Vietnam has culled over 10,000 chickens as it steps up a fight against the outbreak of a strain of bird flu that is not lethal to humans, an official and state media said on Thursday.
Nguyen Phuc Tai, director of the animal health department of Bac Lieu province in the Mekong Delta, told Reuters 5,752 chickens had been culled since June 25 after tests confirmed the H5 type virus in poultry at several local farms in the south.
Another 4,450 chickens were culled in the delta province of Tien Giang last week after bird flu symptoms were spotted in the dead chickens, state-run Lao Dong (Labour) newspaper on Thursday quoted the provincial animal health authority as saying.
“More tests are being made to verify if the N1 type is involved,” Tai said. “We are checking with the surrounding areas to see if the virus is spreading.”
Outbreak not surprising
While the H5 type is not known to be harmful to humans, the H5N1 strain is lethal and caused the deaths of 16 people in Vietnam earlier this year before it was declared vanquished at the end of March. Eight people in Thailand died from the virus.
Tien Giang is 43 miles southwest of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest city, while Bac Lieu is 124 miles further to the southwest of Tien Giang.
Bac Lieu had 1.4 million poultry left after the bird flu was declared over in March. The poultry flock in the Mekong Delta had been hit hard during the outbreak.
The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in Hanoi has said news of the outbreak was not surprising as the virus could resurface periodically.
Last week, Nguyen Van Thong, deputy head of the Agriculture Ministry’s animal health department, told Reuters many of the more than 10,000 poultry blood samples from 37 cities and provinces tested recently were H5 positive, mostly from ducks.
Chinese and U.S. researchers reported on Monday that the frightening H5N1 strain of bird flu is mutating into an ever more deadly form in ducks and needs to be controlled quickly.
Birdflu erupted across many parts of Asia from late last year and killed millions of chickens and devastated poultry industries in several countries.
People who got infected are believed to have caught the disease from close contact with sick birds. There were no confirmed cases of human-to-human transmissions.
