Bird flu flares again in Asia
Bird flu flares again in Asia
Panarat Thepgumpanat, Reuters/Bangkok
Bird flu has killed a 48-year-old man in Thailand, the country's first human death in a year, officials said on Thursday, as the deadly H5N1 virus that has now hit Europe reared its head again in east and southeast Asia.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told a news conference the victim had slaughtered and eaten an infected bird in Kanchanaburi province, which reported new outbreaks of avian influenza this week in birds around 100 km west of the capital.
Eating well-cooked chicken meat is not considered by health authorities to be a risk but contact with sick chickens or ducks is a known method of transmission.
Health officials said several tests were needed before the man could be confirmed as Thailand's 13th official victim.
"The first lab results came out negative but we tested it several times and it confirmed it was positive," Thawat Suntrajarn, director-general at the Department of Disease Control, told Reuters.
He added that the victim's son, who had been in close contact with chickens, had so far not tested positive for the H5N1 virus which experts fear could mutate and "go human", unleashing a global pandemic of killer flu.
Elsewhere in Asia, Vietnamese officials started culling again in the Mekong Delta and Taiwan's Agriculture Council said it had found infected birds in a container smuggled from China, the first case on the island since late 2003.
Tests results confirmed that 1,000 birds in the Panama- registered cargo seized by coastguards on Oct. 14 were infected with H5N1, Chiang Hsien-Choung of the animal health and inspection department said.
All the birds had been destroyed and there was little danger of the virus spreading, he added.
The H5N1 strain, which first surfaced in Hong Kong in 1997, re-emerged in 2003 in South Korea and has spread to Russia and Europe from southeast Asia, which the World Health Organization says will be the most likely epicenter of any human pandemic.
It has killed over 60 people in Asia, including 41 in Vietnam, the worst-hit country.
Most human deaths have been linked to contact with sick birds, but experts say the virus could mutate at any time into a form that is more easily transmitted from person to person.
After a relative lull in new human and bird cases, Vietnam has reported its first outbreak in poultry since July.
"We have just slaughtered and buried all the 180 ducks after tests showed they had the bird flu virus," said Nguyen Van Giam, chairman of the People's Committee in Ninh Quoi A commune.
Vietnam has been vaccinating millions of poultry nationwide to prevent outbreaks in its "winter" season -- which runs from November to January -- when the virus appears to thrive.
In China, where there have so far been no human cases, the Foreign Ministry confirmed H5N1 in 2,600 birds at a poultry farm in Inner Mongolia, but said the outbreak had been wiped out without spreading to people.
"As far as I know, there have been no cases of human infection," spokesman Kong Quan told reporters.
Aphaluck Bhatiasevi of the World Health Organization in Beijing told Reuters China had culled 91,100 birds, vaccinated 166,000 more, and imposed a 21-day quarantine on the affected area and movement controls on poultry around the country.
With H5N1 continuing a westward march that has sparked stockpiling of anti-flu treatments in Europe, Russia told the EU on Wednesday it had found the virus in a region south of Moscow.
The same strain has also been discovered in Turkey and Romania, although bird flu detected in a turkey on a Greek Aegean island has yet to be confirmed as H5N1.
As Europe geared up its responses, Britain said it planned to buy enough vaccine to protect the entire population in the event of a pandemic, while Germany said it would confine all poultry to pens to prevent contact with wild migratory birds believed by some to carrying the virus from Asia.