In Reply to: backyard poultry slaughtered posted by Burti on Sunday, 21. January 2007 at 15:21 Bali Time:
Authorities clearing Jakarta of backyard chickens
JAKARTA (AP): Authorities slaughtered thousands of backyardchickens and pet birds Sunday to halt the spread of bird flu thathas killed five people in the country in two weeks.
Edi Setiarto, an animal health official in Jakarta, saidaround 10,000 chickens, ducks quail and doves would be culled Sunday, part of a campaign to rid the capital of around a million birds by the end of January.
The birds being cleared in recent days were voluntarily handed over by owners, but from February authorities have vowed to involuntary clear potentially infected poultry.
On Sunday, healthy birds were slaughtered and the carcasses returned to the owners to be eaten or sold, while infected animals were killed and burned.
The most recent human casualty was on Friday, when a womandied of avian influenza, the fifth fatal case since Jan. 9.Before that, Indonesia had not recorded a single infection forsix weeks - a lull that led some Indonesian officials to say theywere succeeding in beating the disease.
But others warned that with winter flu season here,authorities should remain vigilant.
There are an estimated 350 million backyard chickens in Indonesia, many of them being kept outside houses in the capitaland surrounding towns.
The health minister said last week that nine other provinceshard-hit by bird flu would also soon ban chickens fromresidential areas.
Bird flu remains hard for humans to catch. But internationalexperts fear it may mutate into a form that could spread easilybetween humans and potentially kill millions around the world,including in wealthy nations that have so far been spared humancases. (**)