Photo Credit – FAO
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On December 21st, Hong Kong Health authorities raised their bird flu response level from `Alert’ to `Serious’ after a dead chicken found at the Cheung Sha Wan Temporary Wholesale Poultry Market tested positive for the H5N1 virus.
The following week, in the neighboring city of Shenzhen, a bus driver died from the H5N1 virus, heightening concerns (see Hong Kong: Suspected Human H5N1 Infection In Neighboring Shenzhen).
As no additional cases (human or in poultry) have been detected in Hong Kong over the past 21 days, Secretary for Food and Health, Dr York Chow, has announced the lowering of the alert response is set for tomorrow, January 12th.
This also means that the ban on the sale of live poultry, in effect for the past three weeks, will be lifted. This press release from Hong Kong’s government website (http://www.info.gov.hk):
Sale of live chickens in Hong Kong to resume tomorrow
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Issued at HKT 18:26The Secretary for Food and Health, Dr York Chow, announced today (January 11) that wholesale and retail of live poultry in Hong Kong will resume tomorrow (January 12). Imports of live poultry including day-old chicks from the Mainland can also resume on January 12, except for live poultry from a designated import control zone in Shenzhen.
After the detection of the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza (AI) virus in a chicken carcass sample taken from the Cheung Sha Wan Temporary Wholesale Poultry Market (Wholesale Poultry Market) during regular surveillance by the Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department (AFCD) on December 20 last year, the Government declared the Wholesale Poultry Market an infected place and suspended the dispatch of live chickens from local farms to the market as well as import of live poultry for 21 days.
Dr Chow convened the third meeting of the Steering Committee on AI this morning to sum up the follow-up actions on AI over the past three weeks. Participants at the meeting included AFCD, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) and the Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health.
"Since the detection of AI in the Wholesale Poultry Market, AFCD completed three rounds of inspections on all 30 chicken farms in Hong Kong in the last three weeks. Local farmers were found to have strictly complied with bio-security and environmental hygiene requirements. No abnormality was found with the chickens. AFCD has also tested about 4,500 samples collected from local farms and all were found negative for H5 AI virus," Dr Chow said.
