China reports another bird flu outbreak in Tibet

BEIJING, Feb 19 (Reuters) - China has reported a bird flu outbreak in poultry in Tibet, the second in the Himalayan region in two weeks.

The outbreak, which started on Feb. 6 in a village outside the regional capital Lhasa, has killed 132 poultry and led to the culling of 7,698 birds, the Agriculture Ministry said.

The National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory confirmed on Sunday that the virus the birds contracted was a subtype of the H5N1 strain, the ministry said in a statement posted on its Web site (www.agri.gov.cn) late on Monday.

Authorities have taken emergency measures to bring the epidemic under "effective control", it said.

An outbreak of the H5N1 strain in Tibet's Gongga county on Jan. 25 killed 1,000 chickens and ducks. More than 13,000 birds were culled at the time.

Separately, the Health Ministry said on Monday that a 22-year-old man in the central province of Hunan had died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu on Jan. 24, bringing the number of human cases in the country to 28, including 18 deaths.

China has reported three outbreaks of the disease in poultry since December, when average temperatures across the country hit their lowest in 21 years.

Officials have not linked the flare-up to the unusually cold winter weather and snow storms in large areas of the country. The bird flu virus tends to be more active in low temperatures.

With the world's biggest poultry population and hundreds of millions of farmers raising birds in their backyards, China is seen as crucial in the global fight against bird flu.

Scientists fear the bird flu virus could mutate into a form that could pass easily from person to person, sparking a global pandemic. (Reporting by Guo Shipeng; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)