More bird flu outbreaks in China and Vietnam

BEIJING - China and Vietnam have reported major bird flu outbreaks in poultry, days before global health experts meet to refine plans to control the virus that has killed more than 60 people in Asia and spread to Europe.

Experts say the virus must be stopped in poultry to prevent more people catching it and nowhere is that fight more crucial than in densely populated Asia, where farmers and even city dwellers live side-by-side with poultry and other livestock. In China, the world's most populous nation, officials are struggling to control the spread of bird flu in poultry.

In the fourth outbreak in a month, nearly 9,000 chickens had died and 369,000 domestic birds culled within a three-km radius in the northeast province of Liaoning, an official at the Agriculture Ministry said. The outbreak was detected last week.

"370,000 in one outbreak to be destroyed is really, really big. This is not a good signal," said Noureddin Mona, China representative for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Authorities in eastern Japan ordered the culling of 180,000 chickens at a poultry farm after avian flu antibodies were found in the birds.

In Vietnam, where 41 people are known to have died of avian influenza, a 24-year-old pregnant woman with a fever and respiratory problems is the latest suspected case in Asia after Indonesia said on Thursday three children were being tested for bird flu. The results are due in a few days.

State media said the woman came from Bac Giang province where bird flu has infected poultry in three communes, killing more than 3,000 chickens, ducks and geese. Bac Giang is near the capital Hanoi.

The World Health Organisation has said H5N1 is endemic in most poultry flocks in Asia and experts say migratory birds, which act as hosts for the virus, could be spreading it.

The virus has already surfaced in eastern Europe in birds, though no human infections have been detected there.

In Asia, though, it is known to have killed 62 people and infected 122 since late 2003. It remains hard for people to catch and is spread almost exclusively through human contact with birds.

But scientists say it is steadily mutating and could acquire changes that make it easy to spread from human to human, triggering a pandemic in which millions could die, devastating societies, overburdening health systems and disrupting trade.

MAKE-OR-BREAK MEETING

Highlighting a growing urgency, health and veterinary officials from around the globe meet in Geneva from Monday to discuss plans to control H5N1.

"The Geneva summit will be a make-or-break time for the human threat of H5N1 influenza," The Lancet medical journal said in an editorial.

"There remains no reliable early warning system in place across large parts of the world. This vacuum in surveillance poses the most serious threat to human health," it added.

African ministers said on Friday they would seek financial and technical help in Geneva to check the spread of the virus. It has not been detected in Africa but there are fears it could spread rapidly if it reaches the continent's rural hinterlands.

"Currently we do not have emergency funds to deal with this pandemic," said Aberra Deressa, Ethiopia's state minister in the ministry of agriculture.

"We have resolved to speak with one voice at the Geneva summit -- seeking financial, technical and information assistance," he told Reuters after a meeting in Rwanda.

West European countries are gearing up to deal with an outbreak of bird flu.

France said it needed to improve its communication strategy after carrying out a two-day drill at a poultry farm in the west of the country.

Britain will lead 28 European countries in an exercise to test their ability to cope with a human influenza pandemic. The drill will take place this year, but participants will get no advance notice of the date to make it more realistic.

The Asian Development Bank warned on Thursday that a pandemic risked triggering a global economic recession.

However, IMF chief Rodrigo Rato said on Friday it was not time to panic.

"I think we should be careful and we should be vigilant but we should not alarm ourselves and the rest of the world on something that has not yet happened," he told a conference in Paris.

- REUTERS