Information that cases of mass death of poultry were registered in the Ivanychi district alarmed many people.

After all, no news broadcast lately is complete without reports of possible infection with a dangerous avian influenza virus. As reported by the head of the veterinary medicine department in the Ivanychi district, Mykola Romanyuk, in the village of Kolona, the death of 85 chickens and five ducks was recorded in seven households. The first to raise the alarm last Wednesday was epizootologist Vitaliy Kopanko of the Rykovychi district hospital, who noticed a dead chicken in his own yard. Then seven more died. Without delay, he turned to the district veterinary hospital, where that same day material was taken from the dead bird for analysis.

And already on Thursday morning it became known that zinc phosphide, which could have been used for treating wheat, became lethal for the chickens.

The death of poultry was also detected in six other households located nearby. As it turned out, the cause of the deaths was grain scattered along the street under the fence of one of the homesteads. Zinc phosphide was found in it. In another affected owner's yard, pulp was found sprinkled with grain.

A specially created commission headed by the head of the veterinary medicine department, Mykola Romanyuk, went to Kolona. Over the course of a day, a door-to-door survey was conducted, residents were interviewed, and material was taken for new analyses. Their preliminary results were confirmed in the regional laboratory as well — the mentioned poison, which is also used to destroy rodents, was found in the selected grain samples. Now law enforcement officers have taken an interest in the "emergency."

Villagers say that near the homesteads where the poultry died, there is an abandoned building of a former collective farm, which now serves some fellow villagers as a dumping ground. Perhaps someone among them, without thinking about the consequences, threw there the poison they had kept at home.

Another version was put forward at a press conference for media journalists by the head of the veterinary medicine department of the regional state administration, Bohdan Lozynskyi. According to him, a week ago mouse-like rodents were being destroyed in the fields with a poison that contained zinc phosphide. As it turned out, cases of poultry poisoning by this chemical substance had occurred in Volyn before. They were recorded in the Kivertsi, Lutsk, and Ratne districts, as well as in the regional center. Therefore, Bohdan Vasyliovych advises villagers not to let poultry out of buildings or to keep them in yards, and in order to strengthen immunity against diseases, in particular the same avian influenza, to get them vaccinated. More than three million birds in the households of Volyn villagers have already been vaccinated with the vaccine used against Newcastle disease.

Alla LISOVA, Yevheniia SOMOVA