Azeri victims take bird flu toll past 100

BAKU - Three young women in Azerbaijan have died from suspected bird flu, taking the death toll from the virus beyond 100, while secretive Myanmar on Tuesday tackled its first outbreak in birds.

Adding to fears over bird flu, India said it had detected a fresh outbreak in poultry in Maharashtra, the scene of the country's first brush with the virus last month.

The United States, so far spared bird flu, is treating avian flu as a scourge that will inevitably reach its shores, US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in Berlin.

The Azeri victims, who died in recent weeks, fell ill after contact with sick birds and were not thought to have infected each other, local health officials said.

Azerbaijan, which lies on a crossroads between Asia and Europe, reported its first bird flu deaths overnight, citing results from tests at a mobile laboratory borrowed from a US Naval facility in Cairo.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said it believed the tests were reliable, adding it awaited results from a British laboratory before confirming the H5N1 virus was to blame.

While it remains mostly a disease of poultry, bird flu can occasionally infect humans and has previously killed at least 98 people in seven countries in Asia and the Middle East.

Scientists fear it is only a matter of time before the H5N1 virus mutates into a form that passes easily among people, triggering a pandemic which could kill millions and cripple the global economy.

Local officials said they believed the Azeri victims contracted the virus from sick birds.

"The (deceased) fell ill as a result of contact with birds," said Shyakar Babayeva, head nurse at the Lung Disease Research Institute in the capital, Baku, where they were treated.

"I do not believe the virus passed from human to human," she told Reuters.

Azerbaijan is located on the Caspian Sea, sandwiched between Russia and Iran. It also shares a border with Turkey where four children died from bird flu in January.

The WHO said two of the victims, women aged 17 and 20, came from the southern Salyan region. It said the third, aged 21, was from a different province.

In recent weeks, bird flu has spread deep into Europe, taken hold in Africa and flared anew in Asia, adding urgency to efforts to contain its spread and prevent a pandemic.

Officials in India said they were checking whether the latest outbreak of bird flu was the deadly H5N1 strain.

"Several poultry samples were received ... toward the end of February. Some of these samples have tested positive for avian influenza (H5)," a government statement said.

They said four villages in Jalgaon district in the northern part of Maharashtra were affected by the outbreak.

International agencies are rushing protection suits and testing kits to Myanmar as the secretive Asian country battles its first outbreak of bird flu.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) agreed to send US$40,000 worth of equipment to help the former Burma contain the outbreak on a farm in the central Mandalay region.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai told his people to avoid touching chickens as the country awaited test results to determine if bird flu found in five chickens is the H5N1 strain.

"Don't touch chickens at the moment, until this virus is finished," Karzai told farmers at an agriculture meeting in Kabul.

- REUTERS