Despite the desperate culling through Sunday night of thousands of birds at chicken farms in Kumamoto Prefecture, there is virtually no chance the avian flu outbreak will spread to humans, experts say.
From Friday to Sunday, an estimated 1,100 chickens raised at a farm in the town of Taragi were reportedly killed by the H5-type avian flu virus. It was the first domestic bird flu outbreak since 2011, in the city of Chiba.
Kumamoto Prefecture ordered that 112,000 birds at two farms be culled to contain the disease.