Bird flu threat looming for Azerbaijan

As Azernews informs, most participants in a recent public opinion poll in Azerbaijan said they will refrain from consuming poultry until 'all the circumstances are studied', despite assurances from officials, producers and importers that the produce is safe.

An 11-year-old child Ulya Kocyigit died of the virus, shortly after her teenage brother and sister passed away in hospital in the Van eastern province of Turkey.

Another member of their family, just six years of age, is among the 23 people being treated in the Turkish hospital. Nine of them were proven to have been infected by the virus, including three in critical condition, Russian media reported.

The bird flu virus was discovered in Turkish Igdir province last December. A group of the country's health ministry employees are working on site and special medical and quarantine groups were set up at the Georgian-Turkish border.

Concerns mounted in Georgia on Sunday over a possible threat of infection. An official from the veterinarian service headed for the town of Lagodehi, which borders on Azerbaijan, after it was discovered that chickens kept by a Georgian family had symptoms of the dangerous virus, local television channels reported.

The Azeri health ministry officials confirmed that no cases of bird flu have been registered in the country so far. The research conducted over the past two weeks did not ascertain any cases of infection, head of the state veterinarian service, Ismayil Hasanov, said.

Four birds from the southern Masalli district, where massive deaths of birds were registered earlier, were brought to a lab in Baku for testing. None of them were proven to be bearers of the virus, he said.

Deputy head of the veterinarian service Emin Shahbazov said monitoring activities are underway, jointly with the ecology ministry, to study the bird flu threat, and security was tightened in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic bordering on Turkey.

Shahbazov mentioned that the Azeri authorities earlier banned poultry and food imports from Turkey, where the virus surfaced, according to the reports. Poultry imports from Iran were also forbidden, although official reports say no cases of infection were ascertained there, he said.

"Azerbaijan has not purchased any poultry from Iran. We have been importing it only from USA and Brazil."

Shahbazov noted that the bans did not cause a shortage of poultry meats in the market.

The veterinarian service official said that some assumptions suggest that 200 birds have been infected by pasteurellosis in Masalli. The virus presumably came from soil, household items and spoilt feed, he said.