More bird flu in China as disease spreads

China reported its seventh and eighth bird flu outbreaks in three weeks, as Australia’s foreign minister said today that he will urge Pacific Rim nations to think creatively about how to tackle the threat at a meeting of regional leaders.

In Thailand, a 1 1/2-year-old boy became the 21st person to catch the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus, but he was recovering in a hospital, a senior health ministry official said.

An agricultural official in Kuwait, meanwhile, said that a migrating flamingo, one of two birds found infected with bird flu in the oil-rich state – the first known case in the Arab world – had the H5N1 strain that has devastated poultry stocks and killed at least 64 people in Asia.

Mohammed al-Mihana, of the Public Authority for Agriculture and Fisheries, said that further tests on samples from the birds showed that the flamingo found on a Kuwait beach had the H5N1 strain, while a second – a bird imported from an Asian country – had the milder H5N2 variant.

He said the imported bird, quarantined at the airport, was a falcon, not a peacock as had been reported on Thursday. Both birds were destroyed.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, in a statement a day before leaving for South Korea for meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum, said that bird flu was a “ignificant challenge” for APEC.

“Australia is playing a leadership role in APEC on this issue and I will ecourage my regional counterparts to think creatively about how we can strengthen APEC’s response,” Downer said.

China yesterday reported additional outbreaks – the seventh and eighth in the country. No human cases have been reported in China.

One of the new Chinese outbreaks was in Liaoning province northeast of Beijing. It occurred on Sunday and killed 300 chickens, the Chinese Agriculture Ministry said in a report on the Web site of the Paris-based International Organisation for Animal Health. Some 2.5 million birds were reported destroyed.

The other bird flu outbreak occurred Nov. 2 in Jingshan County in Hubei province, killing 2,500 poultry and prompting officials to destroy more than 31,000 birds, China’s official Xinhua News Agency said.

The 21st case in Thailand was a boy who lived in a house in the Bangkok suburb of Minburi, where three fighting cocks and a chicken also lived, said Dr. Thawat Suntarajarn, director-general of the Department of Communicable Disease Control.

All the birds died soon after the boy was taken to a hospital with flu symptoms, he said.

Vietnam – which has suffered two-thirds of Asia’s human deaths from the virus - ordered its military and police to help fight the disease.

In Bolivia, agriculture ministers from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay pledged to create a common fund to fight possible outbreaks of bird flu and other animal diseases yesterday, while Trinidad and Tobago announced a ban on all imports of pet birds as a preventive measure against bird flu.

The regional fund would supplement each country’s domestic animal health budget and would help in the event of a crisis, officials said, adding that they plan to seek assistance from international donors. There have been no cases of the deadly H5N1 virus reported in the Americas.

H5N1 first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997 but was curbed when authorities destroyed all poultry in the territory. It re-emerged in December 2003 and has recently spread from Asia to Europe.