Indian authorities sealed off a western town on Thursday to try to contain a spreading outbreak of bird flu, but said 11 out of 12 people quarantined following a bird flu outbreak in chickens tested negative for the virus.
In France, suspected H5N1 bird flu wiped out thousands of turkeys at a farm in the east of the country. If confirmed, it would be the first time the deadly strain has infected farm birds in the European Union and could hammer France’s already battered 6 billion euros-a-year poultry industry, the biggest in the bloc.
Test results were due on Friday.
There was a scare in Germany but a second test on a duck showed it did not have H5N1 avian influenza, German officials said.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu, which has killed at least 92 people out of 170 infected since 2003 but which still mostly affects birds, made its first appearance in Slovakia in a wild falcon and a grebe.
Scientists in Australia said it would not be surprising if birds had carried it, undetected, to their shores.
Egypt reported the virus had reached further into birds in provinces in the south and west, and Greece said it had found more cases in wild swans in the north of the country.
Pandemic fears
The rapid spread of H5N1 from Asia into the Middle East, Africa and Europe has heightened fears of a human pandemic and triggered sharp falls in poultry sales.
The Economic Community of West African States called for international aid to help set up a regional fund to pay for emergency action as they seek to prevent the spread of the virus, found in poultry in Nigeria this month.
The World Health Organization plans to test samples from four Nigerians possibly infected with the virus, including a woman who died last week and three people who have recovered.
Experts fear that in Africa, where chickens live in millions of homes, the virus could spread rapidly and largely undetected due to a lack of health, veterinary and laboratory services.
They hold similar fears for India, where hundreds of millions of people live in rural areas side-by-side with livestock and domestic fowl.
So far the biggest risk seems to be for people who come into direct contact with sick chickens, and in countries where people personally care for their fowl.
There have been no confirmed human cases in India, but authorities were making final tests of a 12th person quarantined with suspected bird flu in Navapur, a remote town in India’s western Maharashtra state.
Culling and disinfecting
Authorities said they had culled more than 345,000 poultry and were now sanitizing the area.
WHO expressed concern that India had not submitted virus samples to its labs for additional testing.
“Testing has been undertaken at the National Institute of Virology in Pune and the National Institute of Communicable Diseases in Delhi,” the WHO said in a statement posted on its Web site late on Thursday.
“It was not clear if samples from a 27-year-old poultry worker from Gujarat State, said to have died of respiratory disease on 17 February, were among those tested,” it added.
“In India, as in all countries experiencing their first outbreaks of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza, WHO strongly recommends that patient samples be sent to a WHO collaborating laboratory for diagnostic confirmation. Certainty about the status of human cases in a newly affected country is important for accurate risk assessment.”
WHO said it also wanted to test the virus to make sure it had not mutated. WHO fears that the virus could evolve into a form that spreads easily from person to person, sparking a pandemic.
In Europe, the most immediate concerns are of the virus hitting domestic poultry. Mass culling would devastate the EU’s 20-billion-euro ($24 billion) poultry and egg industry.
Poultry producers in France have estimated a 30-percent fall in sales due to bird flu has cost them 130 million euros ($155 million) since November and the government announced the sector would receive 52 million euros ($62 million) in aid to deal with the crisis.
Health experts say H5N1 will almost certainly become entrenched in flocks around the world eventually.
Europe is preparing for more cases of H5N1 as the spring migration season approaches and new species, possibly already infected, arrive from Africa, EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou told Reuters.
“It’s a concern, because now we have the virus in Africa. Spring migration of birds coming from the south to Europe poses a risk,” Kyprianou said.
