Millions of volunteers led by emergency teams fanned out across Thailand yesterday in a new drive to fight bird flu after the prime minister gave officials 30 days to eradicate the epidemic.
Agriculture Minister Somsak Thepsutin said Thailand's offensive against the disease "begins from this minute," while international health experts warned that hopes to stamp out the disease in one month were unrealistic.
Thailand went on high alert Tuesday when it reported that its latest bird flu victim died after likely contracting the virus from her daughter in the first probable case of human-to-human transmission.
Ten people have died of bird flu in Thailand and 20 in Vietnam while more than 100 million chickens and poultry have died or been culled to stop its spread since a severe strain of the virus spread across large swaths of Asia early this year.
Somsak told reporters that livestock officials are directing "millions of volunteers and officials ... to X-ray every spot nationwide, to cull the sick chickens and properly bury them. "We will do our best to eliminate the bird flu from our country."
He said Thailand had faced setbacks in fighting bird flu, or avian influenza, blaming rural villagers for ignoring government rules that require them to inform officials when they have found dead chickens and provide complete health records when they enter hospitals.
"When a small number of chickens die, people think, 'never mind' and keep the information to themselves," Somsak said. "But from now on, volunteers will go into every village and report every single case to officials."
The anti-bird flu drive began after Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra declared a national war against the disease at an emergency meeting of 76 provincial governors on Wednesday.
He gave ministers until the end of this month, before the cool season sets in, to wipe out the disease or face the sack. People are more vulnerable to viruses during the cooler months, and migratory birds believed to spread the illness also arrive then.
But Dr. Kumara Rai, the acting Thailand representative of the WHO, said "eradicating the virus in one month, I'm sorry to say, is almost impossible."
Thai officials on Tuesday confirmed that a 26-year-old woman, Pranee Sodchuen, died of bird flu on Sept. 20, probably after catching it while taking care of her daughter.
The 11-year-old, who is believed to have been ill with the disease, died Sept. 12 but was cremated before tests to confirm the disease could be conducted.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema