Avian flu ruled out in mass chicken deaths in Palau

Transcript

Contaminated water and not avian flu may be behind the death of hundreds of chickens on a Palau poultry farm.

The government's been investigating the deaths of 200 chickens at the Palau Mission Academy farm nine days ago which coincided with three workers falling ill with flu-like symptoms.

An epidemiologist with the Palau government, Dr Haley Cash, told Sally Round the authorities took all precautions and notified the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US.

DR HALEY CASH: We received a phone call stating that about two hundred chickens had died over the weekend at a local chicken farm and that there were workers on the farm with flu-like symptoms so we immediately put a response team together and notified CDC and WHO of the situation. That afternoon and evening we sent a team out to the site to investigate both the chickens and the farm workers. We collected samples from the farm workers as well as the chickens that were sent as soon as possible on to CDC and to CDC labs for further testing and analysis. Over the course of the week we monitored the chickens as well as the farm workers. None of the farm workers had severe illness. They were all minor symptoms. By the end of the week the workers and the chickens were healthy and well. Overall there were three workers that were sick over the course of about two weeks. In total there were 350 chickens that died out of a flock of about 7,000. So it was actually a very small cohort of chickens that became ill. We've received results back from the human samples and all of the human samples are negative for avian influenza and the farm workers that were ill, their strain of influenza matched the strain of influenza that's currently going on around Palau.

SALLY ROUND: So was this a coincidence do you think?

HC: Yes. We are actually in the middle of an outbreak of seasonal influenza here. The strain that the farm workers had matched the strain that we're seeing an outbreak of.

SR: And what about the birds? What do you think they had?

HC: We did some preliminary tests on the water supplies and some of the chickens are watered using a nearby river and there were high counts of E Coli and coliform in the river so we're doing further investigations but our suspicions are that the water contamination may be to be blame.

SR: Was there a warning out for people not to eat chicken?

HC: Yes all of the products from PMA Farms were immediately recalled when the situation arose. The products are still under recall until we have a confirmation as to why the chickens became ill. None of those products leave Palau. They're all consumed within Palau.

SR: Do you think there's enough regulation around chicken farming in Palau?

HC: Yes.

SR: So this was just a one-off issue do you think?

HC: I believe so.

SR: And the influenza outbreak - is it particularly bad in Palau at the moment?

HC: We see these outbreaks from time to time so it's not above and beyond our typical seasonal influenza outbreak.

SR: And bird flu - has that ever happened before on Palau?

HC: To my knowledge we've never seen any avian influenza in Palau nor have we had a scare like this. This is just a coincidental situation.