An old virus returns to the fore, and mass liquidation operations to get rid of it

Chilean health authorities announced that they had culled 40,000 chickens on Wednesday, after detecting the first case of bird flu in a poultry farm in the center of the country.

This comes within a series of measures taken by the country after the virus was discovered last Monday, as the export of chicken meat was suspended for a full month.

A local official described the mass culling of chickens as a “very limited” event, and the rest of the tests came back negative.

And experts at the World Health Organization had warned a few days ago that the H1N1 virus that causes bird flu could acquire the ability to transmit from infected animals to humans.