May 14, 2004

Thailand Virtually Certain Country Is Free Of Bird Flu

Thailand says it is all but certain that is now free of bird flu after the last area to suffer an outbreak was declared safe at the end of a 21-day monitoring period.

"Now, we admit that we're not sure bird flu is totally cleared out of Thailand. But we haven't found the disease anymore in farms," Agriculture Minister Somsak Thepsuthin told reporters Friday.

He said authorities will continue to monitor the disease for another six months "to know for sure whether it will come back."

The bird flu virus swept through 10 Asian nations earlier this year, killing or forcing the cull of more than 100 million poultry, including more than 37 million birds in Thailand.

The disease also jumped to people, killing 16 people in Vietnam and eight in Thailand.

Vietnam declared itself bird-flu free at the end of March, though international animal experts as well as the World Health Organization have repeatedly warned that it was premature to declare the disease under control. Thailand was also about to declare itself free of bird flu but held off after the WHO warning.

Somsak said Thai authorities are now more worried about the birds in the wild rather than those in farms.

He said a farm in the northern Uttaradit province was the last area in Thailand that reported bird flu cases, where 20,000 chickens died or were culled as of April 19. But a 21-day monitoring period found no signs of the disease, Somsak said.