SINGAPORE — It is not complaints of noise, but the risk of exposure to bird flu that prompted the Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) to cull free-roaming chickens in areas where there are “relatively high numbers” of them, the authority said on Monday (Feb 13) in a letter to TODAY’s Voices page.

Dr Yap Him Hoo, director-general of the AVA, said: “The noise issues only serve to bring attention to the relatively high numbers of free-roaming chicken in certain areas, which in turn raise the exposure risk to bird flu in these localities.” He added that “various media reports” may have given the impression that the AVA is taking action solely because of complaints of noise, but that is not the case.

It was reported early this month that the AVA had put down the chickens around Thomson View and Blocks 452 to 454 Sin Ming Avenue, after receiving 20 complaints from residents last year, most of them related to noise. 

Dr Yap said that the risk of free-roaming chickens being exposed to bird flu is significant here, because Singapore is one of the stopover nodes for migratory wild birds: “This means that the chickens on our island can catch the disease through direct contact with wild birds or even through their droppings ... There is clear scientific evidence that chickens are very susceptible to the bird-flu virus, and (they) can in turn transmit the disease to humans. This was indeed what happened when the region was struck with bird flu in 2004.”