Bird flu: Another death, another outbreak

An Indonesian man has died of bird flu, raising the country’s human toll to four, officials said today, as international health experts prepared to go house-to-house to search for infected poultry.

The government – accused of covering-up outbreaks of bird flu when it first started killing chickens two years ago – said it would work closely with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation to hunt down sick fowl on the densely populated island of Java.

All of Indonesia’s human bird flu deaths came from Java, including the latest victim, a 23-year-old man from Bogor who was hospitalised in late September and died two days later, said Hariadi Wibisono, a Health Ministry official.

A Hong Kong lab confirmed Monday that the man had the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu – and that a 4-year-old boy from neighbouring Sumatra island was sickened by the virus earlier this month, he said.

The child has since fully recovered and returned home.

Bird flu has swept through poultry populations in many parts of Asia since 2003, jumping to humans and killing more than 60 people and resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of chickens.

Indonesia’s health ministry said that its two latest cases were believed to have had contact with infected poultry.

Meanwhile, a bird flu outbreak sickened 2,100 geese in eastern China and killed about a quarter of them, a UN official said today, in the country’s second outbreak reported in a week.

The Agriculture Ministry confirmed yesterday that the birds died of the H5N1 virus near Tianchang, a city in Anhui province, said Noureddin Mona, the China representative for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The ministry did not say where or when the geese were infected, Mona said.

A report to the World Organisation for Animal Health, posted on the group’s Web site, said the outbreak was detected on October 20. It said 140,000 birds had been vaccinated and that quarantines and other precautions were taken.

According to Mona, about 45,000 birds have been culled within a three-mile radius of the site.

“The situation is not only in China but in Asia,” he said. “There’s no question about its seriousness.”

China has not reported any human infections.

Officials began stepping up preventive measures last week after H5N1 killed 2,600 chickens and ducks in a breeding facility in China’s northern region of Inner Mongolia, sparking fears that the virus might spread to humans.

Health experts have warned that H5N1 could mutate into a form that can be easily transmitted between humans and cause a global pandemic that could kill millions.

The main cause of human infections is direct contact with poultry in slaughtering, butchering or cooking, or surfaces contaminated by their droppings, health officials say.

Such public health threats have been a politically sensitive subject for China’s leaders since they were criticised for their slow response to severe acute respiratory syndrome, which first emerged in the country’s south in 2002.

SARS killed nearly 800 people worldwide before subsiding in 2003.

Chinese officials have been more aggressive in responding to bird flu outbreaks, though international experts are urging a rapid response and strong preventive measures.

Mona said that while Beijing was following the necessary guidelines to deal with bird flu outbreaks, it also needed to educate the public about the disease.

“The message of public awareness should be very simple, very clear,” he said. “Otherwise, it would be misunderstood and it will scare the people.”