June 7, 2017

Bird flu outbreak strikes anew in South Korea

South Korea on Tuesday, June 6, raised the highest bird flu alert as concerned authorities started culling around 120,000 birds on Jeju island, The Korea Herald reported.

Park Sung-soon, an official handling the issue at the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, told Yonhap News Agency that the culling could continue "well into the night (of June 6), though it remains unclear when it will end", the Herald report said.

Already, some 38,000 chickens and ducks have been killed across the country, including 10,400 on Jeju, since Friday when a suspected outbreak of the highly pathogenic strain H5N8 was reported at a chicken farm on the island. It was the first outbreak in two months in South Korea, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

Late last year, South Korea slaughtered more than 30 million poultry to contain its worst outbreak of bird flu (the highly pathogenic H5N6 strain), which hit the country in November. At the time South Korea also raised a bird flu alert at the highest level for the first time.