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Chicken cull after bird flu find Comment: The government drill that ran earlier this month revolved around an outbreak in Norfolk. Let's watch this one very carefully. Related: Bird Flu Outbreak Coincided With Drill Some 35,000 chickens at a poultry farm in Norfolk
are to be slaughtered after dead birds tested positive for a strain
of bird flu. Early tests showed it was likely to be the H7 strain, virulent among chickens but less of a risk to humans than the H5N1 variant, which can be fatal. The government's chief vet said she did not know where the flu had come from. Last month a swan in Cellardyke, Fife, tested positive for H5N1 - the only confirmed case in the UK so far. Exclusion zone Dennis Foreman, director of Banham Poultry Ltd, the company which owns Witford Lodge Farm, said the number of dead birds had been "minimal". "As a company we don't want this but at the end of the day it happened and we have got to deal with it professionally," he said. "With the help of Defra we think we are in safe hands." An outbreak of an H7 variation, called H7N7, in the Netherlands led the Dutch government to order the slaughter of more than 30 million birds in 2003. The cases in Norfolk were found in samples taken from chickens on the farm, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said. The birds at the farm are used to produce eggs that are hatched elsewhere, to create more chickens. There is now an exclusion zone around the farm of 1km (0.62 miles). 'Highly precautionary' Chief vet Debby Reynolds told the BBC she expected further test results to reveal more about the bird flu strain over the next 24 hours. "Those results will allow us to decide whether it's the highly pathogenic dangerous form to birds, which kills a lot of birds, or the low pathogenic which is a much less serious infection." She said no decision had been taken on whether to destroy poultry on neighbouring farms, adding that the slaughter, due to take place on Thursday, was a "highly precautionary" measure to ensure there was no spread of the disease. "The other investigation is, where did it come from? And at this stage we don't know the answer to that," she said. Paul Leveridge, who has a farm with around 15,000 ducks just two miles from Witford Lodge, said it was a stressful time for all poultry farmers. "Every poultry farmer at the moment is worried, especially as this is now in Norfolk, which is the heart of the poultry industry. Everybody is obviously concerned," he said. The National Farmers' Union has said it expected restrictions to be enforced in the area to stop the virus from spreading to nearby poultry farms. A spokeswoman for the union added she believed Witford Lodge should be compensated for the loss of flock. "It is a notifiable disease so I would have anticipated there will be a compensation package," she said. Human health Defra has stressed that at this stage there was no confirmation that the virus had health implications for humans. A vet working on an infected Dutch farm caught the disease and later died of pneumonia. The H5N1 virus has killed more than 100 people in Asia. But neither strain poses a large-scale threat to humans as bird flu cannot pass easily from one person to another. Humans also have to have extremely close contact with infected birds, particularly their faeces, in the first place to catch it. However, some experts fear the H5N1 virus could mutate and trigger a flu pandemic, potentially putting millions of human lives at risk. 'Nasty for birds' Prof Hugh Pennington, a professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University, said that while the H7 strain was "nasty for the birds", it was "not a public health threat to humans". "It's basically a virus that kills chickens and has been around for many, many years. "It's there in wild birds probably, circulating throughout the world and occasionally we get an outbreak in this country," he told the Today programme. The policy of killing the flock was the best option for controlling the virus, he said. "It is wise and prudent to stamp it out. "This is a policy we have had for many, many years - coming down hard on the affected flock of chickens and slaughtering them." ---------------------------------------------------
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