March 24, 2006

 

Seven Cambodians tested for bird flu after child's death

 

 

Seven sick people in Cambodia are being checked for bird flu, the World Health Organization said Friday (Mar 24), after tests indicated a 3-year-old girl from the same village died of the deadly H5N1 virus.

 

Three children and four adults from Tuol Prik in Kampong Speu province, about 45 kilometres west of the capital, Phnom Penh, came down with fevers and cold symptoms after having direct contact with sick fowl or with the girl who died, said Megge Miller, a WHO epidemiologist based in Cambodia.

 

There is a "possibility" they were infected with H5N1, Miller said. "We are being just very cautious. We're treating it very seriously."

 

Test results sent to the French Pasteur Institute in Phnom Penh, were expected by early next week, she said.

 

The 3-year-old girl, also from Tuol Prik, died Tuesday at a hospital in Phnom Penh.

 

"Preliminary (test) results suggested that she tested positive for H5N1," Miller said Thursday. She said more tests were being carried out and an official statement would be released Friday.

 

If confirmed, the girl would be Cambodia's fifth fatality from the disease since 2003, and the first this year. According to WHO statistics, 103 people in eight countries, mostly in Asia, have died from the virus. Most human infections have been linked to direct contact with infected birds.

 

Poultry had been dying since February in the area around Tuol Prik, according to Miller, who said that according to the girl's parents, she had been playing with sick birds a few days before she fell ill.

 

The virus has killed or prompted the slaughter of more than 140 million birds worldwide since 2003.

 

Earlier this month, the UN agriculture agency said Cambodian health officials should expand their surveillance of wild and migratory birds from Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa as part of measures to halt the spread of the H5N1 virus.

 

"Cambodia, with 60 percent of the land under forest cover and with many wetland areas, is home to millions of wild birds," the Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement. The country is also an important transit point for many birds which migrate between the northern and southern hemispheres, FAO said.