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CX2SA > HEALTH 09.02.06 05:49l 67 Lines 3682 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: H5N1 bird flu reaches Africa
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Sent: 060209/0345Z @:CX2SA.LAV.URY.SA #:29666 [Minas] FBB7.00e $:29666_CX2SA
From: CX2SA@CX2SA.LAV.URY.SA
To : HEALTH@WW
H5N1 bird flu reaches Africa
============================
The H5N1 bird flu virus has been confirmed in north-central Nigeria.
Scientists had feared the virus would reach Africa, where human poverty and
disease could combine with millions of highly susceptible backyard poultry to
produce many human infections, and potentially a human pandemic virus.
But New Scientist can reveal that the location of Africa's first reported
outbreak should not come as a surprise. The region affected is right beside a
major wintering ground for two relatively common species of duck. Those ducks
shared breeding grounds in Siberia last summer with birds that winter in
Turkey and around the Black Sea, where the virus also appeared recently.
"We are facing a serious international crisis," said Samuel Jutzi, head of
animal health at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, Italy. He
is pleading for any further die-offs of poultry in the region to be reported
immediately.
The World Animal Health Organization (OIE) in Paris, France, reported on
Wednesday that 40,000 poultry, mainly laying hens, have died since 10 January
at a commercial farm near Igabi in Kaduna state, a small town 150 kilometres
south of the northern city of Kano. The owners initially tried antibiotics.
But the cause has now been confirmed as H5N1 by the OIE's collaborating centre
for bird flu in Padua, Italy. There is no word yet on whether it is the highly
pathogenic strain that has killed at least 88 people in East Asia, Turkey and
most recently Iraq.
Summer breeding grounds
-----------------------
However, that seems likely. The virus appears to be having a devastating
impact on poultry in the region, with Nigerian agricultural authorities
reporting the death of 150,000 birds in Kano and Kaduna states.
Furthermore, Kano is near the Hadejia-Nguru inland river delta, which is a
major wintering location for Northern pintail and garganey ducks. They summer
in breeding grounds across Siberia, where there were numerous outbreaks of
H5N1 in poultry and wild birds last summer. Birds of those species that winter
in Turkey and around the Black Sea also summered in the same places in Siberia
and migrants are thought to have carried H5N1 there.
The authoritative 1996 Atlas of Anatidae [ducks, geese and swans] Populations
of Africa and Western Europe says the Northern pintail wintering in the Black
Sea and Mediterranean basins "are lumped with those wintering in West Africa
as a single large population". On average, 18,000 pintails winter each year at
Hadejia-Nguru. Similar numbers of garganey ducks follow the same migration and
500,000 of each species winter at nearby Lake Chad.
Some of the Northern pintail wintering now in Britain and along Europe's North
Sea and Atlantic coasts also spent last summer on the same breeding grounds as
the pintail that subsequently flew to the Black Sea, Turkey and West Africa.
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