bati district, Takeo province – Zoo keepers are struggling to explain a mysterious illness that caused some birds to fall mid-flight and die at Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center last month.
Last week, samples from a dead gray heron tested positive for influenza, said Matt Hunt, animal husbandry specialist at the zoo in Takeo province.
“It’s suspicious,” Hunt said Thursday, but he could not conclude the disease is the same bird flu that has ravaged Asian poultry and killed at least 10 people.
Beginning Dec 15, 86 birds died—all the raptors, some herons and falcons. Some of them may have migrated recently to the center, Hunt said.
Migratory birds could carry the disease, but Cambodian authorities believe the virus could also spread as people track it from farm to farm, said Sen Sovann, deputy director of the Ministry of Agriculture’s Animal Health and Production Department.
France’s Pasteur Institute needs at least a week to determine if the heron’s influenza is the highly contagious H5N1 strain that was confirmed in Cambodia last week.
During the outbreak, the zoo’s tigers, lions and leopards, who were fed chicken meat, became inexplicably inactive and stopped eating for five to seven days, Hunt said. “Our attitude is it very much could be” a mutation of the bird flu, he said. “Cats can get the flu, and it’s a mutating disease.”
The birds’ necks swelled, their temperatures spiked and their noses dripped with mucus, said zoo veterinarian Nhim Thy, adding it was the first time in eight years he saw such an outbreak. Some birds fought the disease for three days, while others seemed to die immediately with no symptoms, zoo officials said.
The deaths stopped Jan 14, leaving 261 birds alive, including a red jungle fowl, a rooster-like bird kept in a separate cage. The cats recovered, and the birds became active.
again.
