Thursday, May 04, 2006
Ivory Coast confirms H5N1 bird flu
ABIDJAN (Reuters) - Animal health authorities in Ivory Coast said on Thursday tests in an Italian laboratory had confirmed the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu in the West African country’s main city Abidjan.
Bakary Cisse, head of Ivory Coast’s epidemiological animal health surveillance network told Reuters that tests in the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) laboratory in Padua, Italy, had confirmed that birds in Abidjan had contracted the virus.
“It’s certainly H5N1,” Cisse told Reuters.
He said the confirmation would trigger a range of control and prevention measures already drawn up by Ivory Coast, the sixth country in Africa to have confirmed outbreaks of H5N1, which has killed more than 100 people since 2003, mainly in Asia.
Cisse said poultry sales would be banned within a radius of 3 km (2 miles) of the sites where H5N1 had been confirmed, and animal health authorities would disinfect markets where poultry had been sold to prevent the virus spreading.
“We will also have to identify (poultry) owners within that radius before undertaking culling and compensation,” he said.