Saudi Arabia’s Agriculture Ministry on Thursday said it had temporarily banned imports of live birds, hatching eggs and chickens from India, after a form of bird flu that is lethal for poultry animals was found in the country, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.
The country’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture banned the imports after a report by the World Organization for Animal Health, or OIE, said there had been an outbreak of the highly contagious H5N8 bird flu in Benguluru’s Dasarahalli locality in India’s Karnataka state. The January 15 report said the outbreak was first detected on December 26.
The H5N8 virus had killed nine out of 951 birds in Dasarahalli, the report said, adding that the other birds were culled. The organisation did not provide any data about the kind of birds affected by the virus.
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