Death toll from bird flu hits 70

A THAI boy has become the 70th Asian to die of bird flu, authorities said yesterday as reports warned a flu pandemic could cost the US economy hundreds of billions of dollars as well as millions of lives.

China also reported a new case of H5N1, the fifth person in the country known to have been infected with the deadly virus.

The 31-year-old woman, who lived in Heishan county of Liaoning province, has since recovered.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said it may seek to investigate control measures in the area, which has not reported any other human cases.

The death of the five-year-old boy from the central province of Nakhon Nayok, 110 kilometres from Bangkok, took Thailand’s bird flu death toll to 14 out of 22 known cases since the virus swept through large parts of Asia in late 2003.

The boy, who died in hospital on Wednesday, was not known to have had direct contact with chickens, health officials said.

“We believe that the boy contracted the virus from his surroundings because, although his family does not raise chickens, there are chickens raised in his neighbourhood,” said Thawat Suntrajarn, head of the Health Ministry’s Disease Control Department.

That would follow the usual pattern of human infections of the virus, which has not yet shown signs of evolving into a form which could pass easily from person to person.

Experts say that is the great fear. If the H5N1 virus did acquire that ability, it could set off a pandemic which could kill millions of people without immunity to the new strain.

The virus is now endemic in poultry in parts of Asia and countries around the world are preparing to deal with a pandemic which could cause massive economic losses as well as millions of deaths.

A Russian veterinary official said yesterday that the bird flu strain found in Ukraine is the same one that has destroyed flocks of birds in Asia.

Ukraine announced its first case of bird flu on December 3, revealing that some 2,500 domestic fowl had died suddenly in a marsh area on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

The Health Ministry reported that the outbreak, initially confined to six villages, had spread to nine by yesterday, and dying birds were reported in a total of 16 villages and the peninsula’s regional capital, Simferopol.

Japan will cull about 19,000 chickens after detecting that they were exposed to bird flu, authorities said.

Chickens at Ishikawa farm in Ibaraki prefecture (state), about 105km north of Tokyo, had developed antibodies to fight off a strain of bird flu, Ibaraki official Yoshiko Otani said.

Further tests were being carried out to determine whether the antibodies corresponded to the dangerous H5N1 strain.

Bird flu outbreaks were reported in two more provinces in Vietnam yesterday, as the country’s agricultural minister called on people to eat healthy poultry to help farmers out of financial difficulties.

And two new reports yesterday said a pandemic could cause a serious recession in the US economy, with immediate costs of between $500 and $675 billion.

The World Bank has predicted a pandemic could cost the global economy $800bn a year.