Asia Bird Flu Death Toll Now Seven

A 6-year-old Thai boy became Asia's seventh confirmed bird flu fatality and Pakistan on Monday joined the list of countries affected by the disease that has sparked mass chicken culls across the region.

The World Health Organization pleaded Monday with the global scientific community to accelerate the search for a cure. Attempts to tackle the virus are being frustrated by its fast rate of mutation as well as its spread across at least eight countries.

Pakistan said it had detected a form of bird flu in its chicken population. The commissioner for livestock husbandry said it was not a strain of bird flu that can spread to humans — something that has happened in other parts of Asia.

"We have confirmed this. The strand that jumps to humans is not in them," commissioner Rafaqat Hussain Raja said.

Faizullah Kakar, an official at the WHO office in Pakistan, said it had no confirmation of an outbreak of bird flu in the South Asian nation.

Laos, meanwhile, fears it might also be hit by the bird flu and is awaiting test results on the nature of an illness killing its fowl, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said.

Other Asian governments frantically slaughtered chicken flocks in a desperate bid to contain the disease, as well as the growing political fallout from accusations that officials in two countries — Thailand and Indonesia — initially covered up outbreaks.

Dr. Prasert Phongcharoen, a WHO adviser and viral disease expert, urged caution in the disposal of the chicken carcasses. If infected chickens are thrown in rivers, "the virus could spread to open pig farms and this could result in transmission from pigs to humans," he said.

Officials in Bangkok said they were investigating whether the virus might be being carried by migratory birds.

The Thai boy, Captan Boonmanut, became infected after he played with chickens in his village a in the central Kanchanaburi province. He died Sunday night in a Bangkok hospital, Thailand's first confirmed death from the virus.

Six people have died in neighboring Vietnam and Thai officials are trying to determine whether bird flu was also the cause of last week's death of a 56-year-old man who had bred fighting cocks.

The WHO said a search for a cure had been set back because the virus had mutated. A previous strain detected in Hong Kong in 1997 can no longer be used as the key to producing a vaccine. It said an international effort was needed.

Scientists believe people get the disease through contact with sick birds. Although there has been no evidence yet of human-to-human transmission, health officials are concerned it might mutate further and link with regular influenza to create a form that could be transmitted from person to person, triggering the next human flu pandemic.

"It's jumping around, we don't know where it is, and we don't know where it's going to pop up next," WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley in Manila told CBS Radio News. "At the moment, we're not keeping up to speed with this virus."

So far eight countries have reported bird flu — Thailand, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are also affected and Indonesia admitted it had a problem on Sunday.

Cordingley warns that infections would skyrocket if the virus comes to China.

"We'd have a lot of spread, and more and more chances of this virus to jump from chickens to humans," he said. "It wouldn't be a good situation."

The disease also could be heading for the U.S.

"It would be foolish to say 'no, it couldn't happen,'" said Cordingley.

China's aggressive response to bird flu outbreak contrasts sharply with its failure to vigorously confront SARS before it spread around the world last year.

Authorities insist that bird flu hasn't been detected in China. They are relying on bans, inspections and threats of prosecution to keep things that way, and there's little apparent alarm — so far.

"I don't think there'll be any problem. SARS caught us off guard and now we've learned how to protect ourselves," Shi Peiqi, a trading company employee in Shanghai, said Monday.

Indonesian officials had earlier denied the disease's presence, but the country's veterinarian association said independent investigations had revealed that bird flu had killed millions of chickens over recent months.

The Jakarta Post reported Monday that Indonesian officials may have covered the outbreak there at the behest of politically connected businessmen who feared it would harm their interests. Indonesian officials denied the allegations.

Thailand has killed some 9 million chickens so far.

The outbreak has devastated Thailand's chicken export industry — the world's fourth largest. Thailand shipped about 500,000 tons of chicken worth $1.3 billion in 2003.

Vietnam has slaughtered more than 3 million chickens.

CBS News' Jeff Gibson in Beijing reports Asian health and agricultural leaders meet Wednesday in Bangkok for an emergency summit to brainstorm a regional response.

There has never been a large outbreak in developing countries, and WHO's Dick Thompson told CBS Radio News it means teaching poor farmers how to cull diseased birds from their flocks.

"We're going to have to get them the right protection equipment, including gloves and goggles," he said, "and we're going to have to come up with money to provide especially small farmers with enough incentive for them to destroy their investment."

Thompson said there is concern that that the bird flu caught by humans appears to be resistant to cheaper drugs.

"The only way that they can be controlled is with anti-virals and if inexpensive drugs won't help, these people may be priced out of the support they need," he said.