May 14, 2004

Tests Show New Canada Bird Flu Strain A Low Threat
 

Tests on Canada's latest case of bird flu have found it is not the potentially dangerous strain that inspectors had first feared, a federal official said Thursday.

Preliminary tests at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, indicate the strain found on a duck and goose farm in Abbotsford, British Columbia, was a low-contagion H6 strain of the disease, according to a spokeswoman for federal Agriculture Minister Bob Speller.

Officials had become concerned when field testing indicated it might be the H5 strain of the disease. A substrain of the H5 variety, H5N1, has been linked to more than 20 human deaths in Asia this year.

The H7 strain of avian influenza has already been found in Fraser Valley poultry farms east of Vancouver, where officials have ordered an estimated 20 million birds killed to stop the disease from spreading.

Routine testing on the Abbotsford farm, as part of the farmer's bid to have the flock exempted from the cull, identified the new strain. None of the birds on the farm had shown signs of the illness.

The bird cull in the Fraser Valley is about 83 percent complete.