• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Bird flu flares again in Asia, kills 13th Thai

Posted on: Thursday, 20 October 2005, 02:10 CDT

By Panarat Thepgumpanat

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Bird flu has killed a 48-year-old man in Thailand, the country's first human death in a year, as the deadly H5N1 virus that has now spread to Europe reared its head again in two nations in southeast Asia.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said the victim appeared to have eaten an infected bird in Kanchanaburi province, which has recently reported new outbreaks of the avian influenza strain in birds around 100 km (60 miles) west of the capital.

"The guy was infected with bird flu because he took a sick chicken, slaughtered it and then ate it," Thaksin told a news conference in Bangkok on Thursday.

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.

Thawat added that the victim's son, who had been in close contact with chickens, had so far not tested positive for the virus which experts fear could mutate and "go human," unleashing a global pandemic of killer flu.

The H5N1 strain, which first surfaced in Hong Kong in 1997, re-emerged in 2003 in South Korea, and has spread to Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Russia and Europe.

More than 60 people have died from the virus in Asia, including 41 in Vietnam, the worst-affected country.

The World Health Organization says southeast Asia is the most likely epicenter of any human pandemic, which will probably stem from a mutation of the virus that makes it easily transmittable between people.

Most of the human deaths have been linked to contact with sick birds. But experts say the virus could mutate at anytime into a form that is more easily transmitted from human to human.

BACK IN VIETNAM

After a relative lull in new human and bird cases, Vietnam starting culling ducks at a farm in the Mekong Delta this week, an official said, following detection of the country's first outbreak in poultry since June.

"We have just slaughtered and buried all the 180 ducks after tests showed they had the bird flu virus," Nguyen Van Giam, chairman of the People's Committee in Ninh Quoi A commune, where the virus was first detected in 2004, told Reuters.

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.

Elsewhere in Asia, which has borne the brunt of the disease over the last two years, China's Xinhua news agency reported that bird flu had killed at least 2,600 birds at a farm in the northern region of Inner Mongolia.

However, Xinhua said on Wednesday the outbreak had been controlled, without mentioning any possible human infections or when the outbreak was discovered.

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 birds 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.

Source: REUTERS

More News in this Category