Dutch cull 190,000 chickens after bird flu outbreaks

Dutch authorities have culled some 190,000 chickens after a highly-contagious stress of bird flu broke out at as a minimal two poultry farms, the agriculture ministry said Sunday.

Health workers slaughtered around 100,000 hens at a poultry farm at Hekendorp exterior Gouda while 90,000 chicks had been culled at Witmarsum, in northern Friesland.

In both cases “a highly-contagious stress of the H5 variant” become suspected, the ministry said in a tell.

There had been no other poultry farms interior a one kilometre radius of the outbreaks, it added.

“Every farms had been cleared to pause extra spread of the illness,” the ministry said.

Seasonal bird flu has been detected at quite lots of farms around the Netherlands since October, blamed mainly on migratory birds.

Dutch Agriculture Minister Carola Schouten on October 23 imposed preventative indoor containment on all commercial poultry farms after two unimaginative swans had been chanced on carrying the highly contagious H5N8 vary of bird flu.

The unique measures come because the Netherlands furthermore battles a 2d wave of COVID-19 which persisted to contaminate around 6,000 of us a day.

© 2020 AFP