Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara (ANTARA News) - The East Nusa Teggara provincial animal husbandry service has culled around 1,500 chickens in Kupang, the provincial capital, in anticipation of a possible bird flu outbreak.
"Around 6,950 chickens have suddenly died over the past few days. There is no indication that the chickens were infected with the bird flu virus. They probably contracted other poultry diseases," Maria Geong, a veterinarian of the NTT animal husbandry office, said here on Monday.
Kupang health authorities had sent samples of the blood of the dead chickens to the veterinary center in Denpasar and the biomedical laboratory of Udayana University`s Faculty of Medicine and the results were expected to be known next week, she said.
Last year, thousands of chickens died of bird flu or Avian Influenza (AI) in Lasiana, around 12 km east Kupang.
"We took necessary measures to isolate the AI virus of H5N1 and it worked well at that time. So, the recent death of over 1,000 chickens has nothing to do with last year`s bird flu outbreak," she said.
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