S. Korea confirms deadly bird flu

South Korea said on Monday it had confirmed a case of a highly contagious type of bird flu, which can be deadly to humans, at a chicken farm near Seoul.

“We have confirmed highly contagious avian influenza, known as H5N1, in chickens,” an Agriculture Ministry official told Reuters.

Since early December about 21,000 chickens have died at the farm, which is about 80 km (50 miles) southeast of Seoul. As a precaution, the official said, authorities had now destroyed all the remaining 5,000 chickens there.

Monitoring farms
In rare instances strains of highly pathogenic avian influenza can be lethal to humans, as well as devastating for poultry. The H5N1 strain killed six people in Hong Kong in 1997 and 1998.
South Korea’s poultry industry has 100 million chickens mainly for local consumption with little in the way of exports, official data showed.

Since 1996, South Korea has only reported cases of low pathogenic avian influenza.

The ministry said it was monitoring farms within a 10-km (six-mile) radius of the affected farm.

Earlier this year the Netherlands, the world’s fourth-largest poultry exporter, slaughtered around 26 million birds at some 250 farms to contain a bird flu outbreak.

The disease also spread to neighbouring Belgium and Germany, although on a lesser scale than in the Netherlands.

All those three countries later resumed poultry exports.