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S Korea to cull thousands of birds after flu outbreak

South Korean quarantine officials were preparing to kill hundreds of thousands of poultry after a fresh outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, the agriculture ministry and health officials said yesterday.

The outbreak occurred at a chicken farm in Cheonan, about 92km south of Seoul, earlier this week, the fifth such outbreak since November, said Lee Joo-won, a ministry official.

"We plan to start slaughtering 273,000 poultry within a 500m radius of the outbreak site and destroying eggs on Sunday morning," Lee said.

It will take about three days to complete the culling, said Park Yang-soon, an official at the South Chungcheong provincial government, which controls Cheonan.

Limiting movement

The ministry also said it would make a decision whether to kill another 386,000 poultry today while limiting the movement of about 2.16 million chickens and ducks from 90 farms within a 10km radius of the outbreak.

South Korea culled 5.3 million birds during the last known outbreak of bird flu in 2003. The H5N1 virus began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003 and has killed more than 160 people worldwide.

Most human cases have resulted from contact with infected birds. Scientists fear the virus could mutate into a form that is more easily transmitted between people, possibly creating a pandemic that could kill millions.

"People can be infected with H5N1 virus at any time but the disease is curable if people take the antiviral drug Tamiflu within 48 hours after the infection," said Kwon Jun-wook, an official at the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kwon, the KCDC's director of the communicable disease control team, also called for thorough preparations against the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.

Earlier this month, South Korean officials said that the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus had been transmitted to a human during a recent outbreak among poultry, but the person showed no symptoms of the disease as the poultry farm worker developed natural immunity to the disease.

Meanwhile, an Egyptian woman died from bird flu overnight, bringing to 11 the number of people in the country to have succumbed to the disease, the heath ministry said yesterday.

Drug-Resistant Strain

The death comes only two days after the WHO in Geneva announced that a medication-resistant strain of the virus was responsible for the last two flu deaths in Egypt.

The latest victim, Warda Eid Ahmed, 27, from Beni Sueif south of Cairo, was hospitalized on January 13 in the Egyptian capital before being diagnosed with H5N1 four days later.

Like the previous two cases, Ahmed was treated with the anti-flu drug Tamiflu, but still died.

Health ministry spokesman Abdel Rahman Shahin said however that eight of the 19 cases were treated successfully.

"The cases which were detected early and treated quickly were all cured. The 11 deaths were victims discovered to be at an advanced stage of the disease," he told the official MENA news agency.

also see story:
Indonesian woman dies from avian flu, death toll up to 62

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