Germany to extend poultry cull after bird flu case
BERLIN, April 6 (Reuters) - German authorities announced plans on Thursday to slaughter an additional 14,000 geese, chickens and turkeys after the first case of H5N1 bird flu in a domestic commercial poultry farm was discovered a day earlier.
Agriculture Minister Horst Seehofer confirmed that, like all the cases of bird flu found in wild birds in Germany, the virus was of the lethal Asian strain implicated in more than 100 human deaths worldwide.
The culling operation announced on Thursday is in addition to the planned slaughter of 16,000 birds on a farm in the town of Wermsdorf near Leipzig in the eastern state of Saxony where the deadly disease was reported on Wednesday.
Seehofer said tests were still being conducted into the transmission path of the outbreak but said it was clear the strain was the same one as in other cases found in Germany.
“For the moment all one can say is that the infection doubtless originates from wild birds, because the type of virus corresponds with the type found so far in wild birds,” he said.
He said authorities remained vigilant but the overall threat did not appear to have increased.
“We would assess the threat from bird flu in Germany as unchanged,” he said. “We will have to fight this infection with the utmost consequence but also very carefully. We will have to live with this threat for a long time, possibly years.”