Thais mess up bird flu tests, ask for US help

BANGKOK - Thailand enlisted the help of Australia and the United yesterday to conduct complicated scientific tests for human bird flu, admitting it had messed up its own tests on suspected victims.

Thailand, the worst hit of 10 countries where bird flu has broken out, has seen three confirmed human cases of the deadly virus, of whom two have died.

Tests at a Thai government laboratory which should have shown whether 12 more suspected human victims had the flu had been unsuccessful, officials said. Seven of the suspected victims have died.

"The results are not conclusive partly due to improper methods of collecting tissues and samples," said Suphan Srithamma, a senior Health Ministry official in Thailand, which this week admitted to a "screw up" over its handling of the wider bird flu crisis.

"Not enough samples have been collected," he said. "We will have to send samples to the WHO's lab in Australia and the US CDC for further testing," he said, referring to the World Health Organisation and the Centers for Disease Control.

World health officials are anxious to pin down exactly how many cases have hit humans to get a better idea of whether they are looking at a few isolated cases, or the seeds of a possible global flu pandemic to rival last year's SARS crisis.

So far the virus is only thought to have jumped from poultry to people, rather than from person to person.

Confusion over testing for the virus has also been a problem in Vietnam, where the WHO has confirmed six people have died of the H5N1 bird flu virus.

Vietnam's state-run media quote Health Ministry figures ranging from 10 and 19 confirmed human bird flu cases. The WHO says that in addition to the six dead, it has confirmed only two other human cases in the country.

The fact the bird flu has struck in impoverished countries such as Cambodia and Laos, which have little to no public or animal health infrastructure, has not helped track its spread. Samples from Cambodian chickens went to a lab at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

- REUTERS