November 15, 2005

 

Japan to cull 80,000 chickens after bird flu strain found

 

 

Authorities have detected bird flu at a poultry farm in northern Japan and would cull about 80,000 chickens, but they do not suspect the flu to be the deadly H5N1 strain that has killed at least 64 people and ravaged poultry stocks in Asia, officials said Monday.

 

Officials have extracted and identified a H5 virus in chickens at a poultry farm in Ibaraki prefecture, the prefectural government said in a statement.

 

Officials have yet to determine what strain of the H5 family the virus was, but authorities believed it to be the H5N2 strain, which was less virulent than the H5N1 variety, according to wildlife official Nobuhito Kuriyama.

 

Birds from one of the nine poultry houses at the farm would be culled and the movement of their eggs banned as a precautionary measure, the prefectural government said.

 

The remainder of the farm's 710,000 birds would not be culled, it said.

 

Earlier tests in August showed that chickens at the farm had antibodies for a virus from the H5 family, meaning that they were infected in the past but had survived, Kuriyama said.

 

Authorities have been repeating tests on the birds every two weeks, he said.

 

Ibaraki is about 64 miles north-east of Tokyo.

 

Bird flu hit Japan last year for the first time in decades, with several outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain. The country confirmed a human case of bird flu last December, but nobody has died.

 

In late October, Japan set up a task force to plan against a possible outbreak of bird flu among humans.