Bird flu has killed 11,172 poultry in central China, the official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday, the country's first reported outbreak in three months.

The poultry in Shijiping, a village in Hunan province, died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, Xinhua said, citing the Ministry of Agriculture. Another 52,874 were slaughtered, said the report, which did not give any other details or say when the outbreak occurred.

A man who answered the telephone at the ministry on Saturday said he was "unclear" about the situation.

The last reported cases occurred in March, when the disease struck poultry market in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Some 680 chickens died and another 6,990 birds were culled.

Millions of birds have been destroyed in order to contain outbreaks in China, which has also launched a massive effort to vaccinate poultry.

The H5N1 virus has killed at least 185 people worldwide, since it began ravaging poultry stocks across Asia in late 2003, according to the World Health Organization.

It remains hard for people to catch, but experts worry that every outbreak in poultry may make it easier for the virus to mutate into a form that passes easily among humans, potentially igniting a pandemic. So far, most human cases have been traced to contact with infected birds.