Bird Flu Could Be Worse Than Sars, Un Warns

Bird flu is spreading across south-east Asia and could soon pose a far worse threat to humans than Sars, UN officials said yesterday.

The warning came as a sixth death from the disease was confirmed and as Thailand's Prime Minister was forced to deny accusations that his government had tried to cover up the bird flu outbreak, which has devastated poultry farms across the country.

Experts fear the avian virus could set off an epidemic worse than Sars, another disease which crossed from animals to humans, killing 800 people and spreading international panic last year.

'There's no denying the disease is spreading,' said Anton Rychener, Vietnam representative for the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a UN body.

The World Health Organisation said a 13-year-old Vietnamese boy died on Thursday from the H5N1 strain of avian flu, and that an eight-year-old girl had tested positive for the virus. She is critically ill in Ho Chi Minh City. These are the first confirmed cases of bird flu in southern Vietnam since four children and one adult died in the country's north.

In Thailand a chicken butcher, one of six Thais being tested for the disease, is believed to have died of pneumonia on Friday.

The WHO has said the near-simultaneous bird flu outbreaks in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and now Thailand and Cambodia are 'historically unprecedented'. Thailand will host a meeting on Wednesday of senior health and agriculture officials from Asian countries and international agencies fighting the outbreak.

Thailand denied on Saturday that it had tried to cover up an outbreak of bird flu, saying it had had suspicions for weeks but had only known for certain when tests confirmed the disease.

After weeks of declaring the country free of bird flu, the government confirmed on Friday that two boys, aged six and seven, had contracted the highly infectious virus.

'The government never realised it was avian influenza before yesterday, but it was suspecting that it might be. That's why some measures in extraordinary degrees had been put in place,' said Jakrapob Penkair, the government's chief spokesman.

Critics have accused the Thai government of trying to hide the outbreak by blaming the deaths of tens of thousands of chickens since November on poultry cholera.

'The government's efforts to sweep the problem under the carpet has exploded in its face, leaving the poultry industry in tatters and the very safety of the public in jeopardy,' the Bangkok Post newspaper said in its editorial yesterday.