Posted on 02/01/2006 11:00:31 PM PST by neverdem
HONG KONG, Feb. 1 — A chicken smuggled across the border from mainland China has died here of bird flu, Hong Kong officials announced late Wednesday. The case raised new questions about whether Chinese provincial officials are concealing the true extent of the disease.
A villager living near the Chinese border obtained the chicken last Thursday from a mainland relative in neighboring Guangdong Province, which denies having the disease. The chicken fell sick and died Tuesday, said Dr. Thomas Sit, Hong Kong's acting assistant director of agriculture, fisheries and conservation, adding that preliminary tests quickly confirmed that the chicken had the A(H5N1) avian influenza virus.
Dr. Thomas Tsang, a community medicine official here, said it was possible that the chicken had been infected after it crossed the border, though there has been no sign of bird flu among other domesticated poultry in Hong Kong. The incubation time is a few hours to a few days. The bird died in a rural buffer zone along the Guangdong border that is closed to the general public because some of the zone's residents are allowed to move back and forth among farms on both sides of the border.
There has been no sign of bird flu in Hong Kong's poultry industry. But three nonmigratory birds — two oriental magpies and a crested mynah — have been found dead here in public places fairly near the Guangdong border in the past two weeks. At a news conference on Nov. 17, Gov. Huang Huahua of Guangdong Province, China's wealthiest and most populous province, insisted that no birds or people there had been infected with bird flu, and dismissed rumors to the contrary. Provincial offices were closed Wednesday for the Chinese New Year, and provincial officials could not be reached for comment.
Nearly a dozen other...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
ping
that's one way to stop those illegal border-crossing chickens, zap them with bird flu
Waiting for the inevitable "why did the chicken cross the border? joke...
For target practice.
The things about this that puzzle me are 1) Hong Kong is on the mainland, isn't it? and 2) what's this talk about a border? Hong Kong is part of China now.
Yes and no.There are different requirements for immigration.No visa for US citizens to go to Hong Kong but you need one to go to Mainland China.To get from Hong Kong to the Mainland requires another complete border security crossing.For travel purposes it is much like two countries for US citizens.I was suprised.
Hong Kong is part of China now.
True, but Hong Kong's government has a degree of autonomy that you don't find in the rest of the counry from what I've read.
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