Asian bird flu death toll hits 12, tests in Germany

HANOI - The death toll of victims of bird flu rose to 12 on Monday in an epidemic sweeping Asia, but in Europe German health officials said they doubted two women tested for the virus had contracted the disease.

Scientists fear the virus may now be transmitted from person to person.

The head of the World Health Organisation said China was mobilising to fight the flu as if it were the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak which killed nearly 800 people last year.

Two more deaths -- a 58 year-old-woman in Thailand and a teenage boy in Vietnam -- came a day after World Health said two sisters who died in Vietnam last month probably caught the virus from their brother -- the first cases of human-to-human infection in the present epidemic.

The brother also died, but he was cremated before any autopsy could determine if he was the original source. His wife also contracted bird flu but has since recovered.

Stock markets fell in Hong Kong and Thailand as economists said the possibility of human transmission would have serious implications.

The SARS outbreak last year cost Asia an estimated US$60 billion ($90 billion) and there are worries bird flu could have similar or worse effects if it spreads.

"If we got strong evidence of transmission from human to human and there was a risk of it getting into crowded areas like shopping malls and public transport, it would cause economic disruption," said Rob Subbaraman, regional economist at Lehman Brothers.

World Health Director-General Lee Jong-Wook welcomed China's efforts to try to avoid a repeat of last year's SARS crisis.

"China has taken strong and decisive measures," he told reporters in Brussels. "They are now treating avian flu as if it's SARS."

In Hamburg, Germany, health authorities on Monday carried out tests on two women for possible bird flu infection, though officials said they were very unlikely to have the disease.

"There is nothing to suggest it is bird flu," Professor Bernhard Fleischer, director of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, told reporters after receiving the first results of clinical tests. The institute said final test results would be due on Tuesday.

A spokeswoman for the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, which is responsible for public health, also said it was unlikely the women had been infected. "But unlikely does not mean impossible," she added.

In China, home to the largest number of poultry in the world, bird flu was reported from a new area -- Gansu province in the northwest, state radio said on Monday.

About one-third of the country has been affected by the virus and authorities have culled tens of thousands of birds.

Hospital officials in Vietnam's southern Ho Chi Minh city said the teenage boy who died on Monday had caught the virus after eating meat from a chicken with avian influenza.

The latest Thai victim was a woman who raised chickens in Suphanburi province 100 km west of Bangkok.

More details of her death have yet to be released, but Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra -- under fire for reacting slowly to the outbreak -- lambasted World Health for suggesting the flu could mutate and spread to pigs and then even more easily to humans.

In Geneva, the head of W world Health's Global Influenza Programme Klaus Stohr said person-to-person transmission should be no surprise as it had occurred in limited numbers in apparently similar avian flu outbreaks, notably in Hong Kong in 1997.

"There is no increase in our level of concern. We are still at level zero when it comes to a pandemic. Nothing has changed since last week. There is no pandemic," Stohr said.

Ten countries in Asia have now reported cases of bird flu but only two countries, Thailand and Vietnam, have recorded the virus in humans.

Chief government spokesman Jakrapob Penkair said nine people were suspected of being infected with bird flu. Thailand has so far destroyed 25.9 million fowl in a bid to stamp out the virus.

The United Nations will hold a special meeting on Tuesday of experts from three of its agencies -- World Health, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Organisation for Animal Health -- to discuss how best to tackle the epidemic.

Health experts worry the virus could combine with human flu to create a drug-resistant bug that could cause the world's next big pandemic -- dwarfing the impact of SARS last year.

- REUTERS