Bird flu in South Korea prompts culling of 17,000 ducks

Nov 27 2007

A bird flu scare in South Korea has prompted Japan to ban all imports of poultry from there.

This latest outbreak of the H7 version of the virus was confirmed in farmed ducks in South Korea on the weekend.

Even though the ducks were were not carrying the deadly H5N1 strain, 17,000 were culled on the farm in Gwangju in order to contain the outbreak of the virus.

The farm is about 200 miles south west of the capital, Seoul.

The Japanese Agriculture Ministry says the ban is a temporary and precautionary measure which is aimed at protecting domestic birds, but this latest ban comes only a few months after an earlier ban on poultry imports from South Korea was lifted following a bird flu outbreak last year.

The outbreak is the first in South Korea since March but there have been 7 outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu from last November to March.

Though the deadly H5N1 strain is fatal to humans there is no evidence that H7 affects humans.

The H5N1 strain is not easily spread from bird to human and is contacted by handling infected birds.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) there have been no confirmed cases in South Korea of humans with H5N1 to date.

So far millions of wild and domestic birds worldwide have been killed or culled as a result of H5N1 outbreaks and though it does not spread easily to humans, when it does, it is highly dangerous.

According to the WHO, 206 of the 335 H5N1 worldwide confirmed human cases since 2003 have been fatal.

Experts are concerned over any new outbreak because they believe the H5N1 strain will ultimately mutate into a form which spreads easily among humans; they say the more opportunities the virus has to infect a large bird population, the more chances it has of mutating into such a form.

Containing H5N1 is important for animal health and for human health and more recently, concern has emerged that it is not just H5N1 that needs to be contained and monitored for reasons of human public as well as animal health.

Avian flu experts suggest that even low pathogenic strains of bird flu such as H7 and other H5 types, need to be controlled as they too can mutate several times over and adapt to their new hosts and also become highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses.