Asia steps up fight against bird flu as scientists exhume body in bid to avoid another pandemic

ASIAN countries that have so far escaped the bird flu spreading across the continent stepped up measures yesterday to keep the virus outside their borders.

Hong Kong isolated a woman who returned from Vietnam with suspicious pneumonia symptoms. Singapore intensified a campaign to slaughter crows, considered potential spreaders of the disease because they could contract the virus from dead birds.

Singapore and Hong Kong were hit hard by SARS last year and both were on high alert to prevent an outbreak of bird flu, which has killed 10 people in recent weeks.

Tens of millions of chickens and ducks have died in 10 countries across the region from the disease or in government-ordered slaughters. The virus has jumped to humans in Vietnam, where eight people have died, and in Thailand, where two have died.

Indonesia ordered all chickens in affected areas to be killed, reversing its earlier insistence that a wholesale slaughter was not necessary. Thailand, which for weeks claimed to be bird-flu free, said the disease was spreading rapidly across its countryside.

The World Health Organisation warned that the unsafe culling of poultry in Asia is increasing the risk that the bird flu outbreak could take root in humans.

Television and newspaper images of bare-handed people, without goggles or masks, flinging chicken carcasses into mass graves or stuffing live ones into sacks have alarmed officials at the UN health agency.

"They are trying to eliminate the animal reservoir, which is what we want, but if they are exposing themselves to the virus while they're doing that it might defeat the purpose," said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for WHO's infectious diseases unit.

The danger is that somebody could become infected with the bird flu virus while already carrying a human variety of influenza.

The two flu viruses could then swap genes, triggering a global flu pandemic.

Meanwhile, a victim of the world's worst epidemic is due to be exhumed to help scientists trying to avert the spread of bird flu.

Scientists plan to remove lung samples from the body of 20-year-old Phyllis Burn, who was buried in London 85 years ago.

She was one of 50 million people killed by a devastating strain of influenza that swept across the world in 1918. Evidence points to the 1918 virus being a type of bird flu similar to the one now claiming human lives in Asia.

Scientists are desperate to know more about what caused the pandemic in order to avoid another disaster on the same scale.

They are looking for a "genetic footprint" fragments of RNA - left by the 1918 virus that could yield important clues.