Simon Jeffery and agencies 

Bird flu virus spreads to Pakistan

Pakistan was today added to the list of nations affected by the bird flu spreading across Asia.
  
  


Pakistan was today added to the list of nations affected by the bird flu spreading across Asia.

As fears mounted over the illness's rapid spread, the country said it had detected a form of the virus among chickens in the southern port city of Karachi.

The development came as a six-year-old Thai boy became the seventh confirmed fatality of a more dangerous strain to humans of the bird flu that is affecting other parts of Asia.

Six people have so far died from the illness in Vietnam and Thai officials are also trying to determine whether the virus was responsible for last week's death of a 56-year-old man who bred fighting cocks.

The Thai child, who died last night in a Bangkok hospital, had been infected while playing with chickens in his village. Dr Suraphol Suwanakul, head of the hospital's medical sciences department, said he had severe pneumonia in both lungs and lab results confirmed it was bird flu.

Despite its similarities to the influenza virus in humans, bird flu very rarely jumps species to infect people. It usually only causes infections in birds and pigs, where it can range from a mild disease that has only minor effects to a version that is fatal.

But the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease that can infect humans, has been found in bird populations in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia since it first emerged in Vietnam at the end of last year.

Laos fears that it could also be hit, and is awaiting the results of tests on the nature of an illness that is killing its fowl.

The World Health Organisation said that the rapid spread of the virus was "historically unprecedented", and called on the global scientific community to accelerate the search for a cure.

The Pakistani strain - identified as the H7 and H9 varieties - is less dangerous to humans than H5N1 but its effect on birds is equally devastating and it could have killed as many as two million chickens.

Maruf Siddiqui, a senior Karachi official of the Pakistan Poultry Farm Association, told Reuters that the outbreak had cost farmers "what we have earned during the last 15 years in 15 days"

Attempts to tackle the bird flu are being frustrated by its fast rate of mutation and its rapid spread.

One theory is that the strain is being spread to domestic chicken populations across Asia by migratory wildfowl.

Health officials fear that bird flu could cause a global pandemic if it merged with a human flu virus.

"This is now spreading too quickly for anybody to ignore it," WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley said.

Affected nations have frantically culled chicken flocks in a desperate bid to contain the disease. Vietnam has slaughtered more than three million and Thailand more than nine million.

 

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