Bird Flu Said Not Behind Chicken Illness

SAO PAULO, Brazil – Authorities have ruled out bird flu disease as the cause of a mysterious respiratory illness that prompted the slaughter of 17,000 chickens in a central western Brazilian state, an official with the Agriculture Ministry said Wednesday.

“We know it’s not bird flu,” Jamil Gomes, coordinator of the ministry’s animal sanitation division, said in a telephone interview from Brasilia, the capital. “It has not arrived in South America.”

Testing was still under way to identify the disease, but Gomes said authorities suspect it may be exotic Newcastle disease, which paralyzes and kills all species of birds, but isn’t a threat to humans.

The slaughter was ordered last week at a farm in Mato Grosso do Sul state where 5,000 chickens had died, but officials did not make the news public until Tuesday and initially refused to describe the symptoms that the chickens were suffering from.

Millions of chickens and other fowl have been slaughtered across Asia in attempts to stem bird flu since the disease was discovered in late 2003. A strain of the disease has jumped to humans, killing 54 people in Asia, with Vietnam accounting for 38 of those deaths.

The Brazilian farm in the town of Jaraguari where the chickens were slaughtered was surrounded with road blocks, and 107 chicken farms were quarantined in the town 20 miles from the Mato Grosso do Sul state capital of Campo Grande. Campo Grande is about 750 miles northwest of Sao Paulo.

Brazil is the world’s largest chicken exporter. Production in South America’s largest country rose 8 percent last year, with exports skyrocketing 26 percent, in part because of the outbreak of bird flu in Asia.