China Reports Bird Flu
By Pork news staff
| Thursday, December 18, 2008
Agriculture officials in China have found chickens there infected with the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of avian influenza. More than 300,000 chickens have been slaughtered according to the Wall Street Journal.
Over the past few weeks, several bird flu-related scares have occurred in Asia following flare-ups in Hong Kong and India. The outbreak in Jiangsu province is the first to be reported in China since June. According to the World Health Organization, avian influenza has claimed the lives of 29 individuals this year.
Guan Yi, bird flu expert at the University of Hong Kong, told Reuters that poultry farms in some parts of the world are still using vaccines that don't provide full protection against the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of the virus. "That vaccine (used in Hong Kong) was made to fight an American strain of the H5N2, and it is very distant from the Guangdong strain of the H5N1 virus here," he said. "Not that there is an outbreak (in Hong Kong), we assume it is useless."
Source: Meatingplace.com
