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While it will probably come as no great shock to long time bird flu watchers, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) is reporting that many bird flu outbreaks are either under reported, or not reported at all, around the globe.
For many owners of afflicted livestock around the world, compensation has either been slow in coming, or non-existent. There are many areas of the world where there is no surveillance, where labs are non-existent, and where there is no incentive for people to report die offs of their flocks.
We’ve heard many stories of people hiding sick poultry, selling sick birds, and denying there is a problem. Many people simply don’t believe that their chickens or ducks can carry a dangerous disease.
This report from Reuters.
Many global bird flu outbreaks unreported - FAO
Tue Jan 23, 2007 12:30 PM GM
By Vissuta Pothong
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Many countries are doing a better job fighting the H5N1 bird flu virus, yet many outbreaks are not reported, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) officials said on Tuesday.
Absolute transparency about disease outbreaks, involving farmers directly in surveillance and reporting as well as compensation were key to make the global fight against bird flu successful, they said.
"So far, many countries have managed to progressively control the virus and the global situation has improved tremendously," Juan Lubroth, a senior FAO infectious diseases official, told a news conference.
"Unfortunately, at the global scale, many outbreaks remain under reported or unreported. National or international bodies are often not in a position to immediately verify rumours or reports about unconfirmed outbreaks," Lubroth said.
The number of outbreaks in the first weeks of 2007 had been significantly lower than the epidemic waves of last year despite new flare-ups of the virus so far in eight countries, including Indonesia, China, Egypt, Japan and South Korea, FAO officials said.
"The virus continues to persist in several Asian countries, as well as in Egypt and Nigeria," said Hiroyuki Konuma, the FAO's deputy regional representative for Asia and the Pacific.
Meanwhile, fresh outbreaks of either suspected, or confirmed bird flu in birds have been reported in Japan, Hungary and Thailand. A quick roundup follows:
Another outbreak of bird flu suspected in Japan
TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese authorities have found a suspected fresh case of bird flu in the same province where an outbreak of the virulent virus was reported earlier this month, a local official said.
A total of 243 birds were reported dead as of Monday at a poultry farm in the city of Hyuga, said a government official for Miyazaki prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu.
"One of the dead birds has tested positive to avian influenza," the local official said Tuesday.
It was in a different location from the last outbreak of the toxic virus that was confirmed in the province on January 13, which was later found to be an especially toxic H5N1 strain.
"The virus detected in the new location will be sent to a laboratory to be further examined," said the official who did not want his name used.
It is not confirmed yet whether the new case of bird flu involves the virulent H5N1 strain.
Hungary culls geese on bird flu suspicion
Tue Jan 23, 2007 10:51 AM GMT
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary is culling 3,300 geese at a farm where birds died of suspected avian influenza they may have caught from migratory birds, Chief Veterinarian Miklos Suth said on Tuesday.
"If the case is positive and it is the highly pathogenic type then we can have the result in two to four days," Suth said. "But we have not even isolated the virus yet."
There are only 1,700 other poultry in the three km (2-mile) vicinity of the affected farm in the southeastern Csongrad county -- far fewer than in an outbreak last June which led to the culling of a million birds, Suth said.
Second bird flu outbreak confirmed in north-east Thailand
Bangkok- Thailand Tuesday confirmed its second bird flu outbreak this year at a chicken farm in Nong Khai province, where 236 birds died over the weekend.
Laboratory tests confirmed that the cause of death was the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, said Livestock Development Department director-general Pirom Srichan.
Local livestock officials culled the remaining 2,000 chickens on the farm in Sri Chiangmai district of Nong Khai, 480 kilometres north-east of Bangkok, and declared the area an outbreak zone, where all movement of poultry is prohibited.
It was the second outbreak of bird flu virus in Thailand this year. On January 15, the Public Health Ministry's Department of Communicable Disease Control announced that laboratory tests confirmed the outbreak of the virus in domesticated ducks in Phitsanulok province, northern Thailand.
Unfortunately, we have no idea how many outbreaks occur that we don't hear about.
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