Southern Japan prefecture to cull another 5,000 chickens

The government of southern Japan's Miyazaki prefecture, where a second bird flu case has been reported in a month, decided to cull another 5,000 chickens on a farm adjacent to the bird flu-hit one as prevention measure.

Earlier in the day, the prefectural government started culling about 5,000 chickens on the virus-hit Sato Broiler farm in the city of Hyuga.

According to local officials, the work at the two farms will take several days and the culled poultry will be buried in a forest nearby.

The highly virulent H5 strain of the bird flu virus was confirmed at the Sato Broiler farm on Thursday by the Japanese agriculture ministry. More time is needed to see if it belongs to the deadly H5N1 group.

About 3,200 birds died in mass from Monday to Thursday at the farm. It was the second outbreak of bird flu in a month in Miyazaki Prefecture and the sixth in Japan since 2004.

Earlier this month, a farm in the town of Kiyotake, 60 kilometers away from Hyuga, saw 3,500 of its birds killed by the H5N1 strain of bird flu and had all of its 12,000 birds incinerated.

Bird flu infections hit dozens of farms in central Japan's Ibaraki prefecture in 2005 and 2006, resulting in the killing of at least 5.8 million poultry.

Source: Xinhua