The avian influenza causing the potentially dangerous bird flu outbreak in Asia is being made a notifiable disease in New Zealand.
"We have made highly pathogenic avian influenza notifiable," Health Minister Annette King said in a statement today.
The order-in-council was signed yesterday. It will be gazetted tomorrow and takes effect on Thursday.
The virus causing avian influenza is of the family Orthomyxoviridae, but in poultry this group can be divided into low pathogenic (LPAI) and highly pathogenic (HPAI) forms.
Most bird flu virus strains are low pathogenic forms, but some can mutate into a highly pathogenic virus that is extremely infectious and kills quickly. The virulent viruses can cause 100 per cent mortality in poultry.
Ten Asian countries have had outbreaks of the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu but Ms King said there had not yet been any cases in New Zealand birds or humans.
There was no record of the virus spreading from human to human -- the 19 people killed to date appeared to have been infected by birds.
But it was "prudent" to prepare for the possibility of a human-to-human spread, or for a traveller to New Zealand becoming infected through contact with poultry, she said.
"If this virus combines with a human influenza virus, we could have a global epidemic of a new and devastating illness which would be many times worse than severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars)."
Last year's Sars outbreak killed 774 people worldwide and the World Health Organisation estimated that 15 per cent of people who contracted Sars died. About 50 per cent of patients aged over 65 died.
The death rate among humans infected with the H5N1 bird flu has been about 70 per cent -- mostly young people.
The first cases of human infection with bird flu were identified in 1997 in Hong Kong, when it infected 18 people and killed six. The immediate slaughter of about 1.5 million chickens in Hong Kong was thought to have averted a larger outbreak in humans.
Since then, other outbreaks of avian influenza in humans have caused limited disease. An outbreak of H5N1 in Hong Kong in February 2003 led to one death.
An outbreak of H7N7 avian influenza in the Netherlands killed a veterinarian in April 2003 and caused mild illness in 83 other people. Mild cases of another form, H9N2, occurred in two children in Hong Kong in 1999 and in one case in December last year.
- NZPA
NZ health ministry makes bird flu a notifiable disease
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