Poultry vendors paid higher subsidy

Jinshan district authorities have agreed to pay nine local poultry vendors a higher subsidy to slaughter the remaining 720 live birds in their care after a vendor said over the weekend that 1,000 of their birds had inexplicably died, local media reported Sunday.

The district government told local media that officials didn't find sufficient evidence to prove that nearly 1,000 birds had died, though it acknowledged that the unknown number of birds died in the district due to poor ventilation and conditions in the vendors' pens, according to a report on the news website xinmin.com.

Authorities visited the Wan'an market in Zhujing town after one of its nine vendors called into a local radio station to complain that they had received neither advice nor support from the market or the government since the city's live poultry trade was shut down on April 6 due to concerns about the H7N9 bird flu virus.

The district government had disposed of 3,600 birds by April 6 in response to the bird flu outbreak, which has killed 13 people in Shanghai and 27 in China.

The vendor said they asked local authorities for help when they found their livestock dying, but they didn't receive a reply, so they threw the carcasses away with their other trash, according to the report.

In its response to the vendor's story, the Jinshan district government said that officials investigated and found no evidence that dead poultry had been discarded.

There was no plan in place for handling live poultry when the market was ordered to shut down its live poultry trade after the outbreak of the new strain of bird flu, according to the report.

Several days later, the market told vendors to have their poultry slaughtered at designated spots with quarantine certificates for a subsidy of 3.5 yuan ($0.57) per kilogram, Zhao said. Most of the vendors took the birds home instead of slaughtering them because they were not satisfied with the subsidy.

District officials reached an agreement with the nine vendors to pay 25 yuan for each live bird, according to the report.

It was unclear how they disposed of the dead birds.

Farmers and vendors should bury dead birds with disinfectant and lime in holes at least 1 meter deep, said Chen Yi, a veterinarian at the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences.