With appearance of avian flu, thousands of birds culled

About 5,000 birds will be culled on Monday in the Ajloun governorate, north of Amman, as part of an effort to stave off a possible outbreak of the H5N1 avian virus in Jordan, government officials said.

The country's first case of the so-called “bird flu” was diagnosed on Friday after four turkeys died from the virus in a farm in Ajloun, according to Faisal Awawdeh, assistant secretary-general for livestock affairs at the Ministry of Labour. The infected birds were found in Ajloun's Kufranjeh area, across from the Israeli side of the Jordan Valley.

Awawdeh added that there had been no new cases of bird flu since Friday, noting that all 80 farms in the governorate had been tested. No human cases of avian influenza have been reported in Jordan to date.

On Thursday, after the virus was detected in neighbouring Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the government set a one-week deadline for families who breed poultry to eat the birds before they were culled as a precautionary measure.

Bird flu cannot be contracted by eating cooked poultry, say health experts. According to a December statement by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), "There is no epidemiological evidence that people have become infected after eating contaminated poultry meat that has been properly cooked." Close contact with live infected poultry was the main source of human infection, the statement added.

Ajloun Governor Ahmad Shayyab told the official Petra news agency that the governorate was planning to cull more than 20,000 chickens in four of the area’s poultry farms. Awawdeh added that the authorities had been culling birds within a three-km radius, based upon WHO recommendations. "The poultry that’s been culled was not infected with bird flu,” Awawdeh said. “It was only part of the government's stamping-out policy."

Meanwhile, nationwide inspections, which Awawdeh said began in October, are set to continue. "We already have flu vaccines available to protect poultry,” he said, “but the government hasn’t yet decided to launch a large-scale vaccination campaign.”

With the latest bird deaths, Jordan joins Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories as the only Middle Eastern areas to have contracted bird flu to date.

In a telephone interview from Egypt, Dr Talib Ali, FAO regional officer for animal health for the Middle East and North Africa, said the flu’s appearance in Jordan was not surprising. "The train is coming from Iraq, Egypt, Israel and Palestine,” he said. “You can’t stop it … It's not news anymore."

According to Ali, global consumption of poultry is about 25 percent. In the Middle East it is double that and as high as 75 percent in Iraq and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Consumption levels in Jordan are lower than the regional average, but poultry farming is still a lucrative industry, and news of the flu is expected to have economic repercussions.

Ali went on to note that the region's preparedness for combating a potential pandemic is limited by a lack of adequate veterinary services in some Middle Eastern countries, including the absence of laboratories with which to test infected birds.