Thai man dies of bird flu after eating sick chickens

A 48-YEAR-OLD man has died of bird flu in Thailand after eating his neighbour’s sick chickens, and Taiwan yesterday confirmed the island nation’s first case of the disease in birds smuggled in from China.

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 Organisation said China had destroyed 91,100 birds around a farm in the country's north to stop an 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 UN Food and Agriculture Organisation 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 new lab results confirmed the country's 13th death from bird flu. Initially, authorities said the man had tested negative.

The dead man, Bang-on Benphat, was hospitalised with pneumonia-like symptoms on Sunday, shortly after he cooked and ate his neighbour's dead chickens.

His seven-year-old son, who also had contact with the chickens, has been hospitalised 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."

William Aldis, the World Health Organisation representative in Thailand, said the latest death was not an indication the virus was becoming more common in humans or a pandemic was any closer to reality.

This case shows that virus is "still the same old H5N1 which can rarely affect people," Mr Aldis said, adding that Thailand has reduced its incidence of human infections this year.

"It doesn't mean the pandemic is any closer," he said.