WHO: Human Bird Flu Deaths Top 100

(CBS/AP)  The bird flu deaths of five people in Azerbaijan have pushed the world total human deaths from H5N1 past 100, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.

WHO said seven of 11 patients from Azerbaijan had tested positive for the deadly strain of bird flu in samples checked at a major laboratory in Britain. Five of the cases were fatal.

The new global total of confirmed deaths from H5N1 is 103, WHO said. Those deaths are part of the total 184 confirmed human cases of H5N1 since it broke out in Asia in 2003.

In Azerbaijan, six of the 11 cases occurred in a small settlement in southeastern Azerbaijan, the agency said.

The sources of infection are still under investigation, but they possibly were feathers from dead swans collected by young women, WHO said.

"The majority of cases have occurred in females between the ages of 15 and 20 years," it said. "In this community, the defeathering of birds is a task usually undertaken by adolescent girls and young women."

There so far was no indication of direct exposure to dead or diseased poultry in some of the cases. That has been the usual source of exposure for humans who caught bird flu, which remains a difficult disease for people to catch.

Experts fear, however, that the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people, sparking a human flu pandemic that could kill millions.

Bird flu has not yet reached North and South America, but scientists expect it to arrive soon along with birds migrating from Asia, outgoing Interior Secretary Gale Norton explained to CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer.

However, Norton stressed that people should not be afraid to eat poultry, because cooking kills the virus.

She added that while the government is trying to plan for a pandemic, it is not possible to produce vaccines in advance. "Until the genetic mutation occurs that would make this a human to human transfer, they can't really do the final perfection of a vaccine," she told Schieffer.

"Hopefully that mutation never occurs," she added.

The Azerbaijan deaths come as Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt visited North Carolina as part of a nationwide tour to talk about a possible flu pandemic. The visits are meant to emphasize the need for state and local communities to begin preparing for a possibly serious threat.

During his speech, Leavitt announced that North Carolina will get $2.5 million of the $350 million President Bush has proposed giving states to help with preparedness and said more money will be coming. But he also warned that any community that relies only on the federal government to pay for its preparations will fall short.

"We simply have no way to respond to 5,000 communities at the same moment," Leavitt said.

But some states are saying that's not enough. "From a state perspective, I can tell you that that will not cut it," said Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina. "It is going to take a bigger federal commitment."

Audrey Heffron is an instructor with Florida State University's Disaster Risk Policy Center told CBS News correspondent Trish Regan that federal, state and local officials are not the only people who need to plan for a pandemic. Corporations need to start thinking about it as well.

"What would we do if we only had 40 percent of our workforce at a given time? We can barely begin to get our minds around what could happen," she said.

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