ANKARA – REUTERS
Turkey has reported an outbreak of avian influenza in chickens less than a month after declaring its territory free of the virus and said it had culled 359 birds as a precautionary measure. Turkish authorities have set up a quarantine zone in a town bordering Armenia after some 1,500 dead chickens tested positive for an H5 variant of bird flu, the Anatolia news agency reported on Wednesday.
In a statement released late on Tuesday, the Agriculture Ministry said it had imposed quarantine in the affected area of Iðdýr, near Turkey’s far eastern border with Armenia, after detecting a strain of the bird flu virus in dead chickens. The strain has been identified as the H5 type but authorities are conducting further tests to establish whether it is the deadly H5N1 strain that has killed some 70 people in Asia since 2003 and forced the slaughter of millions of birds. Samples were to be sent to laboratories in Europe to see if the virus is H5N1, which is being tracked worldwide for fear it could mutate into a form that is easily transmitted to humans, the ministry said.
Anatolia reported that a quarantine was set up in a radius of 10 kilometers around the affected zone, adding that the ministry had sent disinfectants and special equipment to the area. It was unclear what was involved in the quarantine, however in a previous bird flu case in western Turkey people were able to move around but cars and people leaving the area had to be disinfected.
“All necessary measures have been taken, with close coordination between central and local units,” the ministry statement said.
“As the necessary quarantine measures were undertaken before the identification (of bird flu), there is no cause for concern for human health, or for our country’s meat and egg trade,” the ministry said.
Iðdýr is a remote, rural area where farming and animal husbandry are the main means of livelihood. However, poultry are mostly raised by people for their own consumption.
An outbreak of bird flu in October in the more densely populated northwest of Turkey triggered the culling of more than 10,000 birds. That outbreak was identified as the deadly H5N1 strain.
Most of Europe imposed a ban on imports of Turkish live birds that was subsequently eased.
The Agriculture Ministry announced on Dec. 9 that it had successfully eliminated bird flu in western Turkey.
Nevertheless, experts say Turkey will remain vulnerable to further outbreaks because it lies on the flight path of migratory birds, which are widely thought to help spread the virus.
The ministry said it believed migratory birds might have brought the virus to Iðdýr from the Caucasus region.
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