Avian flu spreads to northern Cameroon

The tests carried out by the Pasteur Centre confirmed the discovery, recently, of at least one case of avian flu in the town of Daber, located 75km away from the town of Tibati, in the Djerem department.

The epizooty under control for the moment, which broke out in the Cameroonian capital at the end of May, thus reaches the northern part of the country.

With consequences already disastrous for several operators in the local poultry sector.

This is the fifth outbreak of avian flu thus discovered in Cameroon in less than three weeks, after the city of Yaoundé, the capital; Bayangam and Bafoussam, in the western region; and Ebolowa, the regional capital of the South.

As a measure of emergency, the public authorities have always prescribed slaughtering the subjects in the infected farms, strengthening the bio-monitoring measures in the healthy farms, and banning the sale of chickens.

This last measure is circumvented by many operators in the sector, who continue to sell their production illegally.

Indeed, as the President of the Poultry Council of Cameroon François Djonou (Ipavic) claims, “if the chickens and eggs are not sold, this will be a disaster for the sector, with an impact on the country’s economy”.

Therefore, the poultry farmers’ corporation is currently lobbying with the public authorities to have temporary markets created on sites deemed healthy in Yaoundé and Bafoussam, in order to enable the producers to sell their products, the president of Ipavic specified.