Entirely Pets

More testing is needed before China can confirm whether a soldier who died in Beijing in 2003 was an early case of bird flu, the Health Ministry said Monday. The case, first disclosed last month in a letter by Chinese researchers to a US medical journal.

A World Health Organization probe revealed that the bird flu virus mutated within an Indonesian family. An Indonesian man who died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu almost certainly caught the disease from his 10-year-old son. He is the first laboratory-confirmed case of human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 strain.

Fifth person died from bird flu in Egypt on Thursday and experts in Asia expressed concern that poorer countries were unable to put up a co-ordinated fight against the rapid spread of the H5N1 virus.

The Bird Flu virus re-emerged in Asia in 2003, outbreaks have been confirmed in more than 48 countries and territories, according to data from the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).

A peasant worker (surnamed Lai, a 21-year-old) has become the 12th Chinese person to die of the bird flu virus. The official Xinhua news agency says he died in the central city of Wuhan on wednesday. It’s still unknown how he contracted the H5N1 bird flu virus.

Indonesia’s agriculture minister said that Indonesia is winning its fight against bird flu and expects to be free of the killer virus by 2008.

Russian scientists from St.Petersburg will soon start developing the country’s first orally administered vaccine against the lethal H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus.

Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association, the principal trade body for the UK pet food industry, has issued a statement on April 10, 2006 reassuring pet owners that their animals are not at risk from bird flu being carried in processed pet foods.

The latest bird flu vaccine works, but there is a problem.

Mon Puthy, a 3 year old girl from Kampong Speu province, about 45 km west of the capital, was infected with avian influenza and died on Tuesday, said a joint statement of Health Ministry and the World Health Organization (WHO) released on Friday.