January 5, 2007

Dead wild bird in Hong Kong tests positive for H5 bird flu

A dead wild bird tested positive in Hong Kong for the H5 strain of bird flu, an official said Thursday (Jan 4).

The bird--a scaly-breasted munia--was the city's first confirmed H5 case this year, said Thomas Sit, assistant director of agriculture, fisheries and conservation. Further tests would determine whether it had the deadly H5N1 strain.

The bird was among six found in the busy Causeway Bay shopping and residential area on Hong Kong Island.

"Only one tested positive" for H5, Sit told reporters.

He said that last year, officials tested 11,000 birds for the H5 strain and 17 were positive.

Hong Kong aggressively tests for bird flu because it first appeared here in 1997, when the disease jumped to humans and killed six people. That prompted the government to slaughter the entire poultry population of about 1.5 million birds.