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BRUSSELS, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Belgium will cull around 55,000 chickens after detecting an outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu in a western province of the country near its border with France, the federal food safety agency, AFSCA, said on Friday.
A large part of the protection and surveillance zones established in connection with the outbreak overlaps with existing zones created after an outbreak last month and are partly located in France, AFSCA said in a statement.
The European Food Safety Authority said in December that an unprecedented number of bird flu outbreaks among wild birds and their wide geographic spread were driving an early and strong wave of the disease in Europe last year.
Israel on Tuesday reported an outbreak of H5N1 on a farm in the north of the country.
(Reporting by Louise Rasmussen Editing by Tomasz Janowski)
