Indian bird flu tests ’negative’

I had a feeling that those suspected cases were false positives.  So much for the ole mild bird flu .....  

MUMBAI, India (Reuters) -- Indian authorities virtually cut off traffic through a western town on Thursday as 11 out 12 people quarantined following a bird flu outbreak in chickens tested negative for the virus, officials said.

They said the last sample had to undergo further tests to conclusively decide its status.

A dozen people have been kept in an isolation ward in a state-run hospital in remote Navapur town since the country's first outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu was confirmed among chickens on Saturday. Another 83 people have been tested for avian influenza but were cleared.

"Ninety four out of 95 human samples are negative," India's Health Secretary P.K. Hota told Reuters, adding that there was still some uncertainty about the last sample.

N.K. Ganguly, the head of Indian Council of Medical Research, said none of the 12 quarantined people showed any "clinical symptoms" for flu.

While movement of poultry around Navapur in Maharashtra state has already been banned, authorities said they have now placed restrictions on trains and road traffic passing through the town.

"We want to minimize contact between the local people and outsiders. We are telling road travelers to use masks and get on with their journeys without stopping," Maharashtra's health director, T.P. Doke, told Reuters from Navapur.

"Trains are not stopping here and trucks are being parked at a site four-km away from town. It's a kind of sealing."

A Reuters photographer in Navapur said some but not all schools and colleges appeared to have closed.

In Navapur and surrounding areas, civic and health workers went around on motor-rickshaws making announcements about bird flu to locals, most of whom were ignorant of the disease.

Workers also moved door-to-door collecting backyard poultry and destroying them after compensating owners.

Alarm is growing at the emergence of the H5N1 virus in India, where hundreds of millions of people live in rural areas side-by-side with livestock and domestic fowl.

Health officials fear that in a nation of more than one billion people, many of whom have little or no access to health services, avian influenza could spread rapidly.

Bird flu has killed more than 90 people in seven countries since 2003.

Human victims contract the virus through direct contact with infected birds. Experts fear it is just a matter of time before the virus mutates and spreads easily among people, triggering a pandemic.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/conditions/02/23/birdflu.asia .reut/index.html?section=cnn_latest

I was reading another article today that I wanted to pass on in case no one else has seen this.  http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060223/hl_afp/healthflu_060223 130322

Here is the part I though to be the most interesting.  

Meanwhile, in India health authorities set up checkpoints to stop people leaving their villages around the bird flu-hit town of Navapur as fears began easing that the deadly virus may have spread to humans.

R.K. Srivastava, director general of health services, announced all but one of 95 samples collected from residents of the Navapur area had tested negative for avian influenza.

But officials in Navapur were taking no chances, stopping poultry workers leaving town until they had been tested for bird flu.

They were also discouraging people from attending weddings and other public events.

Since bird flu flared on February 18 among poultry farms in the western state of Maharashtra state, more than 200,000 birds had been slaughtered and teams were disinfecting the area, officials said.

But they stopped short of a complete halt to people travelling to and from the town as they tried to prevent the virus spreading.

Schools remained open but teachers were drawing pictures of chickens on blackboards and telling children to stay away from birds, according to an AFP photographer at the scene.

Malaysia is awaiting test results for two people from a group of seven villagers suspected of contracting bird flu after an outbreak among chickens in the capital Kuala Lumpur.

Does this not sound like it is straight out of the pandemic plan for after this goes H2H???