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Bird flu kills girl in Cambodia, woman in China

Posted on: Friday, 24 March 2006, 12:53 CST

By Ek Madra

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Bird flu has killed a young girl in Cambodia, the first human victim of the virus in the poor southeast Asian nation in almost a year, while China said on Friday a woman in the city of Shanghai had died from it.

Jordan became the latest Middle East country hit by an outbreak of the virulent H5N1 virus in poultry, but said no people had been infected.

Bird flu, which has spread from Asia to the Middle East, Africa and Europe, remains essentially an animal disease but can infect people who come into contact with sick poultry.

Health experts fear the virus will mutate enough to pass easily from person to person, sparking a pandemic in which millions could die.

The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the death of the girl in Cambodia, taking the known death toll from the virus to 104 since it re-emerged in Asia in late 2003. The WHO had no immediate comment on the death in China.

Mon Puthy, aged 3, who lived in a village in Kampong Speu province about 40 miles west of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, had been in contact with sick and dying chickens, officials said. She died on Tuesday.

Her death took Cambodia's human death toll from bird flu to five. The country's last victim was a 20-year-old woman who died in a Vietnamese hospital in April 2005.

Seven other people in the village who had either been in contact with the girl or sick poultry were showing some signs of fever, although there was no cause for panic, local WHO spokeswoman Megge Miller said.

"It looks like another one of those isolated incidents. There aren't any alarm bells at the moment," she said.

Mon Puthy's 23-year-old mother, Choeun Sok Ny, said she still had no idea what had killed her daughter, an indication that bird flu public education campaigns in one of Asia's poorest nations still have a long way to go.

"Other children in the village played with the dead chickens more than my loved one," she told Reuters by telephone. "Why are they not sick, and why did my daughter die?"

CHINA DEATH

China's Health Ministry confirmed that a 29-year-old woman in the eastern city of Shanghai had died of bird flu, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The woman, surnamed Li, was a migrant worker who was initially said to have died of "pneumonia of unknown cause." The city government said it suspected bird flu on Thursday.

The latest death is the first known case in Shanghai and brings to 16 the number of human bird flu cases and to 11 the number of deaths announced by China. China reported its first death from the virus in November of last year.

It is not known how the woman contracted the disease. The city government has not said where she was from, nor how long she had lived in Shanghai.

There have been no known outbreaks of bird flu among poultry or other birds in Shanghai. Some of the other human cases in China have also occurred in areas with no reported outbreak among birds.

In Jordan, Health Minister Said Darwazeh said at least three dead turkeys at a domestic farm in Ajloun had tested positive for the disease.

Twenty people were given the Tamiflu antiviral drug and the area had been cordoned off to prevent the disease from spreading further, he told a news conference in Amman.

"The disease in its current form is more of an economic disease that affects poultry. It has had a very limited effect on human health," he said.

Poultry sales have continued a patchy recovery across Europe as a dwindling number of new bird flu cases has shifted the media spotlight away from the virus, calming consumer fears.

In France, which has a 6 billion euro ($7.18 billion) poultry industry, the largest in the European Union, sales are now around 7-10 percent down on the same period last year.

(Additional reporting by Lucy Hornby in Shanghai, Dina Al Wakeel in Amman, David Evans in Paris)

Source: REUTERS

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