A total of 57,500 chickens have been culled in areas around Greater Tainan and Changhua County in Taiwan’s first outbreak of the H5N2 avian influenza strain, the Council of Agriculture (COA) said yesterday.
The chicken farm in Changhua reported the disease on Dec. 27 last year, while cases at a farm in Greater Tainan were detected on Feb. 7, council officials said. The chickens in Greater Tainan were culled on Feb. 10, while the culling of the ones in Changhua was completed yesterday morning, the officials added.
The outbreak was under control and no chickens at nearby farms were found to be sick, added Wu Ming-pin (吳名彬), deputy director of Greater Tainan’s Animal Health Inspection and Protection Office.
Photo: Yang Chin-cheng, Taipei Times
The H5N2 strain cannot be passed from human to human and none of the three farmers or six inspectors showed symptoms of infection, the Centers for Disease Control said.
However, poultry product exports worth NT$700 million (US$23.8 million) might be banned by the nation’s trading partners because Taiwan could be listed as an infected region if the virus is confirmed to be highly pathogenic, the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine said.
Poultry meat is one of the country’s top poultry product exports, with a value of between NT$360 million and NT$370 million per year, said Hsu Kuei-sen (許桂森), director of the council’s husbandry division.
Other exports that could be affected include preserved eggs, salted duck eggs, raw eggs and pet birds, Hsu added.
If the exports are banned, Taiwan’s poultry trade would resume only if no H5N2 case appears for three months. The bureau said it would report the outbreak to the World Organisation for Animal Health.
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
DEFENDING DEMOCRACY: Taiwan shares the same values as those that fought in WWII, and nations must unite to halt the expansion of a new authoritarian bloc, Lai said The government yesterday held a commemoration ceremony for Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, joining the rest of the world for the first time to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Taiwan honoring V-E Day signifies “our growing connections with the international community,” President William Lai (賴清德) said at a reception in Taipei on the 80th anniversary of V-E Day. One of the major lessons of World War II is that “authoritarianism and aggression lead only to slaughter, tragedy and greater inequality,” Lai said. Even more importantly, the war also taught people that “those who cherish peace cannot
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
RSS