Authorities in Thailand confirmed today that a 13th person, the first for over a year, had died from bird flu in the country.
Officials initially denied there was any connection with the disease, which has killed over 61 people in Asia, but today the prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, said new lab results confirmed the bird flu diagnosis.
Bang-on Benphat, 48, was admitted to hospital with severe pneumonia on Sunday, about two weeks after he killed, cooked and ate his neighbour's chickens. Officials said the birds had died of abnormal causes but were not tested for bird flu.
The man's seven-year-old son, who also had contact with the chickens, has been admitted to hospital in Bangkok with a fever and lung infection. He is also suspected of having bird flu, according to Thawat Suntrajarn, the director-general of Thailand's department of communicable disease control.
Other chickens in the victim's village in the Phanom Thuan district of Kanchanaburi province had tested positive for bird flu, he added.
"The people in this area should have known better," Mr Thawat said. "They took sickly chickens and killed and ate them. This is extremely dangerous."
Bird flu spreads easily among poultry and can infect humans in close contact with birds.
William Aldis, the World Health Organisation representative in Thailand, said the latest death was not an indication that the virus was becoming more common in humans or that or that a pandemic was any closer to becoming reality.
This case shows that virus is "still the same old H5N1 which can rarely affect people," he said, adding that Thailand had reduced its incidence of human infections this year.
According to WHO figures, there were 12 deaths from bird flu in Thailand between December 2003 and October 2004 but none in the past year until the latest case.
Meanwhile, the European commission banned imports today of pet birds and feathers from Russia in response a confirmed outbreak of H5N1 strain of bird flu.
The move follows EU bans on imports from Turkey, Romania and Greece.
A commission spokeswoman said the Russian ban, prompted by confirmed avian flu cases in hundreds of domestic birds in the county of Tula, near Moscow, covered the whole country except Kaliningrad, Murmansk, St Petersburg and Karelia.
She also said preliminary tests by the EU's reference laboratory on a Greek bird flu sample were negative for the potentially lethal H5N1 strain, but more tests were needed. On Monday, suspected bird flu was discovered on Aegean island of Oinouses, near the Turkish coast.
Taiwan today became the latest country to announce the discovery of bird flu. Authorities said the H5N1 virus was found among birds on a Panama-registered freighter that was stopped by the Taiwanese coast guard on October 14.
Spokesman Sung Hua-tsung said the freighter was carrying 1,037 smuggled birds - consisting of 19 species - all of which originated in China.
In China, officials have destroyed 91,100 birds around a farm in Inner Mongolia to stop a bird flu outbreak, the WHO said.
The birds were culled after 2,600 chickens and ducks were killed by the virulent H5N1 virus at a breeding facility in Tengjiaying, a village near the regional capital Hohhot, according to the government.
The latest developments came as EU health ministers met in Britain to discuss how best to prepare for a bird flu pandemic.
Bird flu has infected around 120 people worldwide since 2003, leading to 61 deaths, but epidemiologists fear the lethal H5N1 virus could mutate into a form that is highly contagious between humans, resulting in millions of deaths.
There have been deaths in four Asian countries and bird flu cases in another dozen, including Romania, Turkey and Greece.
Yesterday, the Health Protection Agency said it was coordinating an EU-wide simulation exercise to see how well organisations would cope in the event of a flu pandemic.
The Department of Health estimates that 25% of the population - 15 million people - may suffer from the flu during a pandemic.
Experts predict between 2 million and 200 million people could die globally.
