Thailand confirms human bird flu cases

THE bird flu eruption in Asia, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) says could set off an epidemic worse than SARS, has leapt into humans in Thailand and appeared in Cambodia, officials said yesterday.

A chicken butcher, one of six Thais being tested for the disease, died of pneumonia, said Charal Trinwuthipong, director-general of the Department of Disease Control.

After days of declaring the country free of the bird flu which killed five Vietnamese people, the Thai government said two boys, aged six and seven and from different provinces west of Bangkok, were “critical but stable” with the disease.

Three more people are being tested and the Bangkok government issued an urgent warning to anyone suffering from fever and bronchitis after being around poultry to rush to the doctor.

“Those who have contacted chicken and have high fever and bronchitis should report themselves to doctors immediately,” Health Minister Sudarat Keyuraphan said.

Children appear most at risk. No one knows why, but four of the five fatalities in Vietnam were children.

The news that bird flu had struck threatened to devastate the Thai chicken industry, the world’s fourth-largest.

The EU, the second-biggest buyer of chicken from a country which earns more than $1 billion a year from poultry exports, promptly joined Japan, Thailand’s biggest customer, in banning imports of Thai chicken.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra shrugged off the bans, saying they would have only a “trivial” impact on exports, which he expects to help the economy to grow 8% this year. “GDP will be hit by only 0.1% and exports will be hit by 0.4%,” he told reporters.

In Thailand, where the chicken industry employs hundreds of thousands of people on 30,000 poultry farms and in related industries, the immediate impact of bird flu jumping into humans will be largely economic.

Thaksin promised swift action in a country already culling chickens and disinfecting farms due to an outbreak of poultry cholera and said it would have little real impact.

“This problem will pass quickly because we will try to solve it very quickly,” he told reporters.

But Dominique Dwor-Frecaut of Barclays Capital Research in Singapore said it was not good news.

“You are looking at an impact not only on poultry exports, but potentially on tourism. Hopefully we won’t see the same level of panic like we did with SARS,” she said. “It’s too soon to call it a major catastrophe. There is still time to control the epidemic and if it’s controlled the impact on the economy will be minimal.”

Tourism accounts for about 6% of Thailand’s GDP with more than 10 million foreigners a year holidaying there. This year, the Thai government was shooting for 12 million.