Berlin: German authorities are culling about 30,000 farm birds in an attempt to contain the country's first outbreak of H5N1 bird flu among domestic poultry, officials said yesterday.
About 11,000 chickens and turkeys have been electrocuted or gassed at a farm in eastern Saxony state, where the virus was confirmed on Wednesday, state official Albert Hauser said.
The remaining 5,000 geese at the farm in Wermsdorf, east of Leipzig, would be killed by the end of yesterday, and officials were preparing to slaughter another 14,000 birds at 90 farms in the surrounding area.
Authorities are also trying to trace five metric tonnes of meat handled at the local slaughterhouse in the past two weeks so that it can be destroyed.
Germany is the second European Union country, after neighbouring France, to confirm H5N1 in domestic poultry; non-EU members Romania and Albania also have detected such cases.
About 200 wild birds have been found dead in Germany with the H5N1 virus, most of them along the Baltic Sea coast.
Hauser said it was still unclear how the virus reached the poultry stock.
Workers at the farm and others who had visited it all tested negative for the virus, said Gerhard Gey, another local official.
Meanwhile, in Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, bird flu remains "a real and present danger" in Cambodia a senior UN official warned yesterday, a day after the virulent H5N1 virus claimed the life of a sixth victim in the Southeast Asian nation.
The 12-year-old boy, from the southeastern province of Prey Veng, died from bird flu on Wednesday, two weeks after a three-year-old girl succumbed in a village southwest of the capital, Phnom Penh.
Tests conducted by the Pasteur Institute confirmed that the boy's cause of death was the H5N1 virus, said Megge Miller, a World Health Organisation epidemiologist.
She said several chickens and ducks had died in and near the boy's backyard over a 10-day period before he fell sick on March 29.
The boy was collecting them from around the house and taking them to one of his relatives who would then prepare the poultry for eating, she said.
The two recent fatalities "bring home yet again that bird flu is a real and present danger in Cambodia", said Douglas Gardner, country representative of the UN Development Programme. "We would all like to think that these deaths should spur on immediate action and urgent distribution of vital information," said Gardner.
