Poultry farmers face huge losses from bird-flu

Pakistani poultry farmers face huge economic losses after a strain of the deadly bird-flu virus, which has already claimed lives in Vietnam and Thailand, set into the local chicken breeding pattern and caused the deaths of close to four million chicks, an official from the country's poultry association said on Tuesday. "The poultry fraternity has been badly hit because of the strains killing between 3.5 to four million chickens in [the southern province of] Sindh since the end of October," Abdul Maroof Siddiqui, the convenor of the Pakistan Poultry Association (PPA), told IRIN from the southern port city of Karachi. "'Layer' farmers face losses of up to Rs. 700 million [US $12,654,109] to Rs. 800 million [US $14,461,839]. This is a major loss. No industry in Pakistan has had to contend with such a huge loss at one time," Siddiqui added. Earlier, on Monday, a government handout issued to poultry farmers in Sindh province - to which region the disease has been confined, thus far - said the strain was "avian influenza H-7 and H-9" and recommended destroying all birds in order to eradicate the disease. "If flocks cannot be destroyed, measures are necessary to minimise poultry losses through continuous vaccination," it added. Government officials hastened to placate public fears that the disease might be of the same variety that has plagued South-East Asia in recent months, killing six people in Vietnam and two more in Thailand, including a little boy on Monday. But the disease is not believed to be a danger to humans. "The strain we have discovered in Pakistan affects poultry only. This is an avian variety, not harmful to humans. The H-591 virus is harmful for humans and that is not what we have here," Dr. Jalil Kamran, the head of the Epidemic Surveillance Cell at the National Institute of Health (NIH), told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad. And, even in poultry, the virus is said to have attacked only the kind of chicken bred on Sindhi farms. "The virus is not present in broiler chicks. It is only present in egg-laying chickens - what we call "layer" chickens. All of the birds have died because of the virus which was isolated in different laboratories and confirmed to be of the H-7 and H-9 strain," Afsar Qadri, the president of the Pakistan Poultry Association, told IRIN from Karachi. But his colleague was not impressed with what he called the government's late response to the problem. Siddiqui said scientists working in private labs in tandem with poultry association members had discovered the debilitating effects of the strain some time before they wrote a letter to the government, asking for directives about how to proceed with vaccinations and other preventive safety measures, only to meet with indifference. Poultry farmers also weren't prepared to try out a new vaccine, Siddiqui explained. "Only when they started suffering losses did they realise that such safety measures were necessary," he added. And after suffering such heavy losses, the average poultry farmer would find it extremely hard to try again, Siddiqui emphasised. "Whatever we had spent the last 15-20 years earning, we lost it in 15-20 days," he fumed. "How can we recover? Poultry farming is a huge investment. People who have nothing left have been destroyed financially. How are they going to start all over again, when they have no money left to invest?" he asked. The market had already suffered because of the negative publicity, Siddiqui maintained. "People are afraid to buy chickens or eggs because prices have already become astronomical," he stressed.