CHINA: A deadly bird flu virus has been found on a duck farm in southern China, prompting authorities to slaughter 14,000 fowl in the surrounding area as a new health threat emerged in a country ravaged by SARS last year.
Alarmed by the outbreak in the massive poultry industry of heavily populated southern China, the World Health Organisation (WHO) urged vigilant surveillance and quarantine measures to prevent the virus from leaping to humans.
China's Ministry of Agriculture quickly pledged to strengthen monitoring and increase international co-operation to stem the spread of the flu that has killed eight people in neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand. Hong Kong immediately suspended imports of live birds and poultry from China.
As concern bordering on panic spread through Asian governments (the flu has now spread to Laos), a health official in Pakistan said that millions of chickens there should be killed as a precaution against bird flu. However, a livestock official said the flu was not so dangerous and a cull was not advised.
Industry officials said bird flu had been found in chickens in the southern port city of Karachi. It was a milder strain than the deadly avian flu that has appeared across parts of east Asia and no people have been infected.
"As a safety precaution, the government should destroy all layer chickens," said Mr Qaiser Sajjad, general secretary of the Pakistan Medical Association, referring to the 12.5 million layer chickens in Karachi. "This is the only way to stop the deadly bird disease from spreading."
In China, the official Xinhua news agency said the ducks on a farm in the Guangxi province were found to have been killed by the H5N1 strain. This strain has caused the latest fatalities and alarmed global health agencies.
"Clearly it is of concern now that there is an outbreak here in China. The opportunity to interact with human beings is obviously very apparent," said Dr Julie Hall, a WHO co-ordinator in Beijing. "It is very urgent that the matter is dealt with quickly."
About 14,000 poultry within a two-mile radius of the Guangxi farm had been culled, the news agency said. It added that poultry three miles from the duck farm had been quarantined.
No avian flu infections have been found in people in China, authorities told WHO officials.
Chinese officials also were investigating the mysterious deaths of poultry on farms in two other provinces - one of them Hubei, deep in central China.
Veterinarians suspected bird flu also caused deaths of chickens at a farm in Wuxue city in Hubei, and deaths of ducks at a farm in Wugang city in the southern province of Hunan.
Asia is grappling with outbreaks of bird flu that have appeared in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Laos, and Pakistan. Some health experts fear the bird flu virus could spark an epidemic worse than SARS, which also crossed from animals to humans. SARS emerged in southern China in late 2002 and killed about 800 people around the world last year.