China boils baby chickens alive as country is engulfed by panic over outbreak of bird flu

Tens of thousands of baby chicks are being boiled alive in China as panic grips the country over the current outbreak of a mysterious new strain of bird flu.
Four more people have died from the new strain, bringing to the total number of deaths from the H7N9 virus to 31, Chinese health officials revealed yesterday.
Meanwhile, the number of infections has risen by two to 129, with health experts saying that the disease is probably being spread by poultry.


Chicken farms facing official demands to dispose of as many birds as possible have now resorted to to killing off newborn chicks by plunging them in boiling water.
These photographs were taken at a poultry farm in Qingyuan city, in Guangdong province, south-east China, where as many as 30,000 new born chicks were dumped into boiling water to be killed every day.
Farm spokesman Fai T'ien said: 'Before this virus outbreak we were hatching around 100,000 chicks a day. We have now cut that down to 50,000 and it is still too many and we are having to kill most of them.
'We are putting a few aside to be vaccinated and sold onto the market but most are having to be killed by boiling them.'
Farmers say that boiling is the easiest and quickest way to kill the chicks but there has been criticism by animal-rights activists who say that has to be a better way to deal with the problem.

The Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) has said it has no evidence that the new strain of bird flu, which was first detected in patients in China in March, is easily transmissible between humans.
Chinese scientists have confirmed that the H7N9 strain has been transmitted to humans from chickens. But the WHO has said 40 per cent of people infected with H7N9 appear to have had no contact with poultry.

The Chinese government provided only scant details about the latest victims of H7N9.
Two occurred in the eastern province of Jiangsu; one was from eastern Zhejiang; while another was from central Anhui, based on a Reuters analysis of the data provided by Chinese health authorities on Monday.
The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the current strain of bird flu cannot spark a pandemic in its current form.
He added, however, that there is no guarantee it will not mutate and become more dangerous.

Culled from DAILY MAIL