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Mild bird flu found at poultry farm in Barneveld

Xinhua, March 13, 2015 Adjust font size:

In Barneveld, in the Dutch province of Gelderland, the culling of around 30,000 hens will be completed on Friday, after the discovery of a mild form of bird flu one day earlier.

After the bird flu was detected on Thursday, the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) immediately began clearing the farm by culling 6,000 hens, with the other 24,000 following on Friday.

Investigation by the Central Veterinary Institute (CVI) showed that it was the mild H7N7 variant. The culling was necessary, according to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, because the low pathogenic variant can mutate into a highly contagious and highly pathogenic variant, fatal for chickens.

Since Thursday 2:30 p.m. local time (1330 GMT) a transport ban applies for an area of over 1 kilometer around the infected holding in Barneveld for poultry, eggs, poultry manure and used bedding.

The 17 poultry farms within the area are sampled and tested for avian influenza, and all commercial poultry industry within 1 kilometer is obliged to indoor confinement. The results of the investigation are expected this weekend.

In November last year bird flu of the highly pathogenic H5N8 variant was found on several commercial poultry farms in the Netherlands. The first infection of this outbreak of bird flu was discovered on Nov. 15 at a farm in Hekendorp, in the province of Utrecht. Endit