Hungarian authorities killed more than 91,000 ducks after reporting an outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus on a duck farm near the Romanian border, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said on Friday.
The farm in the eastern town of Nyírbator had 94,000 ducks; 2,500 died from the virus, and authorities killed the rest as a measure to contain the outbreak.
Bird flu has been spreading in North America, Europe and Asia. Last year, governments worldwide killed over 50 million ducks, chickens, geese, turkeys, and farm birds after bird flu outbreaks.
“In the long term, we have to realize that the intensive way of raising animals, with a huge number of animals huddled together in one spot, is no longer sustainable for many reasons,” Dutch virologist Thijs Kuiken of Erasmus University Rotterdam said.
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