Fourth bird flu victim in Indonesia, disease spreads

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Indonesia confirmed on Tuesday a fourth person in the country had succumbed to bird flu while China said hundreds of farm geese had died, the latest outbreak of a disease that seems to defy efforts to halt its spread.

The deadly H5N1 virus first surfaced in Asia but appears to be spreading quickly to the West. Russia confirmed more bird flu cases in poultry on Monday, further raising fears the disease could spread across Europe on the wings of migratory birds.

The European Union was poised on Tuesday to ban all imports of captive wild birds after a parrot died of the H5N1 strain in Britain.

More dead birds have also been found and taken for tests in Germany, Croatia, Hungary and Portugal as suspect cases multiplied.

Indonesia’s Health Ministry said on Tuesday testing confirmed that a man who died in September was positive for bird flu. A total of seven people have been confirmed infected with H5N1.

The three survivors included two members of an extended family, but both had come into contact with dead chickens, Hariadi Wibisono, a senior official at the ministry, said when asked if human-to-human transmission might have occurred.

Asia is seen as the likely source of a pandemic arising from human transmission of the disease and health officials are becoming increasingly jittery as more cases of infection occur ahead of winter, when the virus seems to thrive.

In China’s latest outbreak, hundreds of farm geese died in the eastern province of Anhui, Noureddin Mona, of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, told Reuters.

He said China’s Ministry of Agriculture had told him on Monday 2,100 birds had been infected, 550 had died and 45,000 had been culled.

“We are highly concerned about this,” he said of the outbreak, adding that the area had been sealed off at a radius of three miles (five km). He said there were no suspected cases of human infection.

China’s sheer size and its attempts to conceal the SARS epidemic in 2003 have prompted fears among some experts that it has had more bird flu cases than officially recorded.

But experts and UN officials said they believe China is better prepared and more open than in 2003.

“I think that, now, China is unlike (it was) during SARS," Mona said, referring to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. “They are highly concerned and have no option but to report.”

MUST DO MORE FOR ASIA

The H5N1 strain first surfaced in 1997 in Hong Kong and re-appeared in South Korea in 2003. It has since spread throughout much of East and Southeast Asia, infecting 122 people and killing 62. Millions of poultry have been culled.

The World Health Organisation has said the H5N1 strain is endemic in poultry in China and across much of Asia, and it might only be a matter of time before it develops the ability to pass easily from human to human.

If that happens, millions of people could die and economies come to a halt as nations halt travel and curb trade to limit its spread and deal with the sick.

Some health experts are demanding more be done to halt the spread of the disease.

The U.N. food agency’s head said the world must focus on Asia, and on stopping the virus passing between birds.

“Too much time has gone by and even now we seem to focus more on addressing a possible pandemic which is spread from human to human,” Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, told Reuters in an interview in Canada.

He said the FAO had helped develop a $175 million strategy to control H5N1 and had received pledges of $30 million in aid - but donors had not yet handed over a single cent.

Many Asian nations lack the resources to set up effective monitoring networks to detect outbreaks in time, much less possess public health systems to cope with large numbers of sick people.

Some health experts worry Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, is not showing enough urgency in tackling bird flu, especially in culling chickens. The government has defended its response, saying for example that it does not have enough money to compensate farmers.

Vietnam, where 41 people have died of bird flu, is considering rules that would ban the raising and trading of live poultry in urban areas as well as the sale of a traditional pudding made from the raw blood of ducks and geese.

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