China reports new bird-flu outbreak

A bird-flu outbreak has killed 545 chickens and ducks in a village in central China in the country’s third case of the disease in two weeks, the government announced today.

The outbreak in Hunan province prompted authorities to destroy 2,487 other birds in an effort to contain the virus, the Agriculture Ministry said in a report posted on the website of the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health.

The Agriculture Ministry said the outbreak was “under control”, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It said the virus was yesterday confirmed to be the deadly H5N1 strain by a government laboratory.

Agriculture Ministry and Hunan provincial health and agriculture officials refused to give any other information.

The report came as the government said it was activating an emergency disease-reporting network and forestry officials were on the lookout for cases in wild birds, which experts worry might spread the virus when they migrate before winter.

The latest outbreak occurred on Saturday in Wantang village, said the report by the Agriculture Ministry’s Veterinary Bureau. Xinhua said local authorities “adopted a series of emergency treatment policies” but didn’t give any details.

A bird flu outbreak last week killed 2,600 chickens and ducks in China’s northern region of Inner Mongolia. Another this week killed 550 geese in the eastern province of Anhui.

There have been no reports of human cases in China.

Following the Anhui outbreak, the government told the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation that it destroyed 45,000 birds living nearby and vaccinated 140,000 others.

The government has activated a nationwide disease-reporting network and ordered local authorities to be ready to take planned emergency measures, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

“Major Chinese cities are straining every nerve against a possible bird flu pandemic outbreak,” the agency said, without giving other details.

The government says it is considering stockpiling anti-flu drugs – a daunting task in a country of 1.3 billion people.

Flu and other public health threats have been a sensitive issue for the communist government since it was criticised for its slow response to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, which emerged in southern China in 2002.

Bird flu has killed more than 60 people and resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of chickens in Asia since surfacing in 2003.

“The repeated outbreaks really are a signal of seriousness and the inability of the surveillance system of the region in general,” said Noureddin Mona, Beijing representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The Hong Kong government announced that the territory would temporarily halt poultry imports from Hunan “to ensure food safety”.

In Shanghai, China’s biggest city, authorities last week began quarantining poultry arriving from other areas and testing them for bird flu, state media said. Farm vehicles from other areas are being sprayed with disinfectant.

Farms in Shanghai have been ordered to vaccinate all 20 million of their chickens, ducks and other poultry.

A bird flu outbreak in Shanghai last year prompted authorities to destroy 35,000 birds.

Chinese authorities also are worried that wild birds might spread the virus, following an outbreak last spring that killed more than 6,000 migratory geese and gulls at north-western China’s Qinghai Lake.

The State Forestry Bureau said yesterday it was activating a reporting network to detect outbreaks among wild birds.

Migration season is beginning, “which may cause the spreading and cross infection of bird flu”, Xinhua said, citing a bureau spokesman, Cao Qingyao.

“The State Forestry Bureau is paying intensive attention to this problem,” Cao said.