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Thailand confirms 13th bird flu death
Updated: 2005-10-20 19:35
BANGKOK, Thailand - A 48-year-old man
died of bird flu in Thailand after eating his neighbor's sick chickens.
In Russia, emergency workers were killing domestic and wild fowl in and near
a bird flu-affected village south of Moscow while the World Health Organization
said China had destroyed 91,100 birds around a farm in the country's north to
stop a bird flu outbreak. The birds were culled after 2,600 chickens and ducks
died of the H5N1 strain of the virus in a breeding facility in a village in the
Inner Mongolia region.
Amid worrying signs the deadly virus was spreading across Siberia to the
Mediterranean along the pathways of migratory birds, the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organization warned Wednesday of a marked increase in chances that
bird flu would move to the Middle East and Africa — and hit countries poorly
equipped to deal with an outbreak.
The European Union on Wednesday announced plans for an exercise simulating a
human flu pandemic to improve readiness in case the bird virus mutates to form a
strain transmissible among people.
More than 60 people have died of bird flu since late 2003, all of them in
Asia. Most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds. But health
officials warn the virus could mutate into a form that can be easily passed
between humans, possibly triggering a global pandemic which could kill millions.
Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said Thursday new lab results
confirmed the country's 13th death from bird flu. Initially, authorities said
the man had tested negative for the virus.
The dead man, Bang-on Benphat, was hospitalized with pneumonia-like symptoms
on Sunday, shortly after he cooked and ate his neighbor's dead chickens. His
7-year-old son, who also had contact with the chickens, has been hospitalized in
Bangkok with a fever and lung infection and is also suspected of having bird
flu, said Dr. Thawat Suntrajarn, director-general of the Department of
Communicable Disease Control.
"The people in this area should have known better," he said. "They took
sickly chickens and killed and ate them. This is extremely dangerous."
Thailand's last human bird flu fatality was on Oct. 8, 2004.
The country has begun to stockpile the antiviral Tamiflu, the main drug used
to treat bird flu in humans. It has acquired 66,000 doses so far and is also
starting clinical trials of its own generic version of the drug.
In Taiwan, the Agricultural Council confirmed the island's first case
of bird flu. Birds taken from a Panama-registered freighter that was stopped by the
Taiwanese coast guard on Oct. 14 tested positive for the H5N1 virus, the commission
said.
In central Russia, veterinary officials slaughtered poultry in a small
village as fears grew that the bird flu that has swept through parts of Siberia
could reach Moscow.
The Asian H5N1 strain of bird flu was detected in Siberia in July. Migratory
birds flying over the region from elsewhere in Asia were blamed for the
outbreak.
Russia's Agriculture Ministry confirmed Wednesday that the same strain had
been detected in the village of Yandovka, suggesting the dreaded virus might be
spreading across a swath from Siberia to the shores of the Mediterranean.
Officials put Yandovka, a remote village of 200 residents about 200 miles
south of the Russian capital, under quarantine after villagers reported the mass
illness and deaths of their fowl.
About a dozen police officers were posted to prevent outsiders from entering
the village. An acid smell filled the air around the village, where veterinary
officials in long green overcoats sprayed disinfectant on cars of villagers
wanting to leave.
Simon Butrik, a 65-year-old excavator driver from a nearby village who was
helping dig holes for the incinerated fowl, said most villagers were cooperating
and voluntarily handing over their chickens, ducks and geese for death by lethal
injection. The dead birds were put in bags and burned.
"I feel sorry for them. There is an old couple living on the other edge of
the village, whose only hope was poultry. There's no work here but poultry, and
the birds have been destroyed," he said.
If the latest outbreak in Russia is confirmed as the same H5N1 strain that
has decimated flocks in Asia since 2003, it would mark the first appearance of
the virus in European Russia, west of the Ural Mountains. The virus has also
been confirmed in Turkey and Romania, and the European Union was trying to
assess whether it had spread into Macedonia and Greece.
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