January 23, 2007

South Korea expands bird flu quarantine area

South Korea's Agriculture Ministry on Sunday (Jan 21) decided to expand the quarantine area around the site of the latest outbreak of the deadly HFN1 strain of bird flu, a ministry official said.

Quarantine workers began slaughtering hundreds of thousands of poultry after the outbreak, which was confirmed Saturday, officials said.

The ministry decided to expand the quarantine area to 3 kilometers from the outbreak site - a chicken farm in Cheonan, some 92 kilometres south of Seoul, a ministry official said. He didn't give his name, saying he isn't authorised to speak to the press on the record.

The ministry had initially planned to cull poultry within 500 metres from the chicken farm. The ministry official called the decision to widen the quarantine zone a "routine" precaution.

The latest outbreak was South Korea's fifth since November. All cases involved the H5N1 virus.

About 660,000 poultry within the 3-kilometre radius were to be killed and buried, said Lim Seung-beom, a livestock official with the South Chungcheong provincial government in charge of the affected area.

That would bring the total number of birds culled in the five outbreaks to more than 1.8 million.

The ministry suspects migratory birds might have caused the latest outbreak, saying faecal samples taken from wild ducks in two reservoirs near the chicken farm were tested positive for the bird flu virus.