Bird flu returns to Cambodia, official says

The deadly H5N1 bird flu virus has returned to Cambodia (Photo RFA)

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - The deadly H5N1 bird flu virus has returned to Cambodia, found in dead ducks near the border with Vietnam, a senior official government said on Friday.

"The dead ducks were found near a lake where wild birds live and test results showed it is the H5N1 bird flu virus," Yim Vanthon, the number two at the Agriculture Ministry, told Reuters.

The virus has killed four people in Cambodia since it first arrived in late 2003 and its reappearance was the first in months in a region experts believed could generate a mutated virus which might trigger a global human pandemic.

There had been no reports of new human infections since three ducks were found dead two weeks ago in the Kampong Seim district of the eastern province of Kampong Cham, about 50 miles (80 km) east of Phnom Penh, Yim Vanthon said.

"Farmers are complaining about culling their poultry without compensation. This is another problem for us," he said.

The reappearance was a jolt towards the end of the cool season, a time in which the H5N1 virus seems to thrive best in this region, which had passed without incident even as the virus spread rapidly to the Middle East, Europe, Africa and now India.

Vietnam, the worst-hit country where the virus has killed 42 people, has had no outbreaks since November. Thailand, where 14 people have died of bird flu, has gone 107 days without a reported fresh case.

Both countries have enlisted armies of volunteers to spread the word about bird flu throughout countrysides where backyard chickens are the norm and to act as an early detection system.

Vietnam inoculated its vast poultry flock before the cool season began, worried that a virus which has killed 92 of the 170 people known to have been infected might flare up again.

But the experts worry especially about Cambodia, still recovering from three decades of civil war and the Khmer Rouge, under whose radical back-to-the-land rule an estimated 1.7 million people were killed, or died of starvation and disease.

Its veterinary service is rudimentary and its people poor, many of them dependent on poultry for protein.

The main fear of the experts is that the virus will mutate into a form which can move easily between people, which now it cannot. Almost all of the known human cases have been people in close contact with infected fowl.

The flock of more than 200 ducks had been culled and the government had banned the movement of 10,000 ducks being raised near the 12 sq km (4.6 sq mile) lake, home to water fowl believed capable of spreading the virus without falling ill.

The government of impoverished Cambodia was trying to persuade other duck raisers in the area to kill their birds but could not afford to pay them to do it, Yim Vanthon said.