A new highly-virulent bird flu case has broken out in central South Korea, despite wide-ranging quarantine efforts, government officials said Saturday.
"Breeding chickens in a poultry farm in Cheonan turned out to be infected with a highly-virulent strain of avian influenza," the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry said in a statement.
"The farm is a concentrated breeding area where quarantine efforts have been made on an elevated scale after avian influenza was found there in Jan. 2004," it said.
Cheonan is located roughly midway between Seoul, the capital, and Iksan, where a similar outbreak late last year had forced quarantine officials to cull tens of thousands of poultry in the area. "We'll be doing some massive culling within the 500 meter radius of the farm where the virus was found," Jang Ki-yoon, a ministry official, told Yonhap News Agency by telephone.
Jang said 270,000 chickens and other poultry in the area are expected to be killed as part of steps to contain the virus, while movement of all livestock within the 10 kilometer range of the area will be restricted.
The Geneva-based World Health Organization believes the virus may mutate into a highly virulent strain that can easily be transmitted among humans if left unchecked.
More than 250 people have been infected by the virus since 2003, of whom at least 161 are believed to have died of the disease, it said.
In 2003 and 2004, South Korea destroyed more than 5 million poultry to curb the spread of the disease. No South Korean has been reported to be infected.
Seoul, Jan. 20 (Yonhap New)
New hignly-virulent bird flu case confirmed in S. Korea |
