Bird flu outbreak strikes Iraq

MENA

Published: 2021-01-19 12:52

Last Updated: 2024-03-28 06:05


Bird flu outbreak strikes Iraq
Bird flu outbreak strikes Iraq

According to AFP Tuesday, tens of thousands of poultry have died in the town of Samarra, Baghdad due to an outbreak of bird flu.

Iraqi authorities are struggling to contain the spread of the epidemic to neighboring provinces.

The cages of Haitham al-Hamash's fields, located in an area near Samarra, were transformed into a "cemetery."

Masked workers moved around a number of live chickens to pick up the deceased animals while tossing them into a nearby truck.

"The chickens are dying and we can't do anything for them right now," Al-Hamash told AFP.

Hamash’s fields were surrounded by ditches to prevent leakage of infected chickens, while veterinarians in white suits examined the remaining chicks.

Thursday, the outbreak of bird flu began in the northern province of Salah al-Din, and Samarra is one of its cities.

The governor announced that by last Friday, at least 60,000 chickens had died, but farmers in Samarra say their losses were much higher.

Hamash said, "We lost nearly 190,000 chickens."

Fouad Burhan, the owner of another poultry farm, said that the authorities were not able to support all the farms.

"We went to the Ministry of Health and they did not give us anything. The H5 vaccine was not available, so the chickens were left to die," Burhan told France Press.

In turn, the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture said Monday, that the infection was transmitted to chickens from wild birds that came from outside the country.

"Chickens have been isolated, shops have been sterilized, and we have cordoned off the area. We have taken measures to limit the entry of any chicken from Samarra to other governorates," said the ministry’s spokesman, Hamid Nayef.

He pointed out that not much can be done, explaining, "There is no vaccine for bird flu in Iraq because the disease does not spread every year. Last year we did not notice an outbreak of the disease, while two years ago it was much greater than this year."

Agriculture provides one out of every five jobs in Iraq and five percent of the GDP, which is dominated by the oil sector.

The historic decline in crude oil prices last year, in addition to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused an unprecedented financial crisis in the country, as poverty rates are expected to double.

However, there is a positive side to the reduced imports, which is the rise in domestic egg production from 11 million eggs at the start of 2020 to 17 million by the summer of 2021, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

These numbers are likely to decrease due to the fear of the spread of bird flu, as the authorities of the northern Kurdistan region banned the import of chickens from the south of the country and closed their poultry farms.

Notably, on Jan. 14, the Ministry of Agriculture suspended the import of chicken and all derivatives from a set of countries after announcing the registration of bird flu cases among chickens and domestic birds, according to what was published on the World Organization for Animal Health website.


Also Read: Chicken prices will not change, despite import suspensions: Agriculture Ministry