Thai authorities will kill about 40 tigers believed to be sick with bird flu after 30 others died at a private zoo, officials said on Wednesday.
The decision was made after seven more tigers suspected to have the virus died at Sriracha Tiger Zoo in central Chonburi province, officials said. The deaths of 23 other tigers from bird flu were announced on Tuesday.
The tigers, which have all died since October 14, are among more than 400 at the zoo. All are regularly fed raw chicken, which could have been infected with the bird-flu virus.
Zoo executives, health and wildlife officials met on Wednesday and agreed to destroy the remaining sick tigers, said Dr Thawat Suntrajarn, director general of the Public Health Ministry’s department of communicable disease control.
”About 40 tigers are very sick,” Thawat said by telephone. ”Those sick tigers will be destroyed today.”
He said the zoo’s owner consented because he believed the animals would have died of the illness anyway.
”The tigers that are very sick can’t be cured anyway, so they’re going to die,” Thawat said. ”If they are kept alive, they’ll be carriers.”
However, a zoo official speaking on condition of anonymity denied there were immediate plans to kill the tigers.
Bird-flu outbreaks this year have killed 11 people in Thailand and 20 in Vietnam and forced the culls of tens of millions of birds.
Although the virus has most commonly been found in chickens, scientists fear it could mutate by linking with a human flu virus, sparking a global pandemic.
Speaking earlier of the latest seven tigers to die, Charal Trinvuthipong, director of Thailand’s Bird Flu Prevention and Elimination Centre, said, ”We examined them before, and we believe it is [bird flu], but we’ll check the carcasses again, just to be sure.”
During this year’s first wave of bird flu, a clouded leopard and a white tiger contracted the virus at another zoo in the same province as the tiger facility. The leopard died, but the white tiger recovered.
After Thailand last month announced its first probable case of human-to-human bird-flu transmission, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra vowed to rid the country of the disease by the end of October.
International experts, however, have said the virus seems to be entrenched in the region and is likely to take years to get under control. — Sapa-AP