By Kim Tong-hyung
Korean health authorities confirmed the country’s first outbreak of bird flu this year, Tuesday. However, the H9N2 strain of the virus detected at a poultry farm in South Chungcheong Province isn’t highly contagious and not deadly to humans, unlike the feared H5N1, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries said.
The owner of the farm alerted authorities after witnessing the death of 45 of his chickens since Saturday.
``After our initial test on 10 of the dead chickens, symptoms of bird flu were found in six of them. Follow-up tests confirmed they were infected by this low pathogenic type of bird flu,’’ said a ministry official.
``The farm in question has been quarantined and will remain monitored. However, this strain is not contagious enough to warrant a culling of the infected birds.’’
The country will be vulnerable to bird flu outbreaks through April, when migratory birds flock in from the south, which calls for stronger monitoring and prevention efforts, government officials said.
``There was a highly pathogenic bird flu outbreak in Gimjae in early April, 2008. This is the time of the year when we have to be most careful,’’ said an official from South Chungcheong Province’s regional government.
``It’s likely that this bird flu outbreak was caused by migratory birds too. But from the start, it looked like a low pathogenic type. An outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain would have wiped out 80 to 90 percent of the chickens at once, based on our past experience, but in this case it was more like 10 chickens dying on one day and five dying the next.’’
A devastating H5N1 outbreak last year led to the culling of 3 million birds. Along with a foot-and-mouth crisis that decimated farms up and down in the country, the bird flu outbreak contributed to a meat crisis that helped push consumer price inflation to alarmingly high levels in 2011.