Hong Kong culls 100,000 chickens

Health workers tally the slaughter toll, whilst being surrounded by garbage bags filled with destroyed chickens.

HONG KONG, China -- Health workers in Hong Kong have completed the slaughter of more than 100,000 chickens suspected of having bird flu.

The deaths of thousands of birds at a Hong Kong farm last week had raised fears of a second flu outbreak in less than a year.

In earlier outbreaks, the virus proved fatal to humans -- a similar strain killed six people in 1997. Authorities so far have found 29 birds suspected of having the infection on sale in markets.

Last year, Hong Kong temporarily suspended the sale of live chickens and culled more than a million birds to stamp out the flu.

The authorities have neither confirmed or denied whether the birds contracted the H5N1 strain responsible for the deaths in 1997.

Blood and offal samples have been collected from the dead chickens, but results will not be known for several days from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department.

"Our vet found that in the past few days the death rate in this farm was very high, 10,000 chickens had died," a department spokesman told Reuters.

"Based on this information, we took the decision to depopulate the whole farm."

Questions are now beginning to surface over what further regulations need to be made to control outbreaks.

Down with the suspected flu

About 100 health workers in protective clothing completed the slaughter at a farm in the region's New Territories.

The birds were dumped into large airtight bins and then gassed with carbon dioxide.

The government is now trying to thoroughly cleanse the site.

Thomas Chan, director of the Agricultural, Fisheries and Conservation Department, told reporters that the mass slaughter was "an isolated incident" and that no unusual deaths of chickens were reported at neighboring farms.

Health officials have also stepped up the cleansing in wholesale poultry markets.