The Malaysian authorities have begun slaughtering pigs in the northern state of Perak in the latest move to stamp out the Japanese encephalitis outbreak.

The official Bernama news agency said over ten thousand pigs would be killed in Perak, where the disease first broke out last October.

Sixty-three people have so far been killed by Japanese encephalitis, which is transmitted from pigs to humans by mosquitoes, and another as yet unidentified virus.

Over eighty-thousand pigs have already been slaughtered in an attempt to stop the epidemic.