India isolates 26 people as bird flu spreads in Asia

By Bappa Majumdar

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - India has put 26 people in isolation with bird flu symptoms and hundreds more people are being monitored, officials said on Friday as Pakistan and Thailand reported outbreaks of bird flu in poultry.

India is battling its worst outbreak of avian influenza, which has spread to 13 of West Bengal's 19 districts. The densely populated state is adjacent to Bangladesh, itself trying to control a major outbreak of bird flu, and has millions of backyard fowl.

India has not reported any human infection of the H5N1 bird flu virus in its four outbreaks of avian influenza since 2006.

"The preliminary tests for bird flu are negative, but more tests are being conducted and the list of sick people reviewed every day," R.S. Shukla, a senior health official, told Reuters.

To the west in neighboring Pakistan, authorities said bird flu had been detected at a poultry farm on the outskirts of its biggest city, Karachi.

But officials said on Friday there was no likelihood of any human infection.

"We are now monitoring the workers on the farm as well as another one adjacent to it," said an official of the Sindh provincial government.

In Thailand, the virus has been found in a second province in the north.

Tests confirmed the outbreak in Phichit, 215 miles north of Bangkok, where about 30 village chickens died last week, Livestock Development Department chief Sakchai Sriboonsue said.

There were four outbreaks in Thailand last year, but no new reports of human infections in the country where H5N1 has killed 17 people since 2003.

In Indonesia, 102 people have died of the disease.

In the latest case, the health ministry said on Friday a woman who had lived near a poultry slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the capital Jakarta died of multiple-organ failure.

The woman, 31, is the seventh person to die of bird flu in Indonesia this year and some experts say the flare-up is caused by a combination of factors such as rainy weather and poor sanitation.

Not including the latest death, bird flu has killed 224 people in a dozen countries since late 2003, the World Health Organisation says.

MEDICAL WORKERS AT RISK