Bird flu claims first human life in West Africa

LAGOS (Reuters) - Nigeria confirmed the first human death from the H5N1 virus in sub-Saharan Africa on Wednesday after tests on a dead woman showed she had contracted bird flu.

The 22-year-old died after feathering and disembowelling an infected chicken. She was from Lagos, the commercial capital of Africa's most populous country, Information Minister Frank Nweke said.

Test on three other victims, one of them the woman's mother, were inconclusive.

Nigeria was the first African nation to detect the H5N1 virus in poultry last year and had conducted tests on 14 people suspected of having the virus.

Although bird flu remains essentially an animal disease, experts fear it could mutate into a form that could pass easily among humans, possibly killing millions.

In Africa, 11 people have died in Egypt from bird flu since 2003 and there has been a single non-fatal human case in Djibouti, in the eastern Horn.

The H5N1 virus has killed at least 164 people worldwide, most of them in Asia, and Indonesia has the world's highest death toll - 63.

Six Indonesians have died in 2007 from bird flu, which is endemic in poultry in most of the country's provinces, and Planning Minister Paskah Suzetta said this flare-up meant bird flu would now be categorized as a national disaster.

This will trigger additional funding for a focused fight against the virus.

"It is an epidemic, the funding will be allocated from a disaster fund in the state budget," Suzetta said on Wednesday.

"The handling of this will no longer be on an ad hoc basis, but it will be done comprehensively." Indonesia said in December it planned to tackle the virus more forcefully and hoped to beat it by the end of 2007.

NO SURPRISE

Nigeria is among countries regarded by experts as the weakest links in the global attempt to stem infections of birds.

The virus has spread to 17 of Nigeria's 36 states over the past year despite measures such as culling, quarantine and bans on transporting live poultry.

World Health Organization spokesman Gregory Hartl said a human case of bird flu in Nigeria was to be expected because of the experience in other countries, such as Indonesia, with huge poultry populations where chickens and hens live in close proximity to humans.

"It does not change anything from a public health point of view," Hartl said. "It had to happen sooner or later."

In Japan, the Agriculture Ministry confirmed an outbreak of bird flu in the western prefecture of Okayama, the third in the country since the beginning of the year.

Another outbreak is suspected at a poultry farm in the southwestern prefecture of Miyazaki. There have been no reported cases of human infection from the virus in Japan.

More than 200 million birds have died from bird flu or have been killed to prevent its spread since 2003.

(Reporting by Tume Ahemba in Lagos, Muhamadd Al Azhari in Jakarta, Linda Sieg in Tokyo and Richard Waddington in Geneva)