KARACHI, 27 January 2004 — The bird flu virus spread west from Southeast Asia yesterday and claimed its first human victim in Thailand.
Pakistani officials said a disease that has killed up to four million chickens in the country’s south since November was a strain of the bird flu.
A government statement issued to poultry breeders in the southern Sindh province identified the disease as avian influenza H-7 and H-9.
“The outbreak of the avian flu in Karachi has been established through various laboratory tests. A polymerized chain reaction test has also confirmed the prevalence,” a researcher in Islamabad said.
The government has distributed vaccines and ordered farmers to cull poultry in affected farms.
A top government agriculture official said that the H-7 and H-9 strains of the disease cannot spread to humans, but according to the World Health Organization website, the strains have also been known to cause illness in humans — although they are different from the H5N1 bird flu strain that has killed six people in Vietnam.
Pakistan is the first South Asian country to detect the bird flu in the latest outbreak. Eight places have been affected in Southeast and East Asia, forcing governments to cull poultry in a desperate bid to contain the disease.
Rafaqat Hussain Rajam, federal commissioner for livestock husbandry, said 1.5 million chickens had died of the virus.
But the president of the Karachi Wholesale Poultry Association Kamal Akhtar put the toll at almost 3.5 million chickens. He confirmed no humans had been infected.
Abdul Maroof Siddiqui of the Pakistan Poultry Association said the problem started in the last week of October, affecting more than 2,000 poultry farms in Karachi.
In Thailand, a six-year-old boy, who caught the disease, died yesterday. Thailand expanded its bird flu crisis zone to 10 of its 76 provinces from just two as it grappled with a virus the WHO fears might mate with human influenza and unleash a flu pandemic among people with no immunity to it.
Indonesia said at least 400 farms across the vast archipelago suffered outbreaks. But officials said they would only know by the end of the week, when laboratory test results were available, whether it was the less dangerous of the two avian flu strains.
The WHO said it had seen no evidence its greatest fear, people-to-people transmission, had been realized yet. But it fears the potentially deadly H5N1 strain could jump into Myanmar and Laos from stricken farms just over the border in Thailand.
Hans Wagner, a senior official of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, said 700 chickens had died on a farm in Vientiane, the Lao capital, and a Thai laboratory was trying to find out why.
The results would not be known before today, he said.
Confirmation of bird flu in Laos would be very bad news. “Laos also has a very poor public health infrastructure,” WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley said in Manila. “If the virus became embedded in Laos, we’ll have very serious problems.”
The spread of bird flu, which has also struck in Japan, South Korea and Cambodia, has emerged with a rapidity the WHO calls “historically unprecedented” and the Thai and Indonesian governments have been criticized for not revealing it sooner.
“We don’t know how this virus is spreading and so it’s safe to presume that nowhere can consider itself safe,” Cordingley said.
“The challenge is growing by the day.”
The Thai boy’s death means all but one of at least seven confirmed human bird flu victims have been children, leaving scientists trying to figure out why the young are so vulnerable. Another Thai boy was confirmed to have contracted bird flu on Monday. The country also has 10 suspected cases, of whom five have died.
— Additional input from agencies
