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Journalism of Courage
HONG KONG, January 2: Hong Kong has extended "bird flu" tests to rats, dogs and cats in a bid to curb the spread of the deadly disease following the slaughter of millions of chickens, official said on Friday. The animal tests were ordered after the authorities exterminated more than 1.4 million chickens in the past three days in a drastic measures to prevent the spread of the disease, health department sources said.
A 14-year-old girl was hospitalised with the H5N1 virus on Thursday after no new cases emerged for four consecutive days. The disease has already killed four people, with another 10 confirmed cases and six suspected cases reported. Liu Kwei-kin, assistant director of the Agriculture and Fisheries Department, said earlier that the fate of millions of birds and other animals rested on tests on birds other than chickens. The results of these tests were expected early next week. Liu said other animals would be killed if samples proved positive for H5N1.
The decision to extend tests to other species came after rats and dogs were found scavenging over dead chickens killed in the massive slaughter and left for disposal in landfills. Government workers failed to collect many of the plastic bags containing the dead chickens.
Other chickens managed to survive the suffocation and broke free from the plastic bags, reports said.
The authorities say that the next ten days will be crucial in the fight against the bird flu virus. “If there is an outbreak here, it (the flu) will spread around the world in one to two months,” one official was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post. “If no more new cases are found in the next two weeks, we can say the first cluster of cases is over. Initial results on pigeons showed that none had the virus," the official said.
Work would then continue to trace the origin of the virus and its development. At present, we will stick to our earlier assessment that the efficiency of the human-to-human transmission is weak,” the official told the newspaper.
Test results from 400 samples taken from poultry on Monday, during the first day of the mass cull, will be available on Tuesday. Officials had formulated four scenarios after the first case of bird flu was reported in August last year, the post reported.
The first was for an isolated case, the second envisaged a cluster of cases which was also quickly over, the third was for a situation where there were hundreds of cases but the outbreak was contained, and the last, and the worst scenario was for the disease to become a world epidemic.
