The Iraqi authorities announced the emergence of an outbreak of bird flu, for the first time since 2019.
The government cell for the follow-up of bird flu in Basra province said in a statement that it had detected a new focus of bird flu virus in a poultry field in Jabal Sanam area, south of the province.
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She added: “An emergency meeting will be held tomorrow to take all necessary measures to close the affected fields in the Zubair district and Safwan district” in the south of the governorate.
For his part, a source at the Governmental Veterinary Hospital in Basra, who preferred not to be named, said that the new focus appeared in a poultry field that includes 88,000 chickens.
Yesterday, Sunday, the director of the veterinary hospital in Basra province, Riyad Muhammad, said in a statement to the official Iraqi News Agency.
“More than 45 thousand chickens were destroyed in a poultry field in Zubair district, and there are cases of death of other poultry in the rest of the fields in the southwest of Basra” due to viral infections, without mentioning that it is bird flu.
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On Sunday, the Iraqi authorities announced the execution of thousands of poultry (without specifying a specific number) in 4 governorates of Baghdad, Anbar, Wasit and Basra due to virus infections, the type of which the authorities did not reveal.
The last time to announce bird flu infections in Iraq was in 2019, if the authorities at that time executed millions of domestic animals in the northern and eastern governorates of the country.
Avian influenza, known as (H5N1), is an infectious viral disease that affects animals in general and domestic birds in particular, and causes the death of infected birds within days.
