February 10, 2004

 

 

40,000 Poultry Culled in Laos

 

Laos has slaughtered 40,000 poultry to curb the spread of the bird flu, authorities said on Tuesday.

 

Bounlom Douangngeun, director of the National Animal Health Centre, said the farms where bird flu had been detected were in five districts of Vientiane.

 

"Around 40,000 birds have been destroyed so far," he said. "The number of cases of chickens dying seems to be decreasing but we are still carrying on culling operations. We don't have many people to do it so it takes some time."

 

Lao authorities maintain that only Vientiane and its environs have suffered outbreaks of avian influenza.

 

But Pachone Bounma, a senior official from the agriculture ministry, said a suspected "cholera" outbreak had been reported on a farm in the southern province of Champasak.

 

"Local authorities suspect an outbreak of cholera. We have sent samples to Kone Kaen" in Thailand," he said.

 

No human infections have been reported so far in the impoverished communist nation but the authorities have asked people suffering from flu-like symptoms to come forward for treatment and testing.

 

Laos is sandwiched between Vietnam and Thailand, the two countries that have suffered most in human terms from the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of avian influenza. But Lao authorities say they still do not know what strain of the disease is present in the country.

 

International experts fear that the government, with its reputation for secrecy, could be covering up the extent of its outbreak.

 

"They don't take the situation seriously enough," a Vientiane-based expert said. "We don't know if they actually respect the culling of all chickens in a three-kilometre radius of an outbreak. Lots of problems remains to be solved."