Singapore planned yesterday to gas healthy chickens to death in a drill to prepare for any bird-flu infection as health officials warned it could take two years to conquer Asia's outbreak. The World Health Organization said the latest tests show no sign of a killer hybrid virus that could easily pass between people.
Meanwhile, a 13-year-old boy has been confirmed as Thailand's sixth human case of bird flu, a senior health ministry official said yesterday.
"Yes, that is correct," Charal Trinwuthipong, chief of the Department of Disease Control, said when asked if the boy had tested positive for the deadly virus that has killed at least 19 people in Asia, including five Thais.
Another official said the boy had been in hospital since Jan. 29 and was in critical condition.
Tens of millions of chickens across Asia have been felled by infections or slaughtered in containment efforts as bird flu spread across half the continent, jumping to people in Vietnam and Thailand. The human death toll yesterday stood at 19.
Ten governments in the region have dealt with the disease over the past couple of months, from Japan to Thailand to Indonesia, with China boosting its culling efforts in the past couple of weeks as reports of infections in that sprawling country increased.
China's government said yesterday it was mobilizing 16,000 workers for anti-bird-flu efforts in a province bordering Vietnam, where China's first bird flu case of the season was confirmed in late January. Among their tasks is to try to pinpoint the source of the first infection.
The WHO has said the best way to contain the outbreak is to destroy infected fowl while making sure people doing the culling are not infected, and international health officials also have recommended animal vaccines as a preventative measure.
In Singapore, still free of the virus, health workers planned to don masks, eye-goggles, gloves and blood-proof gowns next Wednesday to gas and incinerate 5,000 chickens in a flu preparedness drill at an isolated farm, said Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority chief Dr. Ngiam Tong Tau.
Singapore would rather "overreact rather than underreact" to the bird-flu threat, the city-state's Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said.
Thai officials have said slaughters of more than 26 million chickens have brought the disease largely under control there, while Vietnam has said its outbreak is easing. But the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said it would take much longer to bring the region under control.
"I would have thought that we'd be looking at a period of six months ... but it could be as long as two years," FAO animal health officer Peter Roeder said in Geneva.
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