Cambodia has begun slaughtering poultry in a district south of the capital, Phnom Penh, where a 19-year-old man last week tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus. The agriculture ministry also ordered a 30-day ban on selling or transporting poultry in Kandal province.

The man is the eighth confirmed human case of bird flu in Cambodia, and the first person diagnosed with the disease there this year.

In India, authorities in the eastern state of West Bengal are meeting resistance from villagers in their efforts to cull poultry after a new outbreak of bird flu was confirmed there earlier this week.

Local officials and residents say many villagers do not want to hand over their birds without immediate compensation.

Some say they have never been paid for birds they lost during two other rounds of bird-culling at the beginning of this year. The government says it has increased the amount of compensation paid to bird-owners this time around.

Hundreds of thousands of poultry are already being culled in the northeastern state of Assam, where bird flu was detected late last month. Health workers in Assam are monitoring at least a hundred people who have shown signs of the virus, but officials have not confirmed a human case.

Meanwhile, the French news agency AFP quotes a U.N. official, Vincent Martin of the Food and Agriculture Organization, as downplaying the danger of a new outbreak of bird flu in China, after the virus was detected in the eastern province of Jiangsu.

VOA News

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The discovery of the H5N1 form of the bird flu virus in two areas of Jiangsu province northwest of Shanghai follows recent outbreaks in India, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, raising the risk of human infections during the winter.

After routine testing turned up signs of the H5N1 virus in chicken eggs on farms in two locales, the agriculture ministry said it moved to cull 377,000 chickens and ban the transport of poultry in or out of the affected areas.

Bird flu remains mainly a danger to poultry, not people, since it is not easily transmitted to humans. Just 38 cases of human H5N1 infection — including 29 that led to deaths — have been reported this year. That’s minuscule compared with the number of people who die annually of regular influenza.

Still, the World Health Organization and others say governments in Asia and around the world should be on their guard against H5N1, because the virus has the potential to mutate into a more transmissible form and spark a deadly pandemic.

Last week, Hong Kong health authorities ordered the slaughter of 80,000 chickens after three dead birds tested positive for H5N1. It was the first group of new cases on a farm in the territory in more than five years.

Hong Kong officials also said they would temporarily suspend poultry imports as they work to determine the source of the infection. Hong Kong officials have said smuggled fertilized chicken eggs from China could have carried the disease.

WSJ.com

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