MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Flu scare: Canadian officials cull 500 animals in pig farm

Canadian officials in the province of Alberta culled 500 hogs from the pig farm where the new swine flu virus, A/H1N1, was detected, but it was not because the animals were sick, the province’s chief veterinarian said Saturday.

The decision to cull the animals was to ease overcrowding on the central Alberta farm, Dr. Gerald Hauer said.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the flu,” Hauer, told a news conference. “It has to do again with animal welfare.”

The cull was carried out Friday after discussions between the producer and federal and Alberta officials. “It was not something that we wanted to do, it was something we had to do,” Hauer said.

The entire herd of 1,700 pigs remains under quarantine but the population continues to grow and space was running out.

“Due to the quarantine, these animals cannot be moved off the farm as they normally would,” Hauer said. ”The living conditions would soon become unacceptable due to overcrowding and they (the pigs) would have been in distress”.

However this is the farm where pigs were infected by humans. The owner was just back from vacations in Mexico and is thought to have brought the virus that infected the swine. It was the first case of human to pig contagion.

Apparently among the culled animals only a few had symptoms of having been exposed to the virus.

Meantime authorities reported the new H1N1 flu killed its first patient in Canada, making it the third country after Mexico and the United States to report a death from the virus.

The chief medical officer in the Canadian province of Alberta said tat the woman in her 30s who died on April 28 had not travelled to Mexico, the epicentre of the swine flu outbreak, which suggests a more sustained spread of the infection.

The Canadian woman's death raised the confirmed global toll from the virus to 48. The virus is a strange coupling between a triple-hybrid virus with pig, human and bird elements and a European swine virus not seen before in North America.