Suspected outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu area spreading quickly through farms around the north Nigerian city of Kano, the head of a government clean-up team said on Tuesday.
Shehu Bawa, the leader of Kano State's bid to contain the outbreak, told AFP at the site of the latest slaughter of sick chickens that 40 farms in a radius of 60 kilometres (40 miles) around the city had reported suspicious deaths.
"The disease is spreading fast," he said, as workers at the Madatai Farm in Danbare slit the throats of 5,000 hens that survived after 10,000 more birds died from what is believed
to be an outbreak of avian influenza.
Earlier, federal Agriculture Minister Adamu Bello had said that five officially confirmed cases of the virus had been traced to a farm outside Kano and officials were now investigating reports from eight states in the north.
Bawa said that his team had killed, burned and buried all poultry at 12 of the 40 farms in Kano with problems, but that
new reports were coming in.
"We've had reports of the disease in Gaya, 60 kilometres east of Kano, and from Kabo, 30 kilometres to the west," he said.
On Wednesday last week, Nigeria and the UN International Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) confirmed that a disease which had killed 45,000 chickens at Sambawa Farm, 200 kilometres south of Kano, was H5N1-type bird flu.
This was the first proven case of the disease in Africa.