Chinese state media has denied that the slaughter of 27,500 chickens in Guangdong was to prevent the spread of bird flu, saying it was instead because of a combination of leukemia and infection of the wind pipe.
Over two thousand chickens died in a few days at a poultry farm in Zengcheng, Guangdong Province, before the slaughter of all 27,500 birds was ordered.
Mr. Huang, an epidemic control clerk for the township, told The Epoch Times: “Some chickens caught a cold, and it started to infect other chickens. The situation has been hard to predict. Several hundred chickens may die in a single day. To prevent other animals and humans from being infected, the epidemic control authorities of Zengcheng City came and killed all of the chickens at the farm.”
When asked how the 27,500 chickens had been dispatched, Huang said: “We don’t know. We were not allowed to stay at the scene when the city’s epidemic control center did their job. The news is blocked. You have to ask the city’s epidemic control station.”
The neighboring villages didn’t seem to have been notified. When several local people nearby were reached by telephone, none knew about the event.
Attempts to contact the epidemic control station and the agriculture bureau of Zengcheng City as well as the Department of Agriculture in Guangzhou City were unsuccessful. Only the call to the Zengcheng City’s epidemic control station was answered. The clerk on duty said that the person in charge of the incident was out for a meeting and he did not know details about the incident.
On the last day of 2011, a 39-year-old bus driver in Shenzhen surnamed Chen died from a bird flu infection. Experts from both Shenzhen and Hong Kong confirmed that the virus was a mutant strain of H5N1.
Many who learned the news about the poultry farm slaughter are worried that incidents of bird flu infection are re-emerging in Guangdong. The explanation from Xinhua and the Department of Agriculture in Guangzhou, only says that the chickens contracted avian leukemia which was complicated by infectious avian laryngotracheitis (inflammation of the larynx and the trachea). But Leukemia, a cancer of the blood cells, is not a contagious disease.
Read the original article in Chinese.
