BANGKOK, 24 January 2004 — A man suspected of having bird flu died yesterday and two boys have been infected, the Thai government said, while Cambodia became the sixth Asian nation with a confirmed outbreak of the deadly disease.

Avian influenza also has swept through South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan, infecting millions of chickens. There have been five confirmed human deaths, all of them in Vietnam.

“The spread of bird flu is taking on a large-scale regional dimension,” said He Changchui, the Asia-Pacific chief of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The Thai government dramatically ended days of denial and admitted yesterday it was battling an outbreak of the virus that is devastating its billion-dollar chicken industry.

Tests showed that the disease was present in its poultry population and had been passed onto humans — two boys, aged 6 and 7, and possibly two other people, including the man who died yesterday.

The government has been accused of covering up the extent of the problem until now.

A defensive Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said, “We didn’t have scientific proof” of the H5N1 virus before yesterday. “I didn’t deny anything,” he told reporters. “We were waiting for the tests... I know what I’m doing.”

The World Health Organization said it would send two influenza experts to Thailand to help cope with the outbreak.

The epidemic also is causing economic disruption. The 15-nation European Union, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines and other nations banned imports of chicken from Thailand, which is among the world’s top five poultry exporters.

Together with the re-emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Asia is on a region-wide health alert.

Scientists believe people get the disease through contact with sick birds. So far, there has been no evidence of person-to-person transmission.

WHO officials have expressed concern that the avian virus could mutate to allow human transmission, which could make the disease a bigger health crisis than SARS. That disease, also a virus, killed nearly 800 people worldwide last year.

Farmers in Thailand had said for more than a week that millions of chickens were dying of bird flu and that the government was engaged in a massive cover-up to protect chicken exports. But officials maintained until yesterday that the chickens were suffering from fowl cholera — which they said posed no danger to people.

Public Health Minister Sudarat Keyuraphun said the two infected boys lived near poultry farms where chickens had died, and allegedly touched the carcasses of dead birds.

Officials collected and tested samples from more than 100,000 chickens nationwide.

For days, Thaksin’s government had dismissed claims by farmers that bird flu had infiltrated Thailand, though millions of chickens have died or were killed to prevent the spread of disease in recent weeks. The health minister denied any cover-up.

Politicians outside the government urged it to be forthcoming, saying Thailand should not follow the example of China, which disastrously tried to hide details about SARS, leading to a global health crisis last year.

Cambodia said it received news yesterday that tests carried out by a laboratory in France confirmed that samples of dead poultry contained bird flu. No cases of bird flu have been reported among humans in Cambodia.