The Macao Civil and Municipal Affairs Bureau said Wednesday that it has received an aviso from the quarantine authority in neighboring Zhuhai City of south China's Guangdong Province that it has thoroughly listerized a poultry farm suspected of bird flu infection.

According to the aviso, the suspected bird flu case in Zhuhai was found on Feb. 8 in a small privately-owned farm, which raised some 1,000 chickens and ducks. Concerned authorities quickly moved to quarantine five square kilometers areas around the farm, and killed thousands of live poultry within three square kilometers around the farm.

Zhuhai, which is adjacent to Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR), is an important poultry supplier for Hong Kong and Macao SARs with 35 registered poultry farms for the exports. All of the registered farms started to vaccinate their stocks against bird flu in August last year.

The Macao side has been informed that among its poultry suppliers, the closest to the infected farm is over a dozen kilometers away. Zhuhai will continue to closely monitor the situation before resuming the poultry supply to Macao.

Meanwhile, the first few batches of some 260,000 chicken eggs from Beijing and Liaoning Province in northeast China have been shipped to the Gongbei Customs in Zhuhai, which is the mainland's largest land checkpoint to be linked with Macao. The cargo is expected to ease the market thirst in Macao after the city's many other suppliers in the mainland have been listed as suspected epidemic areas.

(Xinhua News Agency February 11, 2004)