Bird flu spreads to India

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GUWAHATI (India) - THE deadly H5N1 bird flu virus has been found in dead poultry and wild birds in India's north-eastern state of Sikkim, which borders China and Nepal, and authorities plan to start culling poultry soon, an official said on Tuesday.

Officials will initially cull an estimated 15,000 chickens and ducks after samples of more than 30 dead birds from Ravangla area in the southern part of the mountainous state tested positive in a federal laboratory.

The affected area borders West Bengal state, which has been grappling with intermittent outbreaks of the virus since 2007.

'Bird flu has been confirmed in Sikkim and we are waiting for the central team of experts to come here,' said K.C. Bhutia, a senior veterinary official in the state capital, Gangtok.

Bird flu first broke out in India in 2006. Millions of chicken and ducks have been culled since to contain the virus, but it has resurfaced from time to time. India has reported no human infections.

Hundreds of thousands of birds were culled in India's northeast after the virus was detected in two states in November.

Experts fear the H5N1 virus might mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic that could kill millions of people.

There have been 249 human deaths globally from the H5N1 strain and 397 confirmed cases of infection since the virus resurfaced in Asia in 2003, according to data from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The WHO described a January 2008 outbreak of bird flu in West Bengal state, when more than 4 million birds were culled, as the worst ever in India. -- REUTERS

 

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BEIJING - China yesterday warned of a rising bird flu risk as the nation headed into the Chinese New Year holiday.

Until this month, China had not seen a single human infection in almost a year, but it has now confirmed four cases of the H5N1 virus in a month.

The latest victim is a 16-year-old boy in central Hunan province who is seriously ill after contracting the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, says the Health Ministry. No further details were available.

On Sunday, state media reported a 27-year-old woman surnamed Zhang died in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong on Saturday, nearly two weeks after falling ill. It was the second death this month from the virus, bringing the total number of reported deaths in China since 2003 to 22.

The fatality comes less than two weeks after a 19-year-old woman died from the virus in a Beijing hospital after buying and cleaning ducks in a market in a neighbouring province. It was the first death from bird flu since last February.

A two-year-old girl sickened by H5N1 is in critical condition in the northern province of Shanxi. Her case was announced on Saturday.

'As the Spring Festival approaches, there are frequent movements of poultry products and the risk rises of virus outbreaks and transmission,' the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement on its website.

The Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year holiday, starts next Monday, accompanied by a mass movement of people back to their home provinces for lavish celebratory meals.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said people must be aware of how to protect themselves from bird flu. During the holiday season, when people are more exposed to poultry as consumption rises, 'they are urged to maintain normal precautions against avian influenza, such as ensuring all poultry is well-cooked and always washing hands after contact with raw meat', it said in a statement.

Experts have said that the new cases are not unexpected, as the virus is more active during the cooler months between October and March.

But they have also pointed to holes in China's surveillance of the virus in poultry, as there had been no reported outbreaks of bird flu among poultry in the two provinces where the two-year-old patient had lived.

'We are concerned about the three human cases in the mainland in the last month,' Hong Kong Secretary for Food and Health York Chow told reporters earlier yesterday before the fourth case was announced. 'Particularly, all three cases were reported with avian flu and yet they are not connected directly with any outbreak of avian flu in poultry.'

Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao newspaper reported that the girl's mother died recently of what doctors 'highly suspected' was also bird flu.

The girl had fallen ill in Hunan hundreds of kilometres away, but had been taken to Shanxi by her grandparents, Chinese press reports said.

The Agriculture Ministry was sending out teams of experts to probe how the virus could have spread.

With the world's biggest poultry population and hundreds of millions of backyard birds, China is seen as critical in the fight to contain bird flu.

Last week, Nepal reported that chickens tested positive for H5N1 - the first known instance of the virus in the Himalayan nation.

In Vietnam, animal health officials said they detected the bird flu virus in chickens smuggled from neighbouring China. An eight-year-old girl was also reported sick with H5N1 earlier this month, the first human case reported in the country in nearly a year.

According to the latest WHO figures, bird flu has killed 248 people worldwide since 2003.

REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ASSOCIATED PRESS