Global bird flu threat fears grow
Burma and India have announced culls of thousands of poultry to curb the spread of bird flu, while Sweden has confirmed its first cases of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus in two wild birds.
Afghan authorities, meanwhile, said yesterday that preliminary test results from a UN lab left them “99 percent certain” that the country’s first bird flu outbreak was the deadly H5N1 strain.
Further tests at the lab in Rome were expected to confirm the outbreak, said Mustafa Zahir, the director of the government’s environment department.
Concerns over the global spread of bird flu were heightened again this week when the Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan reported three people killed by the virus. It also has killed 98 other people in Asia, the Middle East and Turkey since 2003, according to the World Health Organisation.
Though human infections so far generally have been traced to direct contact with sick birds and not other people, WHO is worried the virus could mutate into form that easily spreads among people. The more regions affected, the higher the chance of this, experts say.
The virus has killed or prompted the culling of more than 140 million chickens and ducks across Asia since 2003, and has recently spread to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
A European Union laboratory confirmed that two wild ducks found infected with an H5 subtype of bird flu in south-eastern Sweden were infected with H5N1, Sweden’s National Board of Agriculture said Wednesday.
In Southeast Asia, Burma said yesterday that that it has culled 5,000 birds in a three-kilometre (two-mile radius) of a farm where the country’s first case of H5N1 was detected last week.
It also banned the sale of chicken and eggs near the property where 112 chickens died, in the city of Mandalay, according to the Livestock Breeding and Veterinary Department.
North Korea, meanwhile, said it has ordered all poultry to be “cooped up” to prevent infection from migratory birds which could be carrying the disease.
“Bird influenza, in general, is propagated widely by wild birds,” said Mun Ung Jo, vice chairman of the North’s main quarantine office, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
In India, tests were being conducted to determine whether four infected chickens had the deadly H5N1 strain, said Upma Chowdhary of the federal animal husbandry department. India has reported no human infections of the virus.
A cull of about 75,000 chickens would be carried out in and around four Indian villages in Maharashtra state’s Jalgaon district, Chowdhary said.
India last month suffered its first outbreak of H5N1 among birds, also in Maharashtra. Authorities culled more than 200,000 birds in that outbreak.
It’s not clear whether the two outbreaks were related.
