Thai calls in troops against bird flu

Thai calls in troops against bird flu

Agencies, Bangkok

Thailand brought in troops and prisoners on Sunday to kill millions of chickens and stop the spread of highly contagious bird flu, which has jumped to humans in Vietnam and Thailand and now spread to Indonesia.

With most people fearing contamination, 400 soldiers were drafted to kill the hens in Suphan Buri province northwest of Bangkok, Deputy Agriculture Minister Newin Chidchop told reporters. A hundred prisoners were also brought in.

"We have had labor problems. It is difficult to find laborers as after the bird flu outbreak was confirmed, many of them are avoiding working on farms," Newin said.

All chickens in the province, a major area of production in a Thai industry that raises a billion chickens a year and earns US$1.5 billion in exports, will be killed.

Thailand kills the hens by tying them up in sacks and burying them alive.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra tried to ease farmers fears on Sunday, promising them compensation, help with starting up again after the epidemic and a suspension of their debts.

China was the latest of many countries to ban Thai chicken imports. Last year, Beijing was widely accused of covering up an outbreak of the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

The World Health Organization (WHO) fears that if bird flu combines with human flu, a new strain could sweep through a human population with no immunity to it in an epidemic worse than SARS.

The WHO calls the near-simultaneous outbreaks in Asia "historically unprecedented".

Meanwhile, a WHO spokesman predicted on Sunday a vaccine for the bird flu rampaging through Asia is more than six months away.

Recently WHO raised hopes that a prototype bird flu vaccine would be ready in four weeks' time. But the UN health agency on Sunday said on its Web site its fears that the virus would mutate had come true, slowing up work on a vaccine.

"I don't think we're looking at a workable vaccine within six months. That's too late for the influenza season in Asia but it would be available," Peter Cordingley, the WHO spokesman for the region, told The Associated Press in the Philippines.

Indonesia confirmed an outbreak of the disease that has emerged in Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Jakarta said on Sunday about 4.7 million chickens had died in the country since November, 60 percent from Newcastle disease, harmless to humans, and 40 percent from a combination of that and bird flu.

Six people have died in Vietnam and two human cases have been confirmed in Thailand.

"There's no denying the disease is spreading," Anton Rychener, Vietnam representative for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, told Reuters.

Vietnam's latest known human case was an eight-year-old girl in the southern metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City.

Children appear most at risk -- five of Vietnam's six dead and both Thailand's cases were children -- but why is unclear. All seem to have caught it from sick chickens.

Thaksin's government denies covering up bird flu by describing the outbreak in November as poultry cholera, which cannot jump to humans. The government said it knew for sure it was bird flu only when tests confirmed it on Friday.

"The government never realized it was avian influenza before yesterday, but it was suspecting that it might be," chief government spokesman Jakrapob Penkair said.

Thaksin told reporters the government took steps at the time to combat bird flu, but announcing them could have caused panic.

Thailand has invited Asian health and agriculture officials and international agencies to discuss bird flu on Wednesday.

Bangkok could come in for criticism at the session, Western officials say, to match the fury of some newspapers and opposition politicians.

The opposition Democrats, with an eye on a general election in early 2005, have demanded his resignation. Thaksin has shrugged off the calls.

"The government's efforts to sweep the problem under the carpet have exploded in its face, leaving the poultry industry in tatters and the very safety of the public in jeopardy," the Bangkok Post newspaper said in an editorial on Saturday.