THE outbreak of bird flu in suburban Shanghai's Nanhui District in January led to over 300,000 chickens and ducks being slaughtered, drastically affecting the market supply of poultry products.

The fatal epidemic was discovered in a duck farm of Yiyuan Village in Shanghai after it had already struck Hubei, Anhui and Guangdong provinces.

The first case in Shanghai was found in a duck shed belonging to migrant farmer Xu Shengwei, in Kangqiao village of Nanhui. Xu's ducks stopped eating and died by the dozen. Xu had not immunized his birds because he had thought the virus had so many variations it could not actually be prevented.

A campaign was launched immediately, based on the slaughter of farm birds within an area of three kilometres around the infected farm and the provision of free immunization to the city's bird farmers.

Kangqiao village remained under quarantine for weeks. People who had come into close contact with poultry were promptly tested for infection and the transportation of poultry products from villages was suspended.

People with fresh memory of the previous year's SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) panic reacted quickly. Medical experts recommended that people fully cook chickens and ducks before eating them. Lightly poached chicken served with soy sauce, a popular dish in the southern range of the Yangtze River, was given up by most diners for fear that such chickens were insufficiently cooked.

The city halted the live poultry trade for months. The government later issued a compensation plan for farmers and enterprises to cover their losses from the bird flu.

Farmers in Kangqiao village, whose ducks were slaughtered during the campaign, had received 6 million yuan (US$72,000) in compensation just a few weeks after the outbreak.

By the middle of March, the Ministry of Agriculture declared that China had successfully eliminated the disease, preventing its spread from the 49 spots where it had been discovered, due to effective methods such as the slaughter of poultry around infected areas and compulsory immunization of remaining birds. Nine million birds were slaughtered in the campaign throughout the whole country. No human infection from the bird flu was found.

Kangqiao village, where the bird flu broke out in Shanghai, will be banned from bird farming for the next few years.

In Chinese villages, farmers have become used to raising poultry in order to enrich their own dining tables as well as to earn money. Large-scale commercial chicken and duck farms account for only a small proportion of poultry production nationwide, which added to the difficulty of the immunization effort.

China's yearly output of chickens for cooking is about 5 billion, second only to the United States. China's output of eggs is the largest in the world, amounting to about 2 billion every year.

Experts estimate that among the country's 7 billion chickens (including cooking and breeding chickens), only one quarter to one third are raised on large farms, with the others spread among small-scale farming families.