The government plans to buy about five million duck eggs from farmers and destroy them in a bid to thwart the spread of bird flu, which has devastated poultry stocks and killed 11 people in Thailand this year.
A panel of public health and agriculture officials agreed late Monday to spend 25 million baht (US$605,000) to buy the eggs from small open-air farms near Bangkok, where the virus has been detected before, Deputy Prime Minister Chaturon Chaisang said.
The plan would mean that birds from flu outbreak areas are culled "before they are born," helping to prevent the spread of the virus, he said.
The panel concluded that traditional open-air duck farms are at high risk of spreading the disease because the birds are free to move around in a large area, potentially scattering the virus through excrement or contact with other birds, Chaturon said.
Rural farmers should be encouraged to raise poultry in confined spaces so the birds can be closely monitored and controlled in case of an outbreak, he said.
The officials also proposed a five billion baht budget to compensate farmers whose ducks and chickens are culled.
The meeting came after a nine-year-old girl died from the disease Monday in northern Thailand, raising the country's death toll from the virus to 11 and Asia's toll to 31, including 20 in Vietnam.
Thailand is grappling with a new wave of bird flu after the disease resurfaced in July.
Dr Kamnuan Ungchoosak, chief of the Health Ministry's communicable disease control department, said the most recent patients have shown different symptoms than those who fell sick earlier in the year.
``During the first outbreak, the medical teams understood that bird flu was affecting only the respiratory system, but in the new outbreak doctors found some patients also have diarrhea and symptoms that look like dengue fever,'' Kamnuan told reporters. Symptoms of dengue include fever, severe headaches and eye, joint and muscle pain.
Public Health Minister Sudarat Keyuraphan said health workers had shifted tactics in fighting the disease, taking an ``offensive'' approach by sending volunteers ``into the villages to search for suspected cases instead of waiting for patients to come to the hospital.''
Hundreds of thousands of volunteers were deployed nationwide to look for people who might have the virus. Suspected cases are given medical advice, brought to hospitals and put under surveillance, she said.
Bird flu has devastated poultry stocks across Asia since it broke out early this year, with tens of millions of chickens and other poultry being killed by the disease or culled.
RSS