South Korea on alert after bird flu confirmed

Cull of 21,000 birds completed at farm, authorities widening cull to 3km radius of site.

South Korea confirmed the outbreak of highly pathogenic bird flu on Saturday and said it would expand the culling of birds to a radius of 3 kilometers around a duck farm, but a nationwide suspension of poultry shipment was considered premature.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs said the case reported at a farm in the southwestern county of Gochang, about 300 km from Seoul, was of the highly pathogenic H5N8 strain.

A cull of 21,000 birds at the farm has been completed and authorities are widening the cull to a 3km radius of the site but there are no indications of a wider spread of the outbreak, a ministry official said on Saturday.

The strain was previously identified in a 2010 case reported in China and is largely similar to the H5N1 type, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said.

Asia's fourth-largest economy has had four outbreaks of the virus in the past 10 years, the most recent in 2011, which led to the slaughter of more than 3 million poultry, but no human cases of the bird flu strain have been reported.

In Asia, around 150 people in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have been infected by a new H7N9 strain of bird flu since it emerged in China last year, claiming at least 46 lives.