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Special Report: Global fight against bird
flu
Related: H5N1 virus found at British
poultry farm
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An avian flu-affected poultry farm is
seen from behind a police cordon at Holton near Halesworth in eastern
England Feb. 3, 2007. (Xinhua photo)
Photo
Gallery>>> | BEIJING,
Feb. 5 (Xinhuanet) -- More than 150,000 turkeys were gassed at a farm in eastern
England Saturday and the government extended restrictions on the movement of
poultry in an attempt to stop the spread of bird flu.
United Nations officials said they were not surprised
by the outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza and said they have been expecting the
virus to spread during the colder winter months, much as it did last year.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs or Defra issued a statement on Sunday saying it appeared the virus had
been confined to the Bernard Matthews farm near the town of Lowestoft.
Dr. David Nabarro, the United Nations bird flu envoy,
said Europe should be ready for more outbreaks.
"It's a cause for concern but at the same time
because the response is right I think the concern should be quite limited,"
Nabarro said in an interview in Jakarta.
He said wild birds, which can carry the virus without
becoming sick, probably infected the turkeys.
"It's incredibly difficult to completely insulate a
bird farm from wild birds in the vicinity," Nabarro said.
The government said the virus was the same pathogenic
Asian strain found last month in Hungary, where an outbreak among geese on a
farm prompted the slaughter of thousands of birds.
The H5N1 virus remains primarily a disease of birds.
It has killed or forced the slaughter of more than 200 million birds globally
since 2003.
But it does occasionally infect people. There have
been 271 confirmed bird flu cases in humans worldwide and 165 deaths since 2003,
according to the World Health Organisation.
Nabarro said the latest death, that of a 22-year-old
Nigerian woman who was the first known human fatality from the H5N1 virus in
sub-Saharan Africa, was no surprise.
"We have been expecting that there may well be human
cases in Nigeria because the amount of virus circulating in the poultry
population is really very large," he said.
The virus has spread to 17 of Nigeria's 36 states
over the past year despite culling, quarantine and bans on transporting live
poultry.
The fear is that the virus will change into a form
that one person could catch easily from another. At that stage H5N1 could spread
quickly around the world in a pandemic.
Flu expert Dr. Robert Webster of St. Jude Children's
Medical Center in Memphis, Tennessee, said the virus is continuously evolving.
"This is the greatest concern of mine at the moment,
the resurgence of these viruses in Japan, South Korea and Thailand where they
had aggressively stamped out the virus, and the virus has come back in," he told
a news conference on Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia.
"It would suggest that migratory birds have probably
brought this virus back in."
Japan has had four outbreaks of the H5N1 virus at
poultry farms this year.
Webster, speaking before news of the outbreak in
Britain, said turkeys are particularly vulnerable because stocks are so inbred,
meaning they are all genetically similar.
The more the virus circulates, the more chances it
has to evolve into something dangerous to people, Webster said.
"It goes into a huge range of different avian species
and it also can go into a wide range of mammalian species and not only go into
those species, but return from the domestic and mammalian species to the wild
bird species," Webster said.
(Agencies)
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A figure passes a shed of a poultry farm
where 160,000 chickens will be culled in Halesworth. (Xinhua
Photo)
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