Thailand remains on alert against bird flu

BANGKOK, March 11 (TNA) - Officials have collected excretion from barn swallows on Silom Road in Bangkok in a bid to control the avian influenza. The concerned officials from the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) and the Department of Livestock Development caught about 400 barn swallows on Silom Road on Monday night to collect their excretion for laboratory tests to prevent any outbreak of bird-carried diseases, especially the avian influenza, as bird flu is spreading in nearby countries like China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia. The laboratory tests of the collected bird excretion will produce results within two weeks, while tags were attached to the legs of caught birds to facilitate surveillance. More than 15,000 barn swallows are estimated to live on Silom Road, some of them might migrate from Russia. Tests on birds over the past six months in Thailand, including migratory ones, have not found any outbreak of bird flu and authorities concerned are, thus, confident of the country's bird flu control measures, as they have been proven to be effective for seven years. Concerned officials will later conduct such tests on migratory birds in Yala Province in the Thai far South and Nan Province in the Thai North in order to cover as many migratory birds as possible.(TNA)