Nigeria confirmed the first human death from the H5N1 virus in sub-Saharan Africa on Wednesday after tests on a dead woman showed she had contracted bird flu.
The 22-year-old died after feathering and disembowelling an infected chicken. She was from Lagos, the commercial capital of Africa’s most populous country, Information Minister Frank Nweke said.
Test on three other victims, one of them the woman’s mother, were inconclusive.
Nigeria was the first African nation to detect the H5N1 virus in poultry last year and had conducted tests on 14 people suspected of having the virus.
Although bird flu remains essentially an animal disease, experts fear it could mutate into a form that could pass easily among humans, possibly killing millions.
In Africa, 11 people have died in Egypt from bird flu since 2003 and there has been a single non-fatal human case in Djibouti, in the eastern Horn.
The H5N1 virus has killed at least 164 people worldwide, most of them in Asia, and Indonesia has the world’s highest death toll — 63.
Six Indonesians have died in 2007 from bird flu, which is endemic in poultry in most of the country’s provinces, and Planning Minister Paskah Suzetta said this flare-up meant bird flu would now be categorised as a national disaster.
This will trigger additional funding for a focused fight against the virus.
”It is an epidemic, the funding will be allocated from a disaster fund in the state budget,” Suzetta said on Wednesday.
”The handling of this will no longer be on an ad-hoc basis, but it will be done comprehensively.”
Indonesia said in December it planned to tackle the virus more forcefully and hoped to beat it by the end of 2007. — Reuters