Farm workers to be screened for bird flu virus

Health authorities in Nigeria today prepared to screen dozens of people who worked on a farm hit by a deadly bird flu strain, amid fears the virus may have for the first time in Africa spread to humans.

Yesterday, samples taken from a Nigerian family with two sick children suspected of contracting the H5N1 strain were sent abroad for testing, said Abdulsalam Nasidi, a federal Health Ministry official who visited them.

Nasidi gave no details on the family’s size and declined to say where the tests were sent.

He said the children “are in fairly good condition … but we are still observing them”.

H5N1 has killed at least 88 people, mostly in Asia, since 2003, but no human cases have been confirmed in Africa so far.

Last Wednesday, tests confirmed the virus had infected birds at the Sambawa Farms commercial poultry farm in Kaduna state, in northern Nigeria. That heralded H5N1’s arrival in Africa.

Bala Abubakar, chairman of a Kaduna bird flu task force, said over the weekend that government teams would be “going after people who have been in contact with farms or any poultry … to check them to see if there are any signs of infection”.

Ibrahim Hassan, a farm worker at Sambawa Farms, said about 40 workers were to be screened there today. It was not immediately clear if health workers were merely going to check for any sicknesses or if they were taking blood samples for testing.

“We’ve been asked to come to the farm this morning,” Hassan said. “We are all going to undergo medical screening to see if we have the virus.”

Health officials fear H5N1 could evolve into a virus that can be transmitted easily between people and become a pandemic. Most human cases of the disease so far have been linked to contact with infected birds.

With little border control and weak government control over large swaths of territory, West Africa is primed for a wider bird-flu outbreak, experts say.

Barry Schoub, executive director of South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases, said the virus probably has spread over a much more extensive area in Nigeria and that he expected to see large-scale destruction of birds there.

“The Nigeria case is very, very concerning because the spread in poultry appears to have been going on for quite some time and may well be more extensive,” Schoub told reporters in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“So you would have an established, infected poultry population to which the human population is exposed and that population gets quite extensive exposure to poultry.”

He said destroying birds was the most effective way to stop the spread of the infection in developing countries which did not have facilities such as those in Europe, where poultry is being kept indoors to avoid contact with water infected by migrating wild birds.

Experts from the US-based Centres for Disease Control and Prevention arrived in Nigeria yesterday with equipment and protective clothing for 200 Nigerian health officials who will kill birds in the north of the country, Agriculture Minister Adamu Bello said.

They were joined by two regional officials for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, said the FAO chief for Nigeria, Helder Muteia. More experts are expected to arrive in Nigeria over the coming days to draw up a plan of action after discussions with authorities.

Nigerian officials have tried to contain the disease by burning chickens and other birds suspected of being infected across the north.

But poultry markets continue to operate and birds are being shipped around the country despite international recommendations to stop those practices.

In Kaduna city, prices for chickens had fallen by a third as many people shunned poultry markets, where traders were selling the birds on Saturday in large, round wicker baskets.

“People are not buying, but this is our business,” said chicken seller Adamu Yusuf. “We are trying to see if we can make some money to meet our needs.”

At Zyil farm in Kano state, farm workers dressed in brown overalls, red gloves and face masks slaughtered and burned over 1,000 chickens yesterday after a suspected bird flu outbreak there, said farm manager Kadiru Sule.

Agriculture Ministry officials supervised the destruction and only people connected to the operation were allowed to enter the farm.

Bello, the agriculture minister, said affected farms have been ordered quarantined for 12 months.