Asian Bird Flu Death Toll Hits 48

The latest deaths were a 26-year-old man from Cambodia’s southern province of Kampot and a 17-year-old woman from Vietnam’s northern Nam Dinh province.

Test results from Phnom Penh’s Pasteur Institute showed that the man died of the severe H5N1 strain, Deputy Agriculture Minister Yim Voeun Tharn said.

In Vietnam, the teenager, who died on Thursday, was one of two new bird flu cases reported yesterday. In addition, a 40-year-old woman from Quang Ninh province was in Hanoi’s Bach Mai Hospital, in stable condition, health officials said.

An epidemiologist for the World Health Organisation in Cambodia, Megge Miller, said this week’s Cambodian victim, Meas Ran, was believed to have contracted the disease from poultry that died near his house. Villagers did not immediately tell authorities about the sick chickens for fear that their remaining stock would be slaughtered, Miller said.

In neighbouring Vietnam, where 14 people have died of bird flu since late December, the latest cases follow a string of infections that have had health experts worried about the spread of the virus now acknowledged to be endemic in the region.