Bird flu kills girl in Cambodia

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 highly pathogenic 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 cases,
taking the known death toll from the virus to 105 since it
re-emerged in Asia in late 2003.

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 and the WHO confirmed that a
29-year-old woman in the eastern city of Shanghai, who died on
Tuesday, had bird flu.

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 death is the first known case in Shanghai, a city of
around 17 million people on the eastern coast. It brings to 16
the number of human bird flu cases in China, 11 of them fatal.

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 in the Shanghai area since February, 2004, the WHO
said. 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 and Stephanie Nebehay in
Geneva)