Flu season is taking a toll on chicken farms across Asia, where new bird flu outbreaks are cropping up from China to India, leading to massive poultry slaughters. Health officials say the chickens are infected with the deadly bird flu strain known as H5N1, but thus far there have been only a few cases of human infection. Two human cases have been reported in Indonesia, one in Cambodia, and in Egypt a 16-year-old girl died of the virus. Yi Guan, a Hong Kong microbiology professor, says the recent spate of cases across the region may not be completely isolated and would likely get worse as winter sets in, when the risks of influenza tend to peak [The Wall Street Journal].
In China, more than 370,000 chickens were culled after an outbreak was announced in the eastern province of Jiangsu. The usual precautions have been imposed: birds have been slaughtered in the surrounding area, farms quarantined and disinfected, and the transport of fowl banned. But no information has been released about the scale of the outbreak - how many birds were found to be carrying the H5N1 strain of the virus and how many of them died [BBC News]. Chinese authorities say migrating birds probably brought the virus to local farms.

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