Farmer convicted for starving 35,000 chickens

A French court convicted a factory farmer of animal abandonment on Tuesday after he allowed at least 35,000 chickens to starve to death.

Zeki Karahancer, a 43-year-old Turkish national, was handed a nine-month suspended jail sentence, a 3,000 euro (3,900 dollar) fine and a five-year ban on managing battery farms.

He let the birds die in late 2010 after a financial dispute with his feed supplier left him short on food at the Kingersheim farm in eastern France which he ran as manager of Alsace Oeufs, the court in Strasbourg heard.

Surviving birds pecked at the carcasses to quell their hunger.

The deaths angered local residents after flies swarmed to the corpses, and drew the ire of animal rights groups as up to 6,000 chickens a day died at the farm, far above the industry average of 100 to 150 battery birds a week.

Authorities eventually removed 35,000 carcasses and sent a remaining 135,000 birds to the slaughterhouse.

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Report: Chinese man dies of bird flu

A 39-year-old man in southern China died Saturday from what appears to be a contagious strain of avian flu, state media reported Saturday.

The man -- identified by Xinhua as a bus driver with the surname Chen -- was hospitalized in Shenzhen on December 21 as he battled a fever. He tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus, the provincial health department said in a statement, according to the official news agency.

The man had not traveled out of the city of Shenzhen, nor did he have direct contact with poultry in the month before he came down with the fever, according to the department.

Shenzhen borders Hong Kong, where more than 17,000 chickens were ordered culled on the same day that Chen was hospitalized. That decision came after a chicken carcass tested positive for avian flu.

The territory's director of Agriculture, Fisheries & Conservation declared the Cheung Sha Wan Temporary Wholesale Poultry Market an infected place, the government said then in a statement.

Farmers were told they could not send chickens to the market for 21 days.

The Hong Kong government said it was working to trace the origin of the chicken, which was infected with the H5N1 avian influenza virus. But, as of December 21, authorities did not know the source.

Meanwhile, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine has since suspended supplies of live poultry to Hong Kong, according to Xinhua.

As of mid-December, the World Health Organization calculated that 573 people had been infected -- and 336 had died -- after coming down with the H5N1 avian influenza virus since 2003. Twenty-six of those deaths had been in China, with the largest number of fatalities, 150, occurring in Indonesia. Vietnam and Egypt had more than 50 deaths each.

This summer, the United Nations warned of a possible resurgence of the virus -- which peaked in 2006, at one point infecting people in 63 countries -- saying there are indications a mutant strain may be spreading in Asia.

A variant strain of H5N1 -- which can apparently bypass the defenses of current vaccines -- had appeared as of late August in Vietnam and China, reported the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The group noted that the strain's movement around Vietnam threatened Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Japan and the Korean peninsula. By then, eight people in Cambodia alone had died this year after becoming infected this year, the agency added.

In addition to the health impact, the avian flu outbreaks have also come at a steep economic cost -- with the United Nations estimating earlier this year that it had contributed to the killing of over 400 million poultry and caused losses estimated at $20 billion.

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