Deadly bird-flu strain found in Nigeria

Authorities reported Africa’s first case of a deadly bird-flu strain, saying officials in afflicted Nigeria need help to prevent its spread on an impoverished continent poorly equipped to fight an outbreak.

Nigeria’s Agriculture Minister Adamu Bello yesterday confirmed findings by the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health, known as the OIE, of an outbreak of the H5N1 virus on a poultry farm in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna.

No human infections were reported, but 40,000 birds died of bird flu, according to the OIE.

The farm had a total of 46,000 chickens, geese and ostriches, and all those that escaped bird flu were destroyed, the OIE said.

Nigeria ordered the quarantine and culling of any fowl suspected of carrying bird flu in hopes of halting its spread in Nigeria.

“The significance is that it’s a completely new continent that we need to be looking at,” Alex Thiermann, an expert for the World Organisation for Animal Health, said of H5N1’s arrival on the world’s poorest continent.

Experts are concerned that H5N1, which has caused human as well as bird deaths in Asia and spread to Europe and the Middle East, might mutate into a form spread easily among humans, triggering a pandemic that could kill millions.

So far, H5N1 has passed only from birds to humans, not from humans to humans.

China, meanwhile, reported yesterday that a 26-year-old woman had contracted bird flu, becoming at least the 11th person to be infected with the disease in the country.

Sub-Saharan Africa, with about 600 million of the world’s poorest people, is particularly ill-equipped to deal with a major health crisis.

With weak and impoverished government institutions in regions where many people keep chickens for badly-needed food, experts say any mass killings of the animals, often a first step in controlling bird flu, will be difficult to pull off.

Thiermann noted that some African countries have “very weak” veterinary systems.

“It is absolutely essential to strengthen the veterinary infrastructures in order to have the capability for early detection and a rapid response,” he said.

The World Health Organisation said Nigeria has a poultry population of about 140 million and that the country’s overtaxed veterinary services needed international help, while calling on other African countries to act quickly against any suspected outbreaks.