A case of highly-virulent bird flu has been discovered in central South Korea near the area where one was found last month, government officials said Saturday.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry said in a statement that it detected an outbreak of highly-virulent avian influenza at a breeding farm in the city of Anseong, 77 kilometers south of Seoul.

Anseong is about 15 km away from Cheonan, where a similar case forced quarantine authorities to cull about 270,000 chickens and other poultry in January.

Ministry officials said they have dispatched a team of quarantine specialists to Anseong to support the containment efforts, including destruction of over 1,000 chickens within a 3-km radius of where the bird flu was found.

"Quarantine officials have just begun epidemiological research as the case was reported late Friday," Deputy Agriculture Minister Kim Dal-joong said.

The transfer of any livestock within a 10-km radius of the outbreak to other areas will be barred, the ministry said. The discovery is the sixth of its kind since Nov. 25, when the first outbreak in three years was reported on a poultry farm in Iksan, about 230 km south of Seoul.

The Geneva-based World Health Organization believes the virus can mutate into a highly virulent strain that can easily be transmitted among humans if left unchecked.

More than 250 people have been infected by the virus since 2003, of whom at least 161 are believed to have died from the disease, it said.

In 2003 and 2004, South Korea destroyed more than 5 million poultry to curb the spread of avian influenza.

Seoul, Feb. 10 (Yonhap News)