Saturday, February 28, 2009

Quail cull at farm starts after bird flu found

The Yomiuri Shimbun

NAGOYA--The Aichi prefectural government on Saturday started culling about 259,000 quails at a farm in Toyohashi, where the H7 strain of bird flu was detected last week.

Aichi Gov. Masaaki Kanda and Toyohashi Mayor Koichi Sahara visited the area in the morning.

The culled quails are being buried at the farm.

Meanwhile, the Toyohashi quail farmers' cooperative restarted quail egg shipments at 8:30 a.m. Saturday as the area regulating the shipment of quails and eggs was reduced from a 10-kilometer radius around the bird flu-hit farm to a five-kilometer radius.

The cooperative, which usually ships about 500,000 eggs in total from eight member farms everyday, received about 250,000 eggs from five farmers one the day.

The cooperative's manager for quality control, Kuniyoshi Iwase, 36, said, "Though the amount is half of our usual load, I'm relieved that we could restart shipments."

(Mar. 1, 2009)

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