Bird Flu Center

Just days after the Asian country announced its 15th bird flu human fatality, but only its first this year, a flock of chickens in the northeastern province of Nakhon Phanom has been found to be infected with the disease. Around 2,200 chickens died on farms across the province last week and laboratory tests confirmed that some of them had fallen victim to the highly pathogenic virus H5N1. It is the second bird flu outbreak confirmed in Thailand in the last two weeks, as Deputy Agriculture Minster Adisorn Piengket reported during a news conference. However these new cases have triggered a state of alert among both agricultural and health authorities in the country. All chickens in the area (around 300,000 of them, in 78 farms) were culled, while a ban was imposed on the transport of any poultry from a perimeter of 10 kilometers around the hotbed. The population has been asked not to panic, but caution is to be exerted when dealing with any suspicious poultry deaths.