S.Korea, Pakistan report new bird flu cases, UK, Turkey updates
Pakistan and South Korea reported new bird flu cases in poultry on Saturday, underlining findings by the United Nations that this season’s wave of the virus came mostly from reared rather than migratory birds.
David Nabarro, the U.N. coordinator for avian and human flu, said that migrating birds carried the virus last season, probably from Mongolia to China and South Korea.
But he told a news conference at the United Nations on Friday: “We suspect that one of the reasons for the current spread has more to do with trade in live birds than to do with the movement of the virus through wild birds.”
Since late last year, outbreaks of avian flu have swept from Asia to Britain, as well as touching Egypt and Nigeria.
On Saturday, health authorities in Pakistan confirmed H5N1 in the capital, Islamabad, in what is the country’s third case this week.
“Samples from a few birds which died at a house in Islamabad on February 4 tested positive for H5N1,” Mohammad Afzal, Livestock Commissioner at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture told Reuters. “All the three cases have been reported in domestic poultry.”
There have been no cases of people being infected with the virus in Pakistan.
South Korea confirmed its sixth case of bird flu on Saturday despite the culling of poultry after earlier cases, raising concerns that quarantine measures had failed to control the outbreak.
The latest case occurred at a poultry farm in Ansong, Kyonggi Province, around 66 km (41 miles) south of the capital, Seoul, and about 24 km (15 miles) from Chonan, where the fifth case was found.
Quarantine authorities plan to cull poultry within a 3-km (about 2 miles) radius of the infected farm, an official of Ansong said.
The World Health Organization has registered 272 cases of the virus in humans and 166 deaths since 2003. But the fear is “that a mutation could occur that makes it suddenly capable from being transmitted from human-to-human and causes a pandemic,” Nabarro said.
“We expect that there will be more outbreaks,” especially during the northern winter season, from November to June, he said.
UK, TURKEY CASES
Britain’s food watchdog, meanwhile, moved to quash concern that meat contaminated with bird flu had reached shops.
The alarm was raised after the government concluded on Thursday that a bird flu outbreak at a giant turkey farm was probably caused not by wild birds but by contaminated shipments from Hungary, possibly of processed turkey meat.
“If infected meat had got into the food chain it wouldn’t be a safety risk to consumers,” a Food Standards Agency spokeswoman said.
A fourth child with flu-like symptoms has been taken to hospital for observation after chickens died of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in a village in southeastern Turkey, local officials said on Friday.
Turkey confirmed an outbreak of bird flu in the impoverished Batman province on Thursday, a year after the H5N1 strain of the disease killed four children in the region.
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