HEFEI, July 7 (Xinhuanet) -- The health authority is smoothly working to handle the bird flu outbreak and the situation is now under control, said government spokesman here on Wednesday.

    The vaccine supply is abundant and vaccination on all the poultry within a 5 km radius of the affected area has completed, said Zhu Tonggui, spokesman of local headquarters of bird flu prevention in the Juchao District, Chaohu City, east China's AnhuiProvince.

    The national bird flu reference laboratory confirmed on Tuesdaythat the latest death of chickens at a farm in the district was caused by the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu virus.

    The headquarters has prepared a total of 175,000 ml of vaccine and dispatched 40 well-trained technical staff to direct vaccination in each of relevant villages, Zhu said.

    The authority has also stored 2,000 kg of disinfector and sent 100 sanitizing workers. Special teams would carry out disinfectionfor large scale poultry raisers, he said.

    All the entries into the affected area were blocked. Fowl tradeand private slaughters were forbidden in all the markets within a 10 km radius of the affected area.

    The local health authority started to kill all the poultry within a 3 km radius of the chicken farm as soon as the disease was confirmed and the slaughter has not finished yet, said Zhu.

    Disinfection work such as burning the poultry bodies and treatment of the excrement is in progress.

    Officials with the Ministry of Agriculture said that the ministry received the report of chicken death on July 3 and soon dispatched a group of experts to the affected area to guide relevant works of prevention and control of the disease.

    Experts of the ministry said the farm is located on a slope in a rather separate environment close to the wide Chaohu Lake and all the chicks are bought from the local markets, where no avian flu case had been reported before.

    The experts estimated that the virus might be spread by migrants or wild water birds.

    The ministry has informed the case to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, World Health Organization (WHO), relevant authorities of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Enditem