Wuxi will suspend its poultry trade from Thursday amid fears about bird flu, becoming the second city in Jiangsu province to halt live poultry markets.
South Korea and Japan have stepped up mass culls of poultry stocks to contain a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza amid fears of a regional outbreak.
Japan's Hokkaido prefecture began culling on Saturday some 210,000 chicken at a poultry farm where highly pathogenic bird flu strain had been detected.
Acting President and Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn on Wednesday ordered stern punishment against those neglecting quarantine regulations to contain avian influenza (AI) that has ravaged chicken farms across the country since mid-November.
At least 611 people have been sickened and one died in eight separate multistate outbreaks of human salmonella infections linked to live poultry in backyard flocks this year in the United States, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Tuesday.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Wednesday said that countries across West and Central Africa are on alert as the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 continues to spread across the region, a UN spokesman told reporters here Wednesday.
Hong Kong's Secretary for Food and Health Ko Wing-man said on Monday that all poultry at Cheung Sha Wan wholesale market will be culled on June 7.
Hong Kong authorities announced Wednesday that they have banned the import of poultry meat and products from France's Lot Department because of outbreaks of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza.
Hong Kong's Agriculture, Fisheries & Conservation Department conducted on Tuesday an exercise to review its preparedness for an avian flu outbreak.
In two samples of droppings from wild ducks around Kamerik, in the province of Utrecht, highly pathogenic bird flu of the H5 type was found, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs announced on Monday night.
Hong Kong's Center for Food Safety on Monday announced that it had banned the import of poultry and poultry products, including poultry eggs, from Kumamoto Prefecture of Japan with immediate effect.
Vietnam has reported 67 cases of H5N1 bird flu in 21 provinces and cities, said the Department of Animal Health under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) on Tuesday.
Hong Kong's food and health authority on Monday evening confirmed a H7N9 bird flu case was found at a local agricultural products wholesale market and announced it will cull about 20,000 poultry in the market Tuesday morning.
Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, announced Thursday that live poultry trading in its main urban areas is halted as of Friday to help contain H7N9 bird flu infections.
Live poultry traders in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou sighed in despair as business was halted Friday at the height of the Lunar New Year sales period due to the resurgent bird flu epidemic.
Prices of poultry products in China could rise sharply as early as next month as the waning H7N9 virus helps consumers regain confidence in poultry meat and eggs, experts said.
Even though the fast spread of avian influenza has so far only hit Shanghai, Beijing and the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Henan, the ensuing fear has reached nationwide. The outbreak since earlier this month has given China's poultry industry its hardest hit in a decade.
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