Sat, Jan 24, 2004 page2

• Bird flu controls found wanting

  DISEASE FEARS Animal rights activists say the government was ill-prepared for the outbreak of bird flu and needs to set up a task force to deal with animal diseases

  • By Chiu Yu-Tzu / STAFF REPORTER
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  Taiwan needs a stricter and more comprehensive policy on preventing the spread of bird flu, according to animal rights activists.

  The government earlier this month slaughtered 55,000 chickens on two farms in Changhua and Chiayi counties where a weak strain of bird flu, H5N2, had been discovered.

  Nevertheless, consumers did not panic and chickens retained their place on dining tables for Lunar New Year feasts.

  

  Council of Agriculture officials dispose of dead chickens at a farm in Chiayi County.

  PHOTO: CHEN CHING-MIN, TAIPEI TIMES

  The festivities, however, were overshadowed on Tuesday by a Council of Agriculture report that thousands of chickens on three farms in Liuchiao township, Chiayi County, had died off over the past week.

  Officials of the council's Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine said farmers should remain calm because the infected chickens had symptoms different to those of avian influenza.

  "Chickens were dying off slowly," the bureau's Deputy Director-General Yeh Ying (葉瑩) said. "It's quite different from the immediate death resulting from the deadly bird flu in other places."

  

  Council of Agriculture officials put solidified carbon dioxide into a bag to suffocate chickens.

  PHOTO: CHEN CHING-MIN, TAIPEI TIMES

  Council officials said that the cause of death would be confirmed next week after the dead chickens had been tested.

  The government's resolution in containing disease, however, has failed to win the confidence of animal rights activists, who say the government has been careless in the way it has handled recent crises involving less virulent forms of bird flu and other unidentified animal diseases.

  They use the example of insufficient doses of chloral hydrate, a tranquilizer, to kill the chickens, which leave them dying a slow, agonizing death.

  When the Chiayi County Government was ready to slaughter 35,000 chickens on a farm in Hsinkang township on Jan. 17, insufficient chloral hydrate reportedly led to the death of less than 30 percent of the chickens it was given to. The next day, workers put solidified carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, into bags containing the remaining live chickens and threw the bags into 5m-deep ditches.

  "It's inhumane because government officials were not even sure that if all chickens in the bags were dead before they buried them," said Shih Chuan-fa (釋傳法), secretary-general of Life Conservationist Association (關懷生命協會).

  Shih, however, acknowledged that slaughtering chickens possibly infected by the less virulent H5N2 strain to prevent it from mutating was necessary.

  Activists of the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST, 台灣動物社會研究會) said that the lack of a permanent epidemic-prevention task force in Taiwan made it difficult to deal with the spread of bird flu appropriately.

  Buddhist Master Wu Hung (悟泓), also president of EAST, said that in some countries veterinarians thought it was inappropriate to use chemicals to kill small animals. According to guidelines for euthanasia of laboratory animals established by the American Veterinary Medical Association, Wu Hung said, chloral hydrate is for use in houses and to kill cows and other big animals.

  "The last thing we want to see is an amateur performance by the government. It took more than five minutes for chickens in bags to suffocate from the dry ice," Wu Hung said.

  Japan's recent adoption of dry ice to suffocate chickens to control the spread of bird flu from last week has been criticized by the World Society for the Protection of Animals, which called on the Japanese government to deal with the problem in a humane manner.

  To fight against animal diseases, Wu Hung said, Taiwan needed to establish a standing task force composed of officials, veterinarians and animal-health technicians.

  Taiwanese animal rights activists said that the government should see the recent bird flu crisis as an indication of the wide-ranging negative implications that industrial farming has on human health and food safety.

  They also urged the government to monitor the environment at sites where chickens had been buried.

  Council officials said that all the dead chickens had been buried in ditches covered with waterproof layers, on which lime was sprayed. All the ditches were covered with a meter of soil.

  According to Hou Hsien-yi (侯憲一), an environmental official at Chiayi County Government, the quality of groundwater near affected sites will be closely monitored.

  "We might use existing wells nearby to carry out follow-up environmental monitoring," Hou said.

  Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Administration has demanded a water quality control plan from the local authority after the Lunar New Year holidays.

  Council officials reiterated that the H5N2 virus in Taiwan had been well-managed. In the US and some European countries, chickens infected by weak strains of bird flu had made it to market, they said.

  Officials said that humans could not catch the weak strain of bird flu. However, migratory birds in Taiwan would be closely monitored because they are virus carriers, they said.

  On Jan. 19, World Health Organization (WHO) officials reportedly said that the situation in Taiwan was less severe than in Vietnam, Japan and South Korea. The outbreak of bird flu in these countries involves a more virulent strain, H5N1, that has jumped to humans. Although WHO officials were reluctant to guarantee that the situation in Taiwan would remain under control, they predicted that preventive measures taken in Taiwan would be effective.

  In fact, official documents produced by the world organization for animal health, known by the acronym OIE, had not yet declared Taiwan one of areas affected by bird flu, according to the Central News Agency.
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