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In the wake of ferocious bushfires that tore through Kangaroo Island, local farmer Rick Morris has endured the gruelling task of burying 400 sheep killed when most of his sprawling property went up in flames.

"It puts it in perspective to say that we're one of the lucky ones," he said. Australia is reeling from bushfires that since September have claimed 28 lives, including two on Kangaroo Island, and razed 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of land -- an area larger than South Korea or Portugal.

Vast swathes of the burned land were used for grazing cattle and sheep, and officials believe the livestock toll exceeds 100,000 across Australia -- including at least 43,000 on Kangaroo Island alone, where farmers like Morris endured three blazes in just 10 days.

"We faced the full wrath of Mother Nature," he told AFP at his 930-hectare (2,300-acre) farm.

"The fire (swept) from the south side to the north side of the island and took no prisoners between... I'm amazed there were not more people killed."

Faced with the scale of the disaster, Australia's army has deployed 3,000 soldiers to assist in bushfire-affected areas.

Here, the defence force flew in firefighters from the mainland and dropped bales of hay from helicopters to farmers isolated by fires in the island's western reaches.

Brigadier Damian Cantwell, the joint bushfire task force commander for South Australia state, said he foresaw a "long road ahead" for Kangaroo Island.

"I've seen a level of destruction which is still surprising me now," he told AFP.

"There's a lot of farmers that are in distress, a lot of community members are struggling, some families have lost everything, and they're struggling to find out where they can move forward from here," he said.

"There's no end date assigned to this mission, and it's very important that there's no sense of anyone... thinking about when this is going to end."

- Pushed 'to the brink' -

Kangaroo Island's agriculture industry is worth Aus$150 million (US$100 million), and farming is the island's biggest employer.

Local agronomist Daniel Pledge said farmers would need to buy extra feed for their livestock, pasture seed to restore burned paddocks and animals would be likely to conceive at lower rates due to stress -- causing lasting impacts from the fires.

"It's a snowball effect that we can't measure and we're very concerned for our local economy, to be honest," he told AFP.

“And these effects could flow on for up to five years, for certain individuals. And that is a long time."

The country's farmers had already been battered by a prolonged drought that has crippled water supplies in rural areas across the vast and arid continent's southeast.

National Farmers' Federation president Fiona Simpson said they were increasingly under pressure across the country.

"Whether it's the drought or the recent bushfires, dry conditions are pushing many of our farming communities to the brink," she said.

"It's a situation that grows graver each day, and shows no signs of abating."

In response, the government has promised immediate support payments of Aus$75,000 to aid in farmers' recovery, which will be drawn from a Aus$2.0 billion bushfire relief package.

Morris, who is also the chairman of Kangaroo Island's agriculture industry body, said the financial support would be welcomed on the island.

For now, though, he is keeping his remaining 4,500-strong flock close until the bushfire threat passes.

"We're hand-feeding them for all their nutrient needs, and that'll be the case until April (or) May when it rains, hopefully," he said. (AFP)

The number of people already infected by the mystery virus emerging in China is far greater than official figures suggest, scientists have told the BBC.

There have been more than 60 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, but UK experts estimate a figure nearer 1,700.

Two people are known to have died from the respiratory illness, which appeared in Wuhan city in December.

"I am substantially more concerned than I was a week ago," disease outbreak scientist Prof Neil Ferguson, said.

The work was conducted by the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, which advises bodies including the UK government and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Singapore and Hong Kong have been screening air passengers from Wuhan, and US authorities announced similar measures starting on Friday at three major airports in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. (BBC)

A second person died in central China after being infected with the new SARS-like virus that’s caused dozens of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, and emerged in Japan and Thailand this week.

The patient, a 69-year-old man, died Wednesday at the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital in Hubei province after a two-week illness that progressed to multi organ failure, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission said late Thursday. The city has reported 41 cases of pneumonia caused by the so-called 2019-nCoV virus. Twelve patients have been cured and discharged, five are being treated for severe illness, and two have died.

Authorities in Japan reported a case Thursday in a resident of Kanagawa prefecture aged in his 30s, who had spent time with an infected person in Wuhan. That’s the second time someone outside China was found to be infected with the novel coronavirus, which has captured international attention because of similarities with the one that sparked Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, 17 years ago.

Unlike SARS, which killed almost 800 people, the new virus doesn’t appear to spread easily between people. Much remains to be understood about the new coronavirus, which was first identified in China earlier this month, the World Health Organization said in a statement Thursday in response to the case in Japan.

“Not enough is known about 2019-nCoV to draw definitive conclusions about how it is transmitted, clinical features of disease, or the extent to which it has spread,” the Geneva-based agency said. “The source also remains unknown.” (Bloomberg)

The U.S. and China signed what they billed as the first phase of a broader trade pact on Wednesday amid persistent questions over whether President Donald Trump’s efforts to rewrite the economic relationship with Beijing will ever go any further.

The deal commits China to do more to crack down on the theft of American technology and corporate secrets by its companies and state entities, while outlining a $200 billion spending spree to try to close its trade imbalance with the U.S. It also binds Beijing to avoiding currency manipulation to gain an advantage and includes an enforcement system to ensure promises are kept.

The ceremony in a packed East Room at the White House included Trump, dozens of American business people and U.S. lawmakers and Chinese officials and marked a rare moment of friendship lately between the world’s two largest economies. Acrimonious talks stretching back almost three years have roiled financial markets, cast a cloud of uncertainty over investment decisions and hurt growth in both nations.

“This is a very important and remarkable occasion,” Trump said. Fixing what he sees as the injustices of past trade deals is “probably the biggest reason why I ran for president,” he added. “Together we are righting the wrongs of the past.”

In a letter to Trump read out at the ceremony, Chinese leader Xi Jinping said the deal proved the two sides could work together to bridge their differences and declared it “good for China, the U.S. and the whole world.” (Bloomberg)