Poultry farmers blame re-occurrence of bird flu on delayed disinfection exercise

Members of the Greater Accra Poultry Farmers Association are blaming Ghana’s Veterinary Service for the re-occurrence of the bird flu outbreak across various regions in the country.

They say the pour nature of the disinfection exercise caused the flu to affect more farms.

According to the association, the veterinary service after destroying affected birds failed to immediately disinfect the farms leading to the fast spread and constant re-occurrence.

There has been yet another outbreak of bird flu in the country.

The latest outbreak of the disease has been recorded in the North East Region where officials of the East Mamprusi Municipality Agric Directorate destroyed over 500 birds.

The reoccurring cases of the outbreak of the disease since July last year has led to the destruction of over eleven thousand birds.

The outbreak, therefore, comes at a time when the poultry industry is still recovering from past outbreaks with a majority of poultry farmers yet to be compensated despite the government releasing  GHS 14 million for farmers whose livestock were affected by the past outbreaks of the disease.

In an interview with Citi Business News, Board Member of the Greater Accra Poultry Farmers Association, Kwame Ntim Doudo said the veterinary service must step up its efforts in order to bring a final end to the spread of the disease.

“We have a case a farmer was complaining that the veterinary services officers that attended his farm to check bird flu situation with the view of killing the birds and controlling it, they ended up asking the farmers to buy the disinfectant to do that exercise, a case which fights against the efforts to fight the bird flu outbreak. So we believe that the veterinary services directorate should step up its efforts. The officers should know that when they kill the birds they should disinfect the place immediately. If you kill the birds and you do not disinfect the whole farm and environment you are encouraging the transfer of the virus from that place to another place and we believe that could account for the re-occurrence. We haven’t seen this before that there has been an outbreak and almost a year now it is still affecting farms one after the other”.

Source: Citibusinessnews