indian town sealed / aust bird flu

India seals bird flu-hit town and awaits results
Thu Feb 23, 2006 7:07 AM GMT
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SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Indian authorities virtually sealed off a bird flu-hit western town on Thursday as they awaited results of laboratory tests that would show whether the outbreak had infected humans, officials said.

The Indian action came as scientists in Australia said birds from neighbouring Indonesia had most likely brought the disease to the country's north and France confirmed a second wild duck on its territory was found to have the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

Seven of 12 people quarantined with suspected bird flu in Navapur, a remote town in India's western Maharashtra state, had tested negative but more tests were being conducted to ensure the rest were also free from the deadly virus.

In all, 95 people had so far been tested, but 94 proved negative for the H5N1 strain.

"The last is not positive for H5N1. We are testing it further as it does not match any classical profile of the H5N1 strain," India's Health Secretary P.K. Hota told Reuters.

While movement of poultry around Navapur has already been banned, authorities said they had placed restrictions on trains and road traffic passing through the town.

"We want to minimise contact between the local people and outsiders. We are telling road travellers to use masks and get on with their journeys without stopping," Maharashtra's health director, T.P. Doke, told Reuters from Navapur.

"Trains are not stopping here ... It's a kind of sealing."

Alarm is growing at the sudden resurgence of the H5N1 virus as it spreads rapidly across Europe, into Africa and now India, where hundreds of millions of people live in rural areas side-by-side with livestock and domestic fowl.

Bird flu has killed more than 90 people in seven countries since 2003.

NO MAGIC CURTAIN

Birds from Indonesia have most likely brought avian flu to Australia's sparsely populated northern shores, but it is yet to be detected, two of the nation's top scientists said.

"There is no magic curtain between Indonesia and Australia, and given the expanse of our land it would not be surprising if it was here," said Professor Mark von Itzstein from Griffith University in the state of Queensland.

"In my view it is highly likely," said von Itzstein, who led the Australian team that developed the flu drug Relenza.

Another bird flu expert, Macquarie University's Professor Peter Curson, agreed avian flu had probably reached Australia.

Australia and Indonesia are separated by the Timor Sea, which at the closest point would take only a day boat ride to cross.

In Indonesia, 19 people have died from avian flu. The Indonesian health ministry on Wednesday said tests showed a 27-year-old woman in the capital Jakarta had died of bird flu. The WHO is yet to confirm the death is due to avian flu.

Human victims contract the virus through direct contact with infected birds, but experts fear it is just a matter of time before the virus mutates and spreads easily among people, triggering a pandemic.

Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service said testing of wild birds in northern Australia had not detected avian flu.

The warning by Australian scientists came as France, the European Union's biggest poultry producer, confirmed on Wednesday that a second wild duck on its territory has been found to have the H5N1 strain.

The duck was found dead on Sunday in the Ain region of eastern France, where the first bird to have H5N1 was discovered in the village of Joyeux.

The French agriculture ministry said in a statement that security measures, such as protection and surveillance zones, would be put in place on Thursday around the spot where the bird was found.

The European Commission has approved plans by France and the Netherlands to vaccinate poultry under strict conditions in the fight against bird flu.

(Reporting by Krittivas Mukherjee in MUMBAI, Michael Perry in SYDNEY, Danielle Rouquie in PARIS)