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Nigeria struggles to quash bird flu

Health authorities imposed a quarantine on poultry farms across northern Nigeria yesterday after one state in the vast region reported Africa's first documented case of the bird flu virus, officials said.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu was first reported on Wednesday in Kaduna state. In neighboring Kano state, some 60,000 farm-raised birds have died, but so far no cases of bird flu have been confirmed there.

Bird farms across the entire north of Africa's most-populous nation are now under quarantine and a special assessment team was traveling around the region yesterday, said Junaidu Maina, director of Nigeria's livestock department. He didn't say how many of Nigeria's 36 states were under the quarantine order.

Nigeria's Agriculture Minister Adamu Bello on Wednesday confirmed findings by the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) of an outbreak of the H5N1 virus on a poultry farm in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna. No human infections were reported, but 40,000 birds died of bird flu there, according to the OIE.

The farm had a total of 46,000 chicken, geese and ostriches, and all those that escaped bird flu were destroyed, the OIE said. Nigeria ordered the quarantine and culling of any fowl suspected of carrying bird flu in hopes of halting its spread, officials said.

"The significance is that it's a completely new continent that we need to be looking at," Alex Thiermann, an expert for OIE, said of H5N1's arrival in Africa.

Experts fear that H5N1, which has caused human as well as bird deaths in Asia and spread to Europe and the Middle East, might mutate into a form spread easily among humans, triggering a human flu pandemic that could kill millions.

So far, the virus has passed only from birds to humans, not from human to human.

Thiermann said some African countries have "very weak" veterinary systems.

"It is absolutely essential to strengthen the veterinary infrastructures in order to have the capability for early detection and a rapid response," he said.

Meanwhile, China was investigating the cause of its 11th confirmed human bird flu case yesterday while pressing on with efforts to stamp out the country's latest outbreak among poultry.

A 26-year-old woman from Fujian Province tested positive for the H5N1 strain after being hospitalized with fever and pneumonia on Jan. 10, the health ministry said in a statement.

"After medical treatment, the patient's condition is currently stable," the statement said, without explaining the delay in reporting the case.

Bird flu has killed seven people in China. Like most of the other human cases in China, no outbreak among animals was detected in Zhangpu County where Lin lived, emphasizing the inability of authorities to effectively monitor the disease.

In related news, Hong Kong authorities yesterday investigated two new suspected cases of bird flu, a dead chicken and a wild bird found near a local school, and Health Secretary York Chow (周一嶽) said he would not be surprised if more birds fall ill.

The government announced late on Wednesday that a dead egret found earlier this week in an urban area has tested positive for the H5N1 strain.

A spokesman for the Agricultural, Fisheries and Conservation Department said final test results on the dead chicken and on a Japanese White-eye, a small wild bird found near the school, weren't available yet.
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