Japan burn 12,000 chickens in bird flu scare

Authorities began burning about 12,000 chickens at a southern Japan farm today to try stemming the spread of the country's latest bird flu outbreak.

Separately, the environment ministry said it found no signs of the bird flu virus in wild birds in the area, making it unlikely that migrating birds had brought in the disease.

About 4,000 chickens died last week at a farm in Kiyotake town in southern Japan's Miyazaki prefecture (state). Officials said on Saturday that the chickens had died from a bird flu strain from the H5 virus family.

Over the weekend, 8,000 more chickens at the same farm were culled in an effort to contain the disease.

Some H5 viruses are highly dangerous to poultry, but not necessarily to humans. But one member of the family, H5N1, has been blamed for more than 150 human deaths worldwide.

Experts at the National Institute of Animal Health near Tokyo are studying samples to determine whether H5N1 was involved in the Kiyotake farm cases, said Miyazaki prefectural official Makoto Takahashi.

Meanwhile, environment ministry officials have checked wild bird droppings around the affected farm but found "nothing unusual", said ministry official Yoshifumi Kubo.

This evening, prefectural officials began burning dead chickens from the farm, Takahashi said.

The government has banned the shipment of eggs or 330,000 chickens from 16 farms within a six-mile radius of the farm, which has been disinfected.

Since 2003, the H5N1 bird flu strain has killed at least 157 people worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation. Japan has confirmed one human case, but reported no human deaths.