July 15, 2004

Thailand Reports Bird Flu Infection In Another Province

Bird flu has been discovered in a province in northern Thailand that is popular with foreign tourists, and borders Laos and Myanmar, officials said Wednesday. It is the eighth province found to be infected with the disease in the current outbreak.

An official in the Livestock Development Office in Chiang Rai, 680 kilometers north of Bangkok, said it had confirmed that chickens there had tested positive for avian influenza.

The official, who asked not to be identified, said that after the disease was discovered in a dead chicken in Pongnamron village, about 400 others were culled Tuesday night, as is standard procedure for containing the disease.

Thailand's poultry industry was devastated in a previous wave of bird flu which swept Asia earlier this year, with tens of millions of chickens and ducks culled. The disease also jumped to people, killing eight in Thailand and 16 in Vietnam.

Deputy Prime Minister Chaturon Chaisang told reporters Wednesday that four other provinces are being closely monitored for bird flu. The eight already affected are mostly in central Thailand.

Chaturon also said that although Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had blamed wild open-billed storks for spreading the disease, the birds would not be indiscriminately culled.

"Random checks found the virus in some storks, but we will not seek to kill them en masse, we will only cull the ones that are found with the virus and dispose of the dead birds properly," he said.

Chaturon, chief of the government's commission to tackle the outbreak, and Agriculture Minister Somsak Thepsuthin on Tuesday announced immediate culling on farms in affected areas where 10% or more of the chickens have died from unexplained illnesses.

They also ordered officials to take random blood tests of chickens at farms across the country on July 31.

Somsak said Tuesday that Thailand has culled 14,789 chickens since the resurgence of the disease earlier this month.