Bird Flu - Avian Influenza - news - information

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Israel investigates suspected bird flu in chickens

JERUSALEM, Jan 3 (Reuters) - Israeli investigators have found preliminary signs of bird flu in dead chickens from a kindergarten petting zoo, government officials said on Thursday.

“The H5 bird flu strain has been found in the fowl,” the Health Ministry said in a statement, referring to 18 dead chickens found in the kindergarten, which was ordered closed for two days.

The ministry said further tests were being conducted to determine whether the strain was of the H5N1 type which could be transmitted from fowl to humans.

Parents of children at the kindergarten, in the northern town of Binyamina, were urged to watch out for signs of high fever, the most common symptom associated with the virus.

About a dozen birds in the kindergarten were culled.

Investigators were checking for any indication of an outbreak at poultry farms within a 10-km (6-mile) radius of Binyamina, the Agriculture Ministry said.

Israel culled around 1.2 million chickens and turkeys in March 2006 after chickens in several communal farms were found to have been infected with H5N1.

Bird flu story source: Reuters

Admin note: The news items related to the previous bird flu outbreaks in march of 2006, in Israel, can be found at the following links:

Israel 2006 bird flu outbreak links

New bird flu outbreak in Israel

Bird flu suspected on Israeli turkey farms

Israel quarantines bird flu outbreak area

Bird flu kills 350 ducks in northern Vietnam

HANOI, Jan 3 (Reuters) - Bird flu has killed 350 white-winged ducks in northern Vietnam this week, the first outbreak in poultry detected this year, the government said on Thursday.

The virus was found at a farm raising two-month-old ducks in Thai Nguyen province and animal health workers slaughtered all the remaining birds there to prevent it spreading, the Animal Health Department said in its daily report.

Last month, the H5N1 bird flu virus killed a four-year-old boy from an ethnic minority group in the northern province of Son La, Vietnam’s first human case in nearly five months.

At the same time, the government also said the virus had hit hundreds of ducks and chickens in the Mekong Delta province of Tra Vinh in the south. The province is still on the government’s bird flu watchlist, along with Thai Nguyen.

Officials said they did not find bird flu in or around the area where the boy who was killed last month, leading them to suspect wild birds might have spread the H5N1 virus.

Source used in this avian flu article: Reuters

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Bird flu infects new Bangladesh farm

DHAKA (Reuters) - The H5N1 bird flu virus has been detected in another poultry farm in northern Bangladesh, forcing authorities to cull nearly 300 chickens, officials said on Wednesday.

The latest infection was at Dinajpur town, 410 km (250 miles) from the capital, said Salehuddin Khan, director of the government’s livestock department.

Bird flu was first reported near the capital in March last year and has since spread mainly to northern districts, forcing authorities to kill more than 300,000 chickens.

Since March, 69 farms in 20 districts have been infected with the H5N1 virus.

There are around 150,000 poultry farms in Bangladesh, with an annual turnover

Avian flu story source: Reuters