Death toll from bird flu rises in Asia

cctv.com 02-05-2004 09:10

Elsewhere in Asia there have been more deaths of people with bird flu. With the disease showing no sign of slowing its spread across the continent, WHO officials have voiced concerns that the deadly virus might become a real global health emergency.

Two more people have died from bird flu in Vietnam, taking the number of confirmed cases in the country to 15, with 11 of those killed by the virus. In human terms, Vietnam is the worst hit of the 10 Asian nations tackling bird flu outbreaks. The WHO representative in Vietnam says they can not rule out the possibility of human-to-human transmission at this stage.

But a WHO official in Thailand says the few confirmed cases there show no evidence of such kind of transmission.

"However, we believe that with the pattern that is accumulating of this epidemic then the human to human transmission will be very limited because the virus seems not to be an efficient virus in terms of moving from one human to another human," said Bjorn Melgaard, WHO representative in Thailand.

In Thailand, the latest victim was a seven-year-old boy. So far, all four people confirmed infected by the fatal virus there have died. Meanwhile, Thailand has also declared another 18 suspected cases and says that 11 of those have died.

On Tuesday, Indonesia confirmed that the avian influenza virus in that country was the deadly H5N1. Earlier, officials had said the main island of Java and the tourist center of Bali were the worst affected areas. The Indonesian government has ordered the mass culling of chickens in flu-affected areas.

Eleven countries and regions in Asia have reported cases of bird flu, and millions of chickens and ducks have died of the disease or been culled to prevent the virus from spreading. But so far only two countries, Thailand and Vietnam, have recorded the virus in humans.

Editor:Han  Source:CCTV.com