Bird flu found in Britain

2005-10-24 12:12

London - The global battle against outbreaks of bird flu was expanding on Saturday after officials confirmed cases of the virus in a parrot in British quarantine and among swans at a Croatian lake.

A parrot that died in quarantine in Britain tested positive for the H5 strain of the bird flu virus. The bird imported from South America arrived in Britain last month and had been held with a consignment of birds from Taiwan, officials at the British agriculture ministry said.

Chief Veterinary Officer Debby Reynolds did not want to speculate whether the bird could have had the lethal H5N1 strain, which has killed more than 60 people in Asia since 2003. That strain has recently spread into Turkey and Romania, which also reported a new suspected case on Friday.

Croatia also said further tests were needed to determine if the virus detected in the dead swans was the H5N1 strain, feared to be the precursor of a human pandemic that could kill millions.

Probability of a pandemic increased

The discovery of the six dead swans prompted the European Union authorities in Brussels to announce they were preparing to ban imports of live poultry and poultry products from the Balkan country.

The six dead swans were found in the lake at Zdenci in the east of Croatia, which is one of 20 sites Croatian veterinary services have put under heightened surveillance as part of a huge operation to take samples from wild birds.

The United Nations' bird flu envoy flew into China on Friday where more than 91 000 birds have been destroyed to stamp out a new outbreak.

In Thailand, doctors reported the seven-year-old son of a Thai farmer who died of bird flu had also contracted the disease, but they said the virus had not mutated and still cannot pass easily among humans.

In Romania, officials said a suspected new case of bird flu had been detected in the northeast of the country, only hours after assurances that the outbreak of the deadly H5N1 virus had been contained to two locations in the southeast.

Even as governments tried to calm people, fear spread.

Stocks of flu vaccines in Spanish chemists "are being exhausted", the Spanish general public health administration said.

The World Health Organisation (WTO) warned against "scaremongering" but it also said each additional human case was making it easier to develop human-to-human transmission.

"While neither the timing nor the severity of the next pandemic can be predicted, the probability that a pandemic will occur has increased," it said.

- AFP