New outbreaks of bird flu in Thailand and Laos are fanning fears the disease is flaring up again in Asia, although concerns the virus was mutating in Indonesia have subsided.
In Vietnam, which has not reported any outbreak of the H5N1 virus in poultry in the last seven months, a 35-year-old man was hospitalised in the southern province of Kien Giang, on the border with Cambodia, with suspected bird flu.
And there were signs on Thursday bird flu may be spreading into central Thailand after outbreaks in the north and north-east exposed weaknesses in the country’s defences against a virus known to have killed 134 people.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) urged governments to be vigilant against a virus still circulating in poultry three years after it swept across much of Asia.
”Countries in the region are doing their best, but there are limited resources available where animal health surveillance is concerned,” FAO spokesperson Aphaluk Bhatiasevi told Reuters.
But concerns about a cluster of human cases in Indonesia eased after preliminary tests cleared six people in the province of North Sumatra of bird flu.
The group lived in the same district where as many as seven members of an extended family died from bird flu in May, but tests showed they had common human flu.
Such cases fan fears the virus could mutate into a form that passes easily between people, even though there is no evidence that it has happened yet.
In Vietnam, where 42 people have died since late 2003, a doctor at the provincial hospital treating the latest suspect case said the man had a high fever after eating duck meat.
Test results are expected in a few days. The last confirmed human infection in Vietnam was in November 2005.
Vietnamese officials said a failure to control its waterfowl, including ducks, which can be silent carriers of the virus, made the country vulnerable to new outbreaks.
Ducks and other waterfowl had doubled to more than eight million since February despite a ban on waterfowl hatching.
”We are unable to control the waterfowl stock,” Nguyen Dang Vang, head of the Agriculture Ministry’s Husbandry Department, told the Tien Phong newspaper.
Adding to the risk, wild birds believed to carry H5N1 would soon migrate from the north, he said. — Reuters