February 14, 2017

Bird flu outbreaks hit Nigeria, Taiwan

Bird flu outbreaks in Nigeria killed at least 11,000 birds and over 6,000 in Taiwan last week.

In a statement on Monday, the Poultry Association of Nigeria (PAN) said at least six farms in the central state of Plateau were affected.

"Farmers in Plateau (state) are really going through tough times because of the resurgence of bird flu in the last one week," the statement said, according to China's state-owned news agency Xinhua.

The statement attributed the fast spread of bird flu in the state to the hesitation by farmers to report cases in their farms to the authorities.

Earlier Xinhua reported that Taiwan had been hit by three H5N6 bird flu cases also last week, and that authorities were reinforcing measures to prevent further infections.

The latest to be hit was a farm in Tainan city, where more than 3,000 turkeys died in an unusually short space of time, according to Taiwan's animal and plant inspection authority.

The first H5N6 case was confirmed on Feb. 5 in a dead goose found on a farm road in eastern Hualien county. Six days later, samples from 3,789 slaughtered ducks from a farm near where the gosling was found, also tested positive for the virus, according to the Xinhhua report.

It said the authority had found that the virus' DNA sequence was 99% the same as a similar virus found in the South Korea and Japan, where more than 35 million fowl have been culled in three months.