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Workers city dead chickens into plastic bags for they are killed at a live chicken …

Hong Kong culled 17,000 chickens Wednesday and suspended live poultry imports for 21 days following three birds tested positive for the rancorous H5N1 strain of bird flu virus.

Health chief York Chow announced the measures at the eleventh hour Tuesday after a dead chicken at the incorporated town's main wholesale market and pair wild birds tested positive for the poison , which can be fatal to humans.

Authorities raised the fowl flu alert level to "serious" and pensile live poultry imports while they mark the origin of the infected chicken, object major disruptions to poultry supplies superior the busy Christmas period.

"It is calamitous that an avian influenza case is detected under the jurisdiction the Winter Solstice, necessitating a stop short to the supply of live chickens," Chow declared.

"I understand that it will attempt inconvenience to the public, and the poultry trade will also encounter losses."

All chickens at the Wholesale Poultry Market were slaughtered and unusual inspections were ordered at chicken farms and hospitals.

Authorities confirmed Tuesday that some oriental magpie robin found dead in a secondary school at the weekend had tested positive for H5N1, the second such case in a week.

Another secondary school was ordered to close in quest of a day for disinfection last Friday for a dead black-headed gull was set with the virus.

A school scholar who picked up the bird was taken to hospital by her son, who had developed flu-like symptoms, nevertheless both were cleared later.

Hong Kong was the locality of the world's first greater outbreak of bird flu among humans in 1997, when six people died. Millions of birds were then culled.

The virus, which does not take no notice of easily from human to human, has killed other than 330 people around the universe, with Indonesia the worst-hit rustic. Most human infections are the resolution of direct contact with infected birds.

In humbler classes it can cause fever, coughing, a sharp throat, pneumonia, respiratory disease and, in in various places 60 percent of cases, death.

Scientists fright H5N1 will mutate into a form promptly transmissible between humans, with the possible to cause millions of deaths.

Hong Kong is specifically nervous about infectious diseases after every outbreak of deadly respiratory disease SARS in 2003 killed 300 populate in the city and a further 500 worldwide.

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