Thai Bird Flu Cases Raise Concern

Thailand's government confirmed Friday that two boys and an undetermined number of chickens have contracted the bird flu virus, while the U.N. agriculture agency said that chickens in Cambodia also have been affected.

Outbreaks of avian influenza have hit six Asian nations — Cambodia, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The virus has killed five people in Vietnam.

The increase in the number of affected countries "confirms FAO's concern that the spread of bird flu is taking on a large-scale regional dimension," He Changchui, the U.N. agency's Asia-Pacific chief, said in a statement.

Thai officials, who had denied for several days that the virus was present in the country, said the infected boys were at separate hospitals in different provinces of central Thailand.

The country's agriculture minister also confirmed that chickens in one province tested positive for the disease.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said that lab results would likely confirm suspicions of a bird flu outbreak, but urged the public not to panic.

"It's not a big deal," Thaksin told reporters. "If it's bird flu, it's bird flu. We can handle it."

The World Health Organization said it would send two influenza experts to Thailand to help cope with the outbreak.

The outbreak also is causing economic disruption. The 15-nation European Union, Japan, the Philippines and other nations banned imports of chicken from Thailand, which is among the world's top five poultry exporters.

Officials in Bangkok said tests showed the disease was present in Thailand's poultry population and was passed to the boys ages 6 and 7, and possibly two other people now under surveillance.

The 7-year-old had symptoms akin to severe pneumonia and was breathing with the help of a respirator at a Bangkok hospital, a health ministry statement said. Details about the other boy's condition were not immediately available.

Together with the re-emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome, Asia is on a region-wide health alert.

A WHO team and six scientists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control are in Hanoi hoping to track down exactly how the H5N1 virus has jumped from poultry to people.

Scientists believe people get the disease through contact with sick birds. So far, there has been no evidence of person-to-person transmission.

WHO officials have expressed concern that the avian virus could mutate to allow human transmission, which could make the disease a bigger health crisis than SARS. That disease, also a virus, killed nearly 800 people worldwide last year.

Farmers in Thailand had said for more than a week that millions of chickens were dying of bird flu and that the government was engaged in a massive cover-up to protect chicken exports. But officials maintained until Friday that the chickens were suffering from fowl cholera — which they said posed no danger to people.

Public Health Minister Sudarat Keyuraphun said the two infected boys lived near poultry farms where chickens had died, and allegedly touched the carcasses of dead birds.

Tests on a third person suspected of being infected with the virus in central Nakhon Sawan province had turned out negative, she said.

Officials collected and tested samples from more than 100,000 chickens nationwide.

A senator raised alarms about bird flu in Thailand on Thursday, claiming that a seriously ill boy was confirmed as its first human case. The prime minister said at the time that it would be days before lab tests could show whether the child was infected.

For days, Thaksin's government had dismissed claims by farmers that bird flu had infiltrated Thailand, though millions of chickens have died or were killed to prevent the spread of disease in recent weeks. The health minister denied any cover-up.

Politicians outside the government urged it to be forthcoming, saying Thailand should not follow the example of China, which disastrously tried to hide details about SARS, leading to a global health crisis last year.

The U.N. agriculture agency said it received news Friday that tests carried out by a laboratory in France at the request of the Cambodian government confirmed that samples of dead poultry contained bird flu.

A spokesman said Cambodia's government has asked the agency for technical details on how they should carry out programs to contain the disease. No cases of bird flu have been reported among humans in Cambodia.