hankyoreh

South Korean officials said Monday they discovered a new case of highly pathogenic avian influenza at a quail farm in the southwestern part of the country.

The disease was suspected to have recently killed about 1,000 quails at the farm in Gimje, 262 kilometers southwest of Seoul, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry said in a press release.

The discovery was the third case since Nov. 25, when an outbreak of highly pathogenic bird flu was confirmed, the first case in three years, on a poultry farm in Iksan, about 230 kilometers south of Seoul. The latest outbreak occurred 18 kilometers south of the farm in Iksan.

Quarantine officials are conducting epidemiological tests to uncover the cause of the outbreak, the ministry said.

The ministry said it plans to cull around 70,000 poultry within a 500-meter radius of the latest outbreak in an effort to prevent the spread of the potentially deadly disease.

"Officials are going to discuss whether or not to expand the radius to 3 kilometers," Lee Sang-kil, director of the ministry's livestock bureau, said in a press conference. An expansion isn't likely to be a problem since there are reportedly no large-scale farms within the zone, he added.

The latest outbreak follows the government's recent completion of slaughtering 764,000 poultry near last month's outbreak, found to have been caused by a highly pathogenic strain of the H5N1 virus, which has killed hundreds of people throughout the world.

No human casualties from the avian virus have been reported in South Korea, which destroyed more than five million poultry and spent about 45 billion won (US$48 million) in 2003, when the first case of avian influenza was reported there, according to the country's quarantine officials.
Seoul, Dec. 11 (Yonhap News)