Bird flu

If affected, they are likely to meet the same fate as the 1.5 million chickens killed last week, officials said.

A warning was issued on Saturday to all people working with ducks and geese, telling them to take extra precautions in case the birds were found to be carrying the virus.

"We need to be absolutely sure that the virus will not spread to other animals and that no animals infected with the disease will be at large because they could be another transmission source," health officials said. If the virus was found in duck excrement, it could possibly spread to chickens and then to humans, they said, adding it could also be transmitted to humans directly from ducks.

It is estimated that about one million ducks, geese, quail and pigeons are in Hong Kong with 60 duck farms and 142 farms raising pigeons, quail and geese.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region chief executive Tung Chee Hwa, after being briefed on the mass slaughter of chickens last week, admitted there had been gaps in the cull. "It is understandable that the public criticises the way we have handled the issue… but there are areas where improvements need to be made and we are going to make those improvements," he said.

Health officials in Hong Kong said over 1,300 tonnes of chickens and poultry had been buried in landfill sites. But some plastic bags of dead chickens were left uncollected and television reports showed dogs and rats scavenging around bags of carcasses left on roadsides.

Other chickens, which survived the cull and escaped from plastic bags, were also found roaming around remote farms in new territories, media reports from Hong Kong said.

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, quoting a government source, said slaughtering all chickens in Hong Kong in 24 hours might have been "too ambitious a target".

"On the basis of an estimated 1.2 million chickens, we thought we could do it in 24 hours if we did it round-the-clock," the source said, denying there had been a lack of coordination at top levels.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has included Australia in a ban on imported poultry in the wake of the Hong Kong bird flu scare, even though it imports no birds from Australia, officials said on Monday.

Australian diplomats in Dubai confirmed the UAE had imposed a ban on all chicken and bird meat from China, Hong Kong and Australia, a spokesman for Primary Industries Minister John Anderson said. There have been no cases of bird flu in humans in Australia, but the ban is believed to stem from an outbreak of a chicken influenza virus there late last year.