A supervision network is being launched this week in Jiangsu Province to prevent the spread of bird flu ahead of the migration season.

One hundred bird monitoring stations and 1,000 workers will be scattered across the province in east China, according to Xu Huiqiang, an official with Jiangsu Forestry Bureau.

Governments from village to provincial levels have each set up headquarters to respond quickly to any reports of sick birds.

"The bird monitoring stations are all fully-equipped, and most of the inspectors have received comprehensive training," said Xu during a meeting held yesterday in Nanjing, capital of the province.

Species of bird, the duration of their stay, the places they stay, and their wastes will all be supervised and recorded, according to Xu.

Any case of a bird's death is required to be reported to the nearest headquarters for further examination, and an emergency system involving all monitoring stations and related bureaux will be triggered.

It is estimated about 3 million migratory birds will fly to Jiangsu in the next two months as the weather gets warmer, and 5 million will pass by.

"The huge quantity of migrant birds is a severe challenge. A single infected bird may infect its whole group," said Xu.

More than a dozen bird deaths have been reported in the province since last December, but none were related to bird flu, said Xu.

Migratory birds are believed to have carried the deadly H5N1 virus which killed 6,000 wild geese in May last year in Qinghai Province and caused six bird flu outbreaks in four provinces since October.

Jiangsu is along one of the biggest migration routes for birds in the world, and its 642,000-hectare lake areas and 3.99 million-hectare wetland areas are the main stopover habitat and breeding areas for many of the birds, according to Zhou Shi'e, an expert in bird studies at Nanjing Agriculture University.

About 280 kinds of migratory birds fly to Jiangsu every year, and another 180 species are long-term residents of the province, according to statistics from Zhou's research.

In addition to supervising those migrant birds, the province also requires all of its zoos and bird markets to immunize their cultivated birds and prevent human beings from being in close contact with them.

(China Daily March 2, 2006)