Bird flu found in dead chickens (Britain)
LONDON (Reuters) - Dead chickens have tested positive for bird flu on a farm in one of Britain’s biggest poultry farming areas, the government said on Wednesday.
“The preliminary test results show that it is likely to be the H7 strain of avian influenza, and not H5N1,” the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said in a statement. The feared H5N1 strain has killed more than 100 people since late 2003, most of them in Asia.
An outbreak of the H7N7 bird flu strain in the Netherlands in 2003 led to the culling of 30 million birds, about a third of all Dutch poultry at a cost of hundreds of millions of euros.
A veterinarian working on an infected Dutch farm caught the disease and later died of pneumonia. It infected more than 80 people in total.
Britain said all the birds will be killed at the farm near the market town of Dereham, in the eastern English county of Norfolk, an agricultural centre which is home to some of Europe’s biggest poultry farms.
“Further tests are being carried out to determine the strain of the virus and more will be known tomorrow (Thursday),” the government said in a statement. “As a precautionary measure, birds on the premises will be slaughtered.”