Suspected bird flu reported in N. Gyeongsang Province

By Kim Se-jeong

A case of avian influenza was confirmed at a chicken farm near Gyeongju city, North Gyeongsang Province, over the weekend.

Prior to the latest report, the province was among the few unaffected by the contagious disease.

“We feel very despondent, because we thought we had successfully kept the region from the outbreak,” an official at the North Gyeongsang provincial government told The Korea Times.

This now leaves Gangwon Province and Jeju Island as the only places that have not yet reported bird flu cases.

Authorities are waiting for laboratory reports to determine whether the virus is highly transmissible.

According to the provincial government, the influenza was detected in 6,700 chickens brought from a farm in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province.

All the chickens have since been culled, and authorities were on site Sunday killing and burying an estimated 500,000 birds at the farm complex.

“The farm is so remote that there is no need to worry about larger scale killing as seen in other provinces,” said the official.

The Gyeongju provincial government criticized the authorities of Pyeongtaek for failing to conduct a thorough inspection of the chickens before allowing their distribution to other farms, including one in Ansung, Gyeonggi Province, where a suspected case had been reported earlier.

Korea experienced the outbreak of the virulent avian influenza early this year.

The H5N8 strain has so far been confirmed in more than a dozen farms nationwide since it was first detected on Jan. 16 in Gochang, 300 kilometers south of Seoul.

More than 2.4 million chickens and ducks have so far been culled. The government has attributed the original source of the disease to migratory birds as dead wild ducks were found to have been infected with the virus.

No human infection has been reported, indicating the H5N8 strain poses no immediate threat to the public.