Japan bird flu test results may be out this week
Source: Reuters
TOKYO, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Test results to determine whether the latest case of bird deaths in southwestern Japan is due to bird flu may be available by late Thursday, a local government official said on Wednesday. "We may know as early as tomorrow evening whether bird flu is to blame," an official with the Miyazaki prefectural government said. A total of 569 chickens died on Monday and Tuesday at a chicken farm in Hyuga in Miyazaki, on Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu, the official said. The prefecture earlier this month reported an outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus. It was Japan's first case of H5N1 bird flu in three years. The virus can be fatal to humans, but there have been no reports of human infection so far. The latest suspected outbreak was found on a farm that raises about 50,000 chickens. A simple preliminary test for bird flu was positive for some of the birds, but more detailed tests are being conducted. The local government official said it is asking that movement of goods and people to and from the farm be restricted. "That will become an order if we find that bird flu is behind the death of the chickens," he said. If bird flu is confirmed, the government will impose a 10-km (six-mile) quarantine zone around the infected farm, banning shipments of eggs and chickens to areas outside the zone. Experts who have been checking the genes of the chickens from the earlier bird flu outbreak in Miyazaki have determined that the H5N1 virus that caused the deaths was the same as the one behind the outbreak in China's Qinghai Lake in 2005. "This suggests that migrating birds may have carried the virus to Japan," the official said. Renewed fears over the disease have rippled across Asia in recent weeks. Hong Kong confirmed on Monday that three more dead birds found in the southern Chinese city carried the H5N1 virus, the third such case this month, while five people have died of bird flu in Indonesia since Jan. 1. In 2004, Japan had four H5N1 poultry outbreaks between January and March, including one in Kyoto in western Japan in which 240,000 chickens were culled and 20 million eggs destroyed.
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