H5N1, Bird Flu Updates - Page 19

Sittwe: Over 1,000 chickens have been culled in Sittwe Township in Arakan State after a tough strain of H5N1 virus was detected at a poultry farm, officials and a witness report.

A witness said, "Many chickens from around ten poultry farms in Tae Chaung Village were culled on Monday. The culling was conducted by the health department. I'd guess over 1,000 chickens were killed by the authority."

The authority has culled chickens from many poultry farms in Bumay Village Tract that are located around one kilometer from the original affected farm.

A state of emergency has been declared on Tuesday here in Korea as bird flu continues to spread.

According to the agriculture ministry, the flu is spreading rapidly throughout South Jeolla and Gyeonggi provinces.

As preventive measures, chicken and ducks within a three-kilometer radius of the affected farms will be put down, and sales of these animals will be banned in traditional markets starting Thursday until the 27th of this month.

There were 23 new outbreaks of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), across the western side of the country, particularly in the far south-west.

The authorities sent Follow Up Report No. 4 dated 17 January to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).

All outbreaks reported were on farms and started between 6 and 13 January. Most were on ducks farms in the regions of Jeollabuk-do (North Jeolla), Chungcheongnam-do (South Chungcheong) and Gyeonggi-do."

Kalianda – Desa (village) Sidomakmur, Kecamatan (sub-district) Way Panji in Lampung Province stated as bird flu endemic area after 17 chickens and 4 swans had suddenly died. Confirmation was done through rapid test by Livestock Service.

Indramayu – Livestock Service (Distankan) stated fifty percent of Kabupaten Indramayu, West Java province, as bird flu endemic area.

The disease is feared to spread among birds during rainy season. According to 2011 data of Distankan Kabupaten Indramayu, of 31 sub-districts, 18 are bird flu endemic. The endemic status was made based on the bird death data.

Via The Korea Times, a disturbing report: Quarantine officials mentally traumatized. While the story deals with culling pigs and cattle, I suspect the same effects are experienced by those destroying poultry in Korea's latest B2B H5N1 outbreak: Excerpt:

Nearly 70 percent of government officials, who participated in the slaughter or the live burial of animals on farms infected with foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), are suffering severe mental trauma, a survey showed Friday.

The results came amid soaring criticism that quarantine officials have buried hundreds of thousands of cows and pigs alive. The authorities explained the inhumane action was inevitable with the spread of the disease outpacing the authorities’ slaughter capacity before a proper burial.

After the discovery of H5N1 at a second Miyazaki Prefecture poultry farm over the weekend (see sidebar news item), the decision has been made to cull another 400,000 birds in a bid to contain the virus.

The number of chickens within these quarantine zones varies depending upon the news source. Estimates run anywhere from 1.5 million to 4 million birds.

As Japan battles this latest outbreak, the Hong Kong government has announced the immediate suspension of the processing of applications for the import of poultry and poultry products from Japan.

In the relatively short history of the H5N1 bird flu virus, the huge bird die off in 2005 at Qinghai lake was a watershed moment. Up until then, the H5N1 virus had been pretty much limited to southeast Asia; Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and China.

But suddenly, and unexpectedly, we learned that waterfowl (brown headed gulls, cormorants, ducks, geese, etc.) – species that normally carry avian flu viruses with little ill effect – had died by the thousands at Qinghai lake.

Something had obviously changed with the virus.

And over the next 18 months, this new clade managed to spread widely – likely on the wings of migratory birds - across Asia, and into Europe and Africa.

So far, highly pathogenic viruses were believed to be brought to Japan by migratory birds arriving in early spring from Southeast Asia, where bird flu is widespread.

But after a highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, closely connected to one found in Mongolia, was detected in wild duck droppings in Hokkaido last October, experts started to suspect northern routes of infection.

"There is a possibility that migratory birds infected in Russia and elsewhere are flying south (to Japan)," said Koichi Otsuki, an avian flu expert at Kyoto Sangyo University.

A 2011 H5N1 sequence, A/whooper swan/Hokkaido/4/2011, has been released by Hokkaido University at Genbank. The sequence is clade 2.3.2, as expected, but it has the receptor binding domain change S227R.

In 2005, the acquisition of S227N by clade 2.2 was predicted, based recombination between donor sequences in H9N2 in the Middle East and Qinghai H5N1. The ability of H5N1 with S227N to bind to human receptors led to the prediction of human cases in the Middle East, which was confirmed in the sequence from the index cases in Turkey in 2006. S227N was in two of the four human sequences in Turkey and appeared in subsequent human H5N1 sequences in Egypt.

The spread of the H5N1 avian flu virus among poultry in Japan continues, with chickens testing positive yesterday in a fifth prefecture – Oita – for the virus.

Reportedly 8,100 chickens have been culled and access and movement of poultry is restricted within a 10-kilometer radius of the infected farm.