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DON’T PANIC: Dr. Sam Okware (centre) addressing the press on bird flu at the Ministry of Health headquarters on Thursday |
Kinshasa, Saturday - Agricultural officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo have recorded at least 260 chickens and ducks suspected of having died of avian flu, Agriculture Minister Constant Ndom Nda said on Thursday.
Announcing this at a news conference in the capital, Kinshasa, he made a public appeal to the United Nations for help to face the danger, and for the rehabilitation of veterinary laboratories in Kinshasa and the southern city of Lubumbashi.
“We have passed Phase Four, and are no longer simply limited to mobilisation but to active intervention on the ground because we are now perhaps living in danger,” he said.
The permanent secretary at the ministry, Ali Ramazani, said they only learnt about the birds on Thursday, but they had died three or four days previously. He said 100 of them died in a single day in Tshikapa, a town in the southcentral province of Kasai Occidental. He said the dead birds presented a danger to public health because tests had not been conducted.
“The problem is that most of the dead chicken and ducks in Tshikapa have been eaten,” Ramazani said.
There were migratory birds among the dead. Samples of six dead pigeons, also found in Kinshasa, have been sent to South Africa for laboratory analysis. A cat which ate one of the dead pigeons also died.
Meanwhile, Josephine Maseruka reports that officials in the ministries of health and agriculture have assured Ugandans that there was no risk in eating well-cooked poultry products and that Uganda is still free of bird flu.
Dr. Sam Okware, the chairman of the National Task Force on Bird Flu, said if the disease hits Uganda and there is evidence that poultry died of the disease the Government would compensate farmers would through the available scheme.
“We don’t want Ugandans to panic, because since 1879, when the first bird flu case was recorded in Italy, less than 100 people world-wide have so far died from it. Eat chicken and do not starve yourselves,” he said.
Okware said that routine surveillance tests on dead wild birds and poultry had confirmed that Uganda was free of the disease.
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Published on: Sunday, 19th March, 2006
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