Bird flu detected in Hong Kong market

By DIKKY SINN
09 june 2008--Hong Kong health workers slaughtered 2,700 poultry in a market Saturday after chickens were found to be carrying the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus, officials said.
The slaughter may be extended to all live poultry in the territory if the virus is detected in any other locations, Secretary for Food and Health York Chow said.
"Since we have detected the virus in the market, we will cull all the chickens in this market," Chow told reporters. "If we find another positive detection in another market, then we will assume that the risk is much higher and we need to cull all the chickens in all the markets."
Hong Kong TV Cable showed health workers wearing protective gear placing live poultry from nine stalls into bags to prepare for the slaughter.
Routine bird flu checks detected the H5N1 virus in five samples of chicken waste. The samples were collected June 3 from three vendors in the market in the Sham Shui Po residential district, Chow said.
Health officials declared the market an infected area and suspended all sales of live poultry there, a government statement said.
Chow said authorities were tracing the origin of the infected chickens.
Chow also ordered a 21-day ban on the supply of live poultry from mainland China and from local farms.
Occasional H5N1 infections in wild birds are common in Hong Kong but the territory has not suffered a major outbreak of the disease since the virus killed six people in 1997.
That prompted the government to slaughter the territory's entire poultry population of about 1.5 million birds.
At least 241 people have died of bird flu worldwide since 2003, according to the World Health Organization.
Most human cases have been linked to contact with infected birds, but health experts worry the virus could mutate into a form that passes easily among humans, sparking a pandemic that might kill millions of people.

Chinese woman dies of bird flu


A migrant worker has died of the H5N1 virus in southern China, the Hong Kong government said Tuesday, as the country confirmed its fourth outbreak of bird flu among poultry this year.
The woman who died Monday in Shanwei, a coastal city in eastern Guangdong province, tested positive for the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus, Hong Kong's Health Department said in a statement issued after receiving confirmation from China's Health Ministry.
Her death marked the country's 20th fatality from the deadly H5N1 virus and its third this year.
The woman had been in contact with dead poultry before becoming sick Feb. 16, a statement on the Web site of Guangdong's Health Department said Monday.
Meanwhile, China confirmed its fourth outbreak of bird flu among poultry this year but said it had been effectively contained.
Nearly 4,000 poultry were killed by the H5N1 virus in southwestern China's Guizhou province, the Agriculture Ministry said on its Web site Monday. Another 240,000 were culled to contain the outbreak.
China, which raises more poultry than any other country in the world, has vowed to aggressively fight H5N1, which has killed 232 people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
Bird flu remains hard for people to catch, but health experts worry the virus could mutate into a form that passes easily among humans, sparking a pandemic. So far, most human cases have been traced to contact with infected birds.
China has already reported two human deaths from H5N1 this year. Since 2003 when the virus began ravaging poultry stocks in Asia, the country has had 19 human deaths from bird flu, the WHO says.
Three outbreaks of bird flu in poultry were reported in China in 2008, two in the far western region of Tibet and another in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Group: Bird flu pandemic risk overblown


Fears of a flu pandemic originating from the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus were overblown, the head of the World Organization for Animal Health said Thursday.
The Paris-based body — an intergovernmental organization responsible for improving animal health worldwide — has been at the forefront of global efforts to monitor and fight H5N1, which scientists have tracked because they fear it may mutate into a human flu virus that starts a pandemic.
But "the risk was overestimated," said Bernard Vallat, director general of the animal health organization, also known as the OIE.
Vallat said the H5N1 virus has proved extremely stable, despite concerns that it could mutate into a form that could spread easily among humans.
"We have never seen such a stable strain," Vallat said.
He said concerns a few years ago that a flu pandemic from H5N1 might be imminent lacked scientific proof.
"It was just nonscientific supposition," he told reporters.
H5N1 has infected more than 340 people and killed at least 212 since 2003, mostly in Asia. The virus strain does not easily spread between people, however, and most patients had been infected through close contact with sick poultry.
While playing down concerns of a pandemic, Vallat said bird flu "will always be a risk" — not just H5N1, but also other strains that could mutate and become more virulent for animals.
He said vaccination campaigns were needed in countries where H5N1 has become endemic, including Indonesia, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Nigeria.
Risks from H5N1 would be "greatly diminished" if the virus were eradicated in these countries, which have become "reservoirs" for bird flu, he said.

Myanmar reports 1st human bird flu case


The World Health Organization has confirmed Myanmar's first human case of bird flu and praised the secretive country for its quick and open handling of the infection.
The U.N. body and the country's health ministry found that a 7-year-old girl from Keng Tung in northeastern Myanmar had been infected with the deadly H5N1 virus, WHO said on its Web site Friday. She has since recovered.
The WHO hailed Myanmar's transparency and swift action in alerting outside health officials about the case. Myanmar's ruling junta has been under international fire since September for killing and arresting pro-democracy protesters, with dissident groups putting the death toll at about 200.
"They handled it very, very well," said Shima Roy, spokeswoman for the organization's regional office in New Delhi. "They actually did house-to-house surveillance, especially in the area where there had been an outbreak of avian influenza in poultry."
State media reported the girl was hospitalized on Nov. 27 and released on Dec. 12 in good condition after being treated with the antiviral drug Tamiflu.
Bird flu has recently resurfaced in parts of Asia, with human deaths reported in Indonesia and China and fresh outbreaks in poultry plaguing other countries during the winter months when the virus typically flares.
According to the WHO, there have been 340 cases of bird flu in humans worldwide since 2003 — 208 of them fatal.
Experts believe most human victims of the virus were infected through direct contact with sick birds. Although bird flu is difficult for humans to catch, experts fear it could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people and spark a flu pandemic.
The young victim, Nan Kham Than, was among four people suspected of having the virus during an outbreak of the disease in poultry in mid-November, the state-controlled New Light of Myanmar newspaper said. Laboratory tests confirmed that only the girl was infected.
The Health Ministry for 10 days closely monitored 689 persons who were involved in culling chickens or lived near the affected farms, and found that no other people were infected, the newspaper said.
Myanmar reported its first bird flu outbreak in March 2006 in the central part of the country, but until now had reported no human infections.
H5N1 began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003, leading to the death or slaughter of millions of birds.