A truck is disinfected at a sanitary cordon in Jingtai County on June 7/XINHUA
BEIJING, Jun 8 – China’s northwestern Gansu province has reported an outbreak of the highly epidemicH5N1 bird flu virus in poultry, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) has announced.
More than 6,200 chickens at a farm in a village in Luyang, a town in Jingtai county, showed symptoms of suspected avian flu Friday, and 260 of them have died, according to the MOA.
The National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory on Tuesday confirmed the epidemic was H5N1 bird flu after testing samples collected at the farm, the MOA said.
Local authorities have sealed off and sterilized the infected area, where a total of 18,460 chickens have been culled and safely disposed of in order to prevent the disease from spreading since the case was confirmed, according to the MOA.
A team was dispatched by the ministry to the quarantined area to guide epidemic prevention and monitoring.
Bird flu, or avian influenza, is a contagious disease of animal origin caused by viruses that normally infect only birds and, less commonly, pigs. It can be fatal to humans.
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Xinhua News Agency, founded on November 7, 1931, is China’s national news agency as well as a global news and information network. Xinhua has set up a global news and information gathering network, with headquarters in Beijing, 33 domestic bureaus in provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities plus the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao, as well as 140 bureaus in the rest of the world. Xinhua is yet to set up a bureau in Taiwan, where it has posted resident correspondents. Xinhua provides its worldwide subscribers with news and financial information products in the forms of text, photo, graphics, audio, video, and mobile phone text messages 24 hours a day in eight languages: Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Japanese.
