FYROM kills thousands of birds amid flu fears

Tests detect deadly H5N1 strain in second location in Romania

Vets collect chickens from a farm in Mogila, some 175km southwest of Skopje, near the Greek border, yesterday. Authorities yesterday oversaw the destruction of thousands of fowl amid fears that bird flu had arrived in FYROM.

MOGILA / CEAMURLIA DE JOS (Combined reports) - The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) yesterday began to destroy thousands of domestic fowl amid fears that a strain of the bird flu virus that is deadly to humans had spread from nearby countries.

Health authorities said they were rounding up about 10,000 chickens and turkeys for slaughter and isolating areas afflicted by the disease, which they have identified as a common form of poultry flu.

The outbreak was discovered over the weekend when about 1,000 birds died in Mogila village, only about 10 kilometers (6 miles) north of FYROM’s second-largest municipality of Bitola, which has a population of about 100,000 people.

Authorities said the cause of the bird deaths was Newcastle flu, which is a common type of avian flu. One of the birds that showed signs of a strain of avian flu with the prefix “H1” was sent to Britain on Tuesday for further laboratory examination.

The outbreak in the former Yugoslav republic came as nearby Turkey and Romania confirmed cases of birds that died from the H5N1 version of the virus that has killed at least 60 people in Asia since 2003.

Staff from FYROM’s state Veterinary Directorate yesterday began collecting the 10,000 birds, breaking their necks and putting them into plastic bags, health officials said.

“The action was being taken after 40 samples showed that the so-called Newcastle flu hit the area,” said Sloboden Cokrevski, the director of the government agency, adding “type H1 can be any type of flu.”

“It was decided all poultry should be killed as they walk around the village and mix with each other,” Cokrevski told AFP.

“In order to protect the entire population, we are going to destroy all of them,” he said, adding farmers would be compensated for the loss of their livestock.

The villagers watched on as the operation gathered pace, calmly accepting the fact their stocks were being wiped out in the knowledge they would be reimbursed.

“We do not want to take any risks at all and it is not a big expense for the state to offer compensation to the citizens of the village,” Cokrevski told AFP.

The authorities said they were also taking measures to protect about 500 households in Mogila, which has a population of 2,300, by isolating areas afflicted with avian flu from disease-free areas.

Meanwhile, Romanian government officials said that tests had confirmed the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain in a second location in Romania’s eastern Danube Delta region.

The tests were carried out at an international expert laboratory in Britain where most of the suspected samples from around Europe are being sent for verification.

Romanian authorities have killed all farm birds in the area and finished disinfecting the two areas, including people’s houses and yards. “We anticipated this and we killed all the domestic fowl there,” Agriculture Minister Gheorghe Flutur said.

Maliuc, the second area in Romania to have confirmed bird flu, is about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from Ceamurlia de Jos where the virus was first detected in the country.

However, it was not immediately clear if the virus spread from one location to the other.

Flutur said tests on 2,000 birds collected in recent days from across Romania indicated the virus has been limited to the eastern Danube Delta region.

Flutur said 22 more dead wild birds had been found on three lakes in the delta, which specialists are testing to see if they carried the virus.

Authorities have fined dozens of Romanian villagers who were not complying with orders to keep fowl confined, Flutur said. He also threatened to close all bird farms in the country if they fail to vaccinate their workers against human influenza. Local authorities in the delta also appealed to residents to keep their birds indoors. (AFP, AP)