An agriculture official said Wednesday the newly confirmed bird flu case in China is only a single isolated incident and not a large-scale outbreak.

But the possibility of discovering cases in other places does exist, Zhang Zhongqiu, vice-director of the stockbreeding and veterinary bureau under the Ministry of Agriculture, said Wednesday.

That is because experts suspect the new case was caused by migratory birds, he said.

Located aside a lake and on a slope, the chicken farm where the disease was found is a relatively isolated place, Zhang said.

To date the ministry has not received reports of new cases, he added.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health Wednesday issued a circular requiring health departments at all levels to carry out monitoring and prevention efforts in order to prevent bird flu from infecting humans.

The national bird flu reference laboratory on Tuesday confirmed that chickens in East China's Anhui Province were killed last Saturday by the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus.

The virus was found at a chicken farm in the Juchao District, Chaohu in Anhui.

The ministry has urged stockbreeding and veterinary departments across the country to spare no efforts in epidemic prevention, Zhang said.

In another development, Anhui provincial government has issued an urgent circular to demand local governments and related departments deal seriously with regular epidemic control measures, standardize control over poultry raising and strictly sterilize chicken or duck farms.

The circular also said that an epidemic monitoring system and a related information network should be established by local governments at all levels.

Supervision should focus on poultry farms and areas that have reported bird flu cases before and on those that were in danger.

According to the circular, local governments should pay compensation to those who suffer losses from compulsory poultry vaccination and slaughter.

Beijing and South China's Guangdong Province have taken measures to prevent the disease from entering, the China News Service reported Wednesday.

The supply of avian products from Anhui to Beijing has been temporarily stopped.

Yao Jiezhang with the Beijing directing office for animal epidemic control said the trade of avian products in Beijing remains normal because Anhui is distant from Beijing.

While the Guangdong quarantine authority has urged avian farms which supply livee avian products to Hong Kong and Macao to keep away wild birds.

Spokesman: efforts to control bird flu in progress

The health authority is smoothly working to handle the bird flu outbreak and the situation is now under control, said government spokesman in Hefei on Wednesday.

The vaccine supply is abundant and vaccination on all the poultry within a 5 km radius of the affected area has completed, said Zhu Tonggui, spokesman of local headquarters of bird flu prevention in the Juchao District, Chaohu City, east China's Anhui Province.

The national bird flu reference laboratory confirmed on Tuesday that the latest death of chickens at a farm in the district was caused by the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu virus.

The headquarters has prepared a total of 175,000 ml of vaccine and dispatched 40 well-trained technical staff to direct vaccination in each of relevant villages, Zhu said.

The authority has also stored 2,000 kg of disinfector and sent 100 sanitizing workers. Special teams would carry out disinfection for large scale poultry raisers, he said.

All the entries into the affected area were blocked. Fowl trade and private slaughters were forbidden in all the markets within a 10 km radius of the affected area.

The local health authority started to kill all the poultry within a 3 km radius of the chicken farm as soon as the disease was confirmed and the slaughter has not finished yet, said Zhu.

Disinfection work such as burning the poultry bodies and treatment of the excrement is in progress.

Officials with the Ministry of Agriculture said that the ministry received the report of chicken death on July 3 and soon dispatched a group of experts to the affected area to guide relevant works of prevention and control of the disease.

Experts of the ministry said the farm is located on a slope in a rather separate environment close to the wide Chaohu Lake and all the chicks are bought from the local markets, where no avian flu case had been reported before.

The experts estimated that the virus might be spread by migrants or wild water birds.

The ministry has informed the case to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, World Health Organization (WHO), relevant authorities of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

The new case is the first one since China announced it had stamped out the disease last March 16.

Bird flu was firstly detected on January 27 at a duck farm in the Dingdang Township, South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Since then, China slaughtered nearly 9 million birds.

During that period of time, altogether 49 cases of bird flu were confirmed and controlled. So far, no humans contracted the disease in China.