December 19, 2003

Spread of Bird Flu to Two More Farms in South Korea

The recent bird flu outbreak in South Korea is believed to have spread to two more farms in the country, despite efforts by the health authorities to contain the disease, officials said on Friday.

The new suspected cases were reported Thursday at duck farms located between 3.5 and 4 kilometres from the chicken farm where the first outbreak was confirmed Monday in Umseong, 130km southeast of Seoul.

Health authorities on Tuesday ordered 205,000 poultry, including chickens and ducks raised within a 3km radius of the original outbreak, to be destroyed together with their eggs.

The outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus - the same strain of bird flu that killed six people in Hong Kong in 1997 - had been confirmed at three poultry farms, but health authorities said no infections of people had been reported in South Korea.

Quarantine officials were carrying out tests at the two latest duck farms to determine whether they had been infected.

"Samples of duck droppings and blood of the ducks have been collected for tests," an official of the agriculture ministry's quarantine department said.

"We are facing an uphill battle ... You know how tricky it is even to catch a cockroach and kill it," the official added.

"Especially ducks are more problematic. They are much tougher than chickens. Once infected with the virus, it is only a matter of days that chickens are dead ... But ducks do not die so easily."

There has been growing suspicion that ducks, not chickens, might be the source of the recent outbreak.

"At first, we thought the virus had come from chickens, but I suspect now that the virus might have come from ducks," said Agriculture and Forestry Minister Huh Sang-Kwan.