Nearly 20,000 chickens on a farm in central Taiwan were slaughtered yesterday after a weak strain of bird flu was found in some of the birds, the Council of Agriculture said yesterday.
Officials of the council's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine said the strain, H5N2, was found on Jan. 5. The strain is less pathogenic than the H5N1 strain that has killed at least three people in Vietnam.
The council decided yesterday to have 19,326 chickens at the farm in Fangyuan township, Changhua County, slaughtered.
The council and the Changhua County Government jointly carried out the task.
As a preventive measure, birds at 21 farms within 1km of the site had been inspected since Jan. 7, none of which were found to be infected.
According to Chen Yu-hsin (
Last year, two weak strains -- H7N7 and H5N2 -- were found on farms in Ilan and Tainan counties.
After a slaughter, monitoring continued for six months in Ilan without any problems surfacing. The affected farms in Tainan are still being monitored.
Chen said the World Organization for Animal Health has no regulations on domestic quarantine measures to prevent the spread of weak strains of bird flu.
"We take strict measures, having all chickens on the farm killed in order to decrease the risk," Chen said.
Officials said the country must be cautious because Taiwan is a wintering site for migratory birds which depart from Siberia and pass over South Korea or Japan, where bird flu spread, on their way here.
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