Bird flu reaches India and France, death toll at 93

By Krittivas Mukherjee and Kerstin Gemlich

MUMBAI/PARIS (Reuters) – Big poultry producers India and
France confirmed their first cases of H5N1 bird flu on Saturday
as the deadly disease continued its geographical spread from
Asia.

India’s federal government said eight people were being
checked for H5N1 in the western state of Maharashtra, where
about 50,000 birds have died in the last few days.

“Yes, it is confirmed. The disease is H5N1. It has come to
Maharashtra,” state animal husbandry minister Anees Ahmed told
Reuters. “We are treating it as an emergency.”

In France, Europe’s biggest poultry producer, the farm
ministry confirmed that a duck found dead on Monday in the east
of the country had H5N1.

“This virus is to 99 percent identical with the virus of
Asian origin,” the ministry said in a statement.

Tests from Indonesia showed a 23-year-old market worker who
died a week ago had been infected with the H5N1 virus.

His death took the number of known human cases of the
disease worldwide to 171 and the death toll to 93. Two hundred
million birds across Asia, parts of the Middle East, Europe and
Africa have died of the virus or been culled.

So far most victims of bird flu have had direct or indirect
contact with chickens, but there are fears the virus may mutate
into a strain easily passed among people, causing a pandemic in
which millions could die.

Indian Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said up to 500,000
birds would be culled in Maharashtra state in response to the
disease. “There is absolutely no need to panic. The situation
is under control. We have sufficient medicines,” he said.

Officials also banned trade in poultry in a 10-km radius
around the outbreak.

“We are testing eight humans for bird flu virus in the
affected area in Maharashtra. Their blood samples have been
sent to testing. Four, including three children, are being kept
under observation,” Federal Health Secretary P.K. Hota told
Reuters.

India is the fifth largest producer of eggs in the world.
Livestock and poultry is one of the fastest-growing sectors in
the country.

FRENCH CASE CONFIRMED

France’s H5N1 case was one of several wild ducks found dead
near Lyon in a region famous for the quality of its chickens.

Officials said veterinarians were checking birds within a
three-kilometer (two-mile) security zone around the spot, in
accordance with European Union emergency measures.

A few hours before the test results were confirmed,
President Jacques Chirac said the government would be vigilant
and ready to act on a possible outbreak.

“It is a situation which we have to take with calm, but
which also has to be taken very seriously,” Chirac told a news
conference in Bangkok during a trip to Thailand.

Farm Minister Dominique Bussereau said it was safe to eat
chicken, but urged people to avoid contact with wild birds and
not to touch any dead ones.

He said that since the disease had only been found in a
wild bird, France was not planning to slaughter poultry, but
added that some 900,000 birds would be vaccinated from
Wednesday.

Bird flu would be a major topic of debate during a meeting
of EU farm ministers in Brussels on Monday, Bussereau said.

SPREAD IN EUROPE

German authorities said H5N1, first confirmed in two dead
swans in the country on Tuesday, had spread across the Baltic
Sea island of Ruegen, a popular resort. State and federal
authorities sealed off several areas to the public.

They said another 28 dead birds on Ruegen were found to
have H5N1, raising the total to 41.

“We’re facing an extremely serious situation,” said Till
Backhaus, agriculture minister in the northern state of
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern near the Polish border.

Austria found two cases of deadly H5N1 bird flu virus near
Vienna, raising the total number of cases there to seven and
prompting a nationwide order to confine poultry indoors, the
health ministry said.

Authorities in Bulgaria put a man in an isolation chamber
and were testing him for bird flu on Saturday after two of his
ducks died, but said he was not showing symptoms of the
disease.

Bulgaria detected its first outbreak of the H5N1 strain in
a wild swan on the Danube River town of Vidin, close to the
Romanian border, at the end of January, and has since stepped
up measures to avoid it spreading.

The disease also spread in Egypt, which reported its first
cases of H5N1 on Friday.

State news agency MENA said avian flu hit a chicken farm
near Cairo and that authorities culled all 10,000 birds there,
while new cases were diagnosed among birds kept at homes or on
roofs in three new provinces.

The government banned the movement of live birds across
provincial borders for the next 15 days and banned the sale or
slaughter of live birds in street markets, as well as ordering
the removal of unlicensed chicken pens from houses.

(Additional reporting by Surojit Gupta in New Delhi, Mark
Heinrich in Vienna, Tsvetelia Ilieva in Sofia, Jonathan Wright
in Cairo and Erik Kirschbaum in Berlin)