January 29, 2007

 

Early tests show bird flu in western Japan's poultry farm

 

 

Preliminary tests show bird flu killed 31 chickens at a farm in western Japan, a local government official said Sunday (Jan 28), the latest in a string of recent outbreaks among the country's poultry stocks.

 

Authorities expect to have definitive lab results showing whether the virus was the H5N1 strain that is harmful to humans after midday Monday, said state official Kohei Kurose.

 

Officials have begun sterilising the farm in Takahashi, western Okayama prefecture, and neighbouring farms have been asked to refrain from moving their chickens, he said.

 

All 12,000 birds at the farm will be slaughtered if the final tests come back positive, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries said in a statement.

 

Takahashi is about 560 kilometres west of Tokyo.

 

Meanwhile, authorities continued to slaughter chickens at a poultry farm in southern Japan where the H5N1 virus killed 3,000 chickens earlier this week.

 

About 40,000 of the remaining 49,000 birds at the farm in Hyuga in Miyazaki prefecture, Japan's main chicken-producing region, had been slaughtered by Sunday, Miyazaki official Hisanori Ogura said.

 

Another 50,000 chickens at a neighbouring farm will also be killed as a precaution, Ogura said.

 

Earlier this month, some 4,000 chickens died from H5N1 in another town in Miyazaki, about 900 kilometres south-west of Tokyo.