South Korea on Tuesday slaughtered 3,000 ducks after the apparent spread of an outbreak of highly contagious bird flu that could be fatal to humans, officials said.
The slaughter was triggered by suspicions that the ducks had been newly infected by the virus that had spread from a neighboring chicken farm where it was first detected, the agriculture ministry said.
"We decided to slaughter all the ducks in a precautionary step to contain the possible spread of the virus," Baek Hyun, an animal health division official at the ministry, told AFP.
He said the number of eggs laid by the ducks had "abnormally" decreased at the farm in recent days -- one of the symptoms of bird flu in ducks.
He said the duck farm was 2.5km away from a chicken farm in Umseong, Chungcheong Province, 130km southeast of Seoul, where the deadly bird flu case was first confirmed.
Quarantine authorities have already set up a tight blockade around the chicken farm, banning the movement of animals from all 76 farms within a 10km radius. Some 670,000 chicken eggs hatched in the area were destroyed, media reports said.
The ministry's National Veterinary and Quarantine Service said the bird flu had killed more than 20,000 chickens at the farm earlier this month. The surviving 5,000 were culled.
The deaths were caused by a variant of the same H5N1 bird flu virus that killed six people in Hong Kong in 1997, it added.
The National Institute of Health (NIH), affiliated with the health and welfare ministry, said it has yet to confirm that the bird flu virus found in South Korea can infect humans.
The health institute says the H5N1 virus has variants.
"Eight people on the infected farm showed no symptoms of the disease," Jeon Byeong-yul, NIH quarantine director, told journalists late Monday.
There have been no reported case of humans being infected by the virus in South Korea, Jeon said.
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