China culls 91,000 birds after flu outbreak
China has destroyed 91,100 birds around a farm in Inner Mongolia to stop a bird flu outbreak, the World Health Organisation said today.
The birds were culled after 2,600 chickens and ducks were killed by the virulent H5N1 virus in a breeding facility in Tengjiaying, a village near the regional capital Hohhot, according to the government.
The first report of dead birds came on October 14, said Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, a Beijing spokeswoman for the WHO.
Since then, domestic birds have been culled within a two-mile radius of the facility, and farms within three miles have been disinfected, she said.
Officials have also imposed a 21-day quarantine on poultry, she said.
While the government’s response shows that the bird flu surveillance system is working, “we are concerned because any outbreak … would increase human’s risk to exposure to the virus”, Bhatiasevi said.
Health experts worry the virus could mutate and start spreading rapidly from person to person, possibly sparking a global pandemic.
There have been no reports of human bird flu cases in China.
Earlier this year, bird flu killed more than 6,000 migratory birds in the western province Qinghai, and cases have been reported in Tibet and the Xinjiang region in the north-west.
The H5N1 strain has been infecting poultry in south-east Asia since 2003, and has spread to people who had contact with sick fowl.
New cases have been discovered in Romania and Turkey in recent days, which led to bans on trade in poultry from those countries.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warned of a marked increase in chances that bird flu would move to the Middle East and Africa – and hit countries poorly equipped to deal with an outbreak.
In Russia, authorities detected a strain of bird flu south of Moscow yesterday.
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