March 3, 2006 - 6:14AM
Iraq, Serbia and Germany have reported their latest cases of bird flu as health officials and researchers around the world prepare to fight a possible deadly avian flu pandemic among humans.
The latest cases in Europe and the Middle East came hours after US Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said it was "just a matter of time" before wild birds and possibly poultry flocks in America contracted H5N1.
US officials said they bought more than 14 million courses of antiviral treatments from GlaxoSmithKline and Roche to prepare for a possible human bird flu pandemic.
The United States plans to have enough medication to treat 25 per cent of its population in the event of an outbreak.
In Tokyo, Japanese researchers said they had developed a new way of producing the anti-flu drug Tamiflu, considered one of the best defences against bird flu in humans, that does not rely on natural ingredients and may help ensure more stable supplies.
The H5N1 avian flu virus has killed 94 people in seven countries - Turkey, Iraq, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Cambodia. It has infected 174, giving it a more than 50 per cent fatality rate, but experts are unsure if some people may have had less serious infections that went undetected. Since 2003, H5N1 bird flu has been found in more than 30 countries.
Experts fear H5N1 will mutate just enough to allow it to pass easily from person to person. If it does, it could cause a catastrophic pandemic, killing tens of millions of people.
Iraq said a woman had died in a suspected case of the H5N1 bird flu virus and Serbia said it had detected its first case of bird flu in a dead swan that was being tested to see if it had the deadly strain.
A cat in Germany was confirmed as testing positive for H5N1, causing some concern in Europe despite the World Health Organisation saying it did not increase the risk to humans.
Iraq said the woman who died of the suspected case of H5N1 lived in the province around the town of Nassiriya in southern Iraq and more tests were being carried out in Baghdad and Cairo.
Two fatal cases of human bird flu, in a teenage girl and her uncle last month, were previously confirmed in the northern Iraqi province of Sulaimaniya, close to the border with Turkey.
Serbia said it had detected its first case of bird flu in a swan found dead in the region of Sombor, close to the Croatian border.
France reports 11 new cases og H5N1 bird flu
02/03/2006 - 17:03:33
France reported 11 new cases of H5N1 bird flu in wild birds today in an area already hit by the lethal virus.
Laboratory tests detected the virus in a heron, a duck and in nine swans, raising to 29 the total number of cases found among wild birds in the southeastern Ain region, the farming ministry said in a statement.
In response to the new cases, the government was expanding a protection zone to about 300 towns in the area, from about 70 when the first cases of bird flu were confirmed there.
Dozens of countries have banned poultry imports from France after the H5N1 bird flu strain was found on a turkey farm last week in Ain, the first infection of the virus in commercial EU poultry stocks.
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