Bird flu appears again in South Korea

Officials in South Korea have confirmed a new bird flu outbreak at a duck farm in the southwest and are also investigating two other possible cases.

The culling of 6,500 ducks at a Jeongeup farm, where 6,000 poultry had died since last week, has begun and thousands of birds which had already been sent elsewhere have been destroyed and buried.

According to the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries they are investigating two nearby duck farms where hundreds of birds also died over the weekend.

The affected area is a mere only 27 km (17 miles) from the chicken farm in Gimje, and about 215 km south of Seoul, where the country's first outbreak of H5N1 in 13 months occurred.

The chicken farm in Gobu, where around 700 chickens died recently, is just 3 kilometers away from a duck farm in Jeongeup has been rearing a total of 18,000 chickens.

The distribution of 3.6 million birds within a 10 km radius of the Gimje site has been banned by farm ministry the and the eggs distributed from the area have been destroyed.

Between November 2006 and March 2007 South Korea has suffered seven outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu and the government has spent 58 billion won ($59 million) on quarantine measures.

According to the World Health Organisation, since it re-emerged in 2003 bird flu has killed 238 people worldwide.

Experts are very concerned that the virus will mutate into a disease that easily passes from one person to another, triggering a global pandemic.

To date four farms in South Korea have reported outbreaks of bird flu this year and all are concentrated in the country's southwestern region.