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Bird Flu confirmed in China, Asia braces itself

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The bird flu quickly spreading throughout Asia has now officially made the leap into China. This comes as a second bird flu death is confirmed in Thailand and all countries involveed move to prepare themselves for a SARS like epidemic.

The rapid spread of the virus, which has now erupted in 10 Asian countries and killed eight people, prompted the World Health Organisation and two other international organisations to ask for money and expertise to fight an all-out war against it. WHO has already predicated that a vaccine or cure could take up to six months and in htat time it is feared that many lives may be lost.”This is a serious global threat to human health,” said WHO chief Lee Jong-Wook. “We must begin this hard, costly work now.” China’s Xinhua news agency said H5N1 strain of the bird flu, which can cross to humans and has already killed eight people in neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand, had killed ducks in the southern province of Guanxi. The province neighbours Laos, where a senior Agriculture Ministry staffer said the disease had struck the area around the capital, Vientiane, prompting alarm from health officials who say the country’s poor infrastructure may not be able to cope with containing it. Veterinarians suspected the death of chickens at a farm in the central Chinese province of Hubei and of ducks at a farm in the southern province of Hunan were also caused by bird flu, Xinhua said. Japan, which banned Thai chicken imports before the Bangkok government confirmed it was fighting a major outbreak, promptly shut its doors to chicken from China’s massive farms. Japan imports about a third of all the chicken it consumes from China. Pandemic fearsThe great fear is that the H5N1 virus might mate with human influenza and unleash a pandemic among people with no immunity to it. So far, there is no evidence of it passing from human to human and generating a new strain that could spark a pandemic. Humans infected so far are believed to have caught the virus directly from birds. But experts say that no matter how remote the possibility, they fear it could happen and the WHO underlined that by launching its appeal with the Food and Agricultural Organisation and the World Organisation for Animal Health. Some countries, in addition to banning bird imports from infected countries, are taking other measures to try to keep out the flu, which experts say probably is spread by wild birds. Japan and Singapore banned imports of birds, from parrots and eagles to ostrich and exotic bird meats, shipped from countries reporting outbreaks. Australia tightened surveillance at sea, restricted public access to poultry farms and deployed sniffer dogs and X-ray machines at airports to stop people from bringing in potentially tainted gourmet food and souvenirs. Singapore is shielding its bird farms with netting, doubling farm inspections to twice a day and stepping up checks on fowl shipments from Malaysia. In Thailand, the government expanded its bird flu crisis zone to 13 of its 76 provinces from 10 and is mounting a political defence after admitting it remained silent about its suspicions that bird flu had arrived for several weeks. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said he expected a meeting of health and farm officials in Bangkok on Wednesday to help Thailand regain international confidence. “Tomorrow, everything will be transparent and we hope to regain confidence from the meeting,” he said after the European Union (EU), a major customer of a Thai chicken industry which earns more than $1 billion a year in exports, said it did not trust his government. EU spokeswoman Beate Gminder said the 15-member bloc would demand independent verification of Thai measures to wipe out the disease before it considered lifting its ban on imports of Thai chicken. “Reliance on Thai assurances is not the best way forward,” she said. Ms Gminder also shot down Thaksin’s assurances to Thailand’s vast army of chicken farmers, many of whom have accused him of telling the world there was fowl cholera when they suspected bird flu, that the crisis would be over in a month. It would be at least five months before Thai poultry would be back on EU supermarket shelves, she said. “Where are we safe? Potentially nowhere”The spread of bird flu has emerged with a rapidity the WHO calls “historically unprecedented” and is proving difficult to stamp out despite the slaughter of millions of chickens, as a fresh outbreak in South Korea showed. So did the announcement by WHO regional director Shigeru Omi in Hanoi that tests had confirmed another human case of bird flu in Vietnam and “there might be many more cases”. “We don’t know how this virus is spreading and so it’s safe to presume that nowhere can consider itself safe,” Cordingley said. “The challenge is growing by the day.” The deaths of the Thai boys means all but one of at least eight confirmed bird flu victims have been children, leaving scientists trying to figure out why the young are so vulnerable. Thailand also has 10 suspected cases, of whom five have died. The WHO and other expert groups say the only way to win the battle against bird flu is to kill infected poultry and all others within five kilometres of an outbreak. Thailand is leading the way by slaughtering millions of chickens, but Indonesia refused to follow, saying it did not have the money to compensate farmers and would choose the cheaper option of vaccinations. This however could be months away this comes as Indonesia is already facing criticism over reports that it knew of the existence of the bird flku within its borders late last year yet said nothing.(Source: Reuters Health, ABC Health News, Jan 2004)


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Dates

Posted On: 28 January, 2004
Modified On: 5 December, 2013


Created by: myVMC