A Thai chicken butcher suspected of having bird flu has died of pneumonia, a senior government official said today.
The 56-year-old man was among six people tested for bird flu, of whom two were confirmed to have caught the virus.
"The man died of pneumonia this evening," the director-general of the Department of Disease Control, told reporters.
Meanwhile the EU has banned imports of Thai poultry meat and products after Thailand confirmed its first human cases of deadly bird flu.
EU food safety Commissioner Mr David Byrne said today it was essential to ban Thai poultry imports immediately.
"We cannot take any risks with public health or animal health."
The Commission had offered EU help to the Thai authorities to eradicate the disease - similar to an offer made to Vietnam when bird flu hit the country.
A Commission statement emphasised the risk of importing the virus in meat or meat products into the EU was "probably very low".
But Mr Byrne said he was ensuring that all possible transmission is avoided.
Today's ban will be reviewed at talks between EU food and animal health experts on February 2nd.
Thailand, which has the world's fourth-largest chicken industry, is the second largest exporter of chicken to the EU after Brazil, with the bloc buying 120,000 tonnes of poultry products from the Asian country in 2002. The EU does not import any live poultry from Thailand.
Several other countries have already banned Thai poultry imports, including Hong Kong, Bangladesh and Japan. Tests have confirmed an outbreak of bird flu among chickens in Cambodia.
Earlier Thailand confirmed its first two human cases of the bird flu that killed at least five people in Vietnam, the health minister said today.
Prime Minister Mr Thaksin Shinawatra said earlier today Thailand have five suspected cases, but there was no immediate word on whether tests on the other two had been done.
The World Health Organization says bird flu could develop into an epidemic worse than SARS, another disease which crossed from animals to humans and frightened the world last year.