Deadly bird flu leaps into China; kills second Thai boy

11.45am

BANGKOK - The bird flu rampaging through Asia made the dreaded leap into China today and a second Thai boy died of the disease as countries tightened defences against a potential SARS-like epidemic.

The rapid spread of the virus -- which has now erupted in 10 Asian countries and killed eight people -- prompted the World Health Organisation and two other international organisations to ask for money and expertise to fight an all-out war against it.

"This is a serious global threat to human health," said WHO chief Lee Jong-Wook. "We must begin this hard, costly work now."

China's Xinhua news agency said H5N1 strain of the bird flu -- which can cross to humans and has already killed eight people in neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand -- had killed ducks in the southern province of Guanxi.

The province neighbours Laos, where a senior Agriculture Ministry staffer said the disease had struck the area around the capital, Vientiane, prompting alarm from health officials who say the country's poor infrastructure may not be able to cope with containing it.

Veterinarians suspected the death of chickens at a farm in the central Chinese province of Hubei and of ducks at a farm in the southern province of Hunan were also caused by bird flu, Xinhua said.

The outbreak in China sparked immediate concern amongst WHO officials.

"Clearly it is of concern now that there is an outbreak here in China," said Dr Julie Hall, a WHO coordinator in Beijing. "It is very urgent that the matter is dealt with quickly."

Culls and quarantine of poultry should be implemented and human contact with animals limited in order to prevent the opportunity for the virus to transmit to humans, she said.

China's huge population and humans living in close proximity close to poultry and other livestock in farms across the southern regions alarm epidemiologists, who worry they will be cauldrons for the next big flu epidemic.

Hong Kong said it was suspending imports of live birds and poultry meat from Guangxi, Hunan and Hubei.

The former British colony also vowed to crack down on live poultry merchants who violate basic hygiene regulations and stopped importing live birds or poultry meat from Indonesia, Pakistan and Laos. It earlier suspended such imports from Thailand and Cambodia.

Hong Kong residents consume about 110,000 fresh chickens a day, of which two thirds come from mainland China. For chilled and frozen whole chickens, imports are also predominantly from the mainland.

Japan, which banned Thai chicken imports before Bangkok confirmed it was fighting a major outbreak, promptly shut its doors to chicken from China's massive farms.

Japan imports about a third of all the chicken it consumes from China.

The great fear is that the H5N1 virus might mate with human influenza and unleash a pandemic among people with no immunity to it.

So far, there is no evidence of it passing from human to human and generating a new strain that could spark a pandemic. Humans infected so far are believed to have caught the virus directly from birds.

But experts say that no matter how remote the possibility, they fear it could happen and the WHO underlined that by launching its appeal with the Food and Agricultural Organisation and the World Organisation for Animal Health.

Some countries, in addition to banning bird imports from infected countries, are taking other measures to try to keep out the flu, which experts say probably is spread by wild birds.

Japan and Singapore banned imports of birds -- from parrots and eagles to ostrich and exotic bird meats -- shipped from countries reporting outbreaks.

In Thailand, the government expanded its bird flu crisis zone to 13 of its 76 provinces from 10 and is mounting a political defence after admitting it remained silent about its suspicions that bird flu arrived for several weeks.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said he expected a meeting of health and farm officials in Bangkok on Wednesday to help Thailand regain international confidence.

"Tomorrow, everything will be transparent and we hope to regain confidence from the meeting," he said after the European Union, a major customer of a Thai chicken industry which earns more than $1 billion a year in exports, said it did not trust his government.

EU spokeswoman Beate Gminder said the 15-member bloc would demand independent verification of Thai measures to wipe out the disease before it considered lifting its ban on imports of Thai chicken.

The spread of bird flu has emerged with a rapidity the WHO calls "historically unprecedented" and is proving difficult to stamp out despite the slaughter of millions of chickens, as a fresh outbreak in South Korea showed.

So did the announcement by WHO regional director Shigeru Omi in Hanoi that tests had confirmed another human case of bird flu in Vietnam and "there might be many more cases".

The deaths of the Thai boys means all but one of at least eight confirmed bird flu victims have been children, leaving scientists trying to figure out why the young are so vulnerable.

Thailand also has 10 suspected cases, of whom five have died.

The FAO, WHO and other expert groups say the only way to win the battle against bird flu is to kill infected poultry and all others within five km (three miles) of an outbreak.

Thailand is leading the way by slaughtering millions of chickens, but Indonesia refused to follow, saying it didn't have the money to compensate farmers and would choose the cheaper option of vaccinations.

- REUTERS