Steve Quayle News Alerts

January 27, 2004

BANGKOK, Thailand — China confirmed Thursday that it had found bird flu in ducks discovered dead on a southern farm, but the government emphasized that the virus sweeping Asia had not been found in human beings.

Authorities also said two other provinces in central China had "suspect" cases of dead poultry believed to be bird flu.

Elsewhere, Thailand confirmed Asia's eighth human victim of the avian flu virus, while the number of affected countries rose to 10 with Laos and China reporting cases.

In China, the official Xinhua News Agency's dispatch was the first official confirmation by the government that avian influenza has surfaced in China during the current outbreak that has killed eight people and forced the slaughter of millions of birds in other parts of Asia.

Authorities immediately isolated the area around the farm in the Guangxi region of south China, which abuts Vietnam. Some 14,000 birds within a two-mile radius of the farm were slaughtered, and all poultry for three miles around it was quarantined, Xinhua said. Latest News

"Local governments have made necessary measures of slaughter or quarantine to prevent a spread," Xinhua said. "No people have been found infected so far and the epidemic has been in control."

The farm is located in Dingdang, a town in Long'an County in southern China's Guangxi region. Though region borders Vietnam and has been the site of increased scrutiny of poultry in recent days, the town is roughly 60 miles from the border.

Roy Wadia, a spokesman for the World Health Organization in Beijing, said China's Health Ministry had informed the U.N. agency of the bird flu cases. "There are no cases known in people so far," he added.

Bob Dietz, a WHO spokesman in Hanoi, said that, because Guangxi borders Vietnam, it "wouldn't be surprising" that bird flu could travel across the border.

"We're seeing it in other countries in southeast Asia," Dietz said. "There's no reason to assume China would be immune."

Xinhua also said reports of bird deaths in a "chicken-raising household" in the central province of Hubei and a "duck-raising household" in the nearby province of Hunan had been diagnosed as "suspect" bird flu. It emphasized that those diagnoses were preliminary.

China's openly aggressive campaign to combat the disease starkly contrasts with the government's initial secretive response last year to the SARS outbreak. Severe acute respiratory syndrome killed 349 people on the mainland before retreating in June.

Still, there were contradictions in the government's account. While Xinhua said anti-flu efforts had been going on at the duck farm since Friday, Yan Qibin, an official with the Food Quarantine Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture, said Tuesday that his agency was investigating whether any ducks had actually died there.

Also Tuesday, other Chinese quarantine officials said they would impose poultry bans on Pakistan and Indonesia, bringing to eight the number of countries whose bird products have been banned from the region's largest economy.

China has already stopped such shipments from Cambodia, Thailand, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam to prevent the disease from spreading to its poultry stocks — an unsuccessful effort, given the announcement Tuesday night. Laos and Taiwan have also reported the virus but the mainland has not said anything about poultry bans from those areas.

In Thailand, the Public Health Ministry confirmed that a six-year-old boy died from the disease Tuesday, becoming the country's second fatality and the region's eighth, following six deaths in Vietnam. Thai officials awaited lab results on five other deaths believed linked to the virus.

Thailand's first death, announced Monday, also was a six-year-old boy, who had carried a dying chicken to a butcher.

The scope of this year's outbreak has widened alarmingly, with countries reporting new outbreaks in poultry stocks for each of the past three days.

So far, 10 governments have reported some strain of bird flu: China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Some countries claim their version of bird flu is milder than the one that has jumped to humans.

The World Health Organization believes the virus can be transmitted across regions by migratory water fowl.

Tens of millions of chicken and other poultry have been infected in recent weeks, prompting the slaughter of chickens at farms across the region to contain the virus. South Korea alone has killed 24 million chickens and ducks.

WHO said the virus has mutated since an outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, when six people were killed in the first documented case of the virus jumping to humans and the deadliest episode until this year's outbreak.

The mutations complicate the search for a vaccine. The virus strain isolated from the 1997 outbreak can no longer be used to produce the medicine, the health organization said.

Scientists believe people get the disease through contact with sick birds. Although there has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission in the latest outbreak, health officials are concerned the disease might mutate further and link with regular influenza to create a form that could trigger the next human flu pandemic.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,109560,00.html