Word: birde
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When Somsak Laemphakwan's chickens started dying in early August, he buried the corpses deep in the ground, hoping to halt the bird flu ravaging his village in northwest Thailand. It didn't work. Later that month, his 11-year-old niece Sakuntala Premphasri developed a stomachache and a high fever. When Somsak took her to a nearby clinic on Sept. 2, nurses dismissed her illness as a common cold. Five days later Sakuntala was back in the clinic, unable to walk and vomiting blood. She was sent to the district hospital, and her mother, Pranee Thongchan, was summoned from...
...several witnesses, Pranee looked ill and complained of tiredness. "We thought it was because of the stress of losing her daughter," says a villager. Pranee visited a clinic, but like her child, was sent home, and then returned to Bangkok. Less than two weeks later, Pranee died of bird flu, the country's 10th confirmed victim of the disease?but one with a major distinction. On Sept. 28, a joint World Health Organization (WHO) and Thai investigation announced what scientists studying the H5N1 bird-flu virus had long feared: Pranee hadn't contracted the disease from chickens. She had almost...
...bird-flu virus manages to become easily transmittable between humans, the world could be in for a health catastrophe approaching the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 40 million people. But by week's end, health officials were relieved to discover that the disease had apparently failed to spread beyond the small family cluster. (Somsak's wife and six-year-old son were both quarantined in a provincial hospital with bird-flu symptoms, and his son has recovered.) The human-to-human transmission "is a nonsustained, inefficient, dead-end street," says Dr. Klaus Stohr, head...
...Thai officials, especially at the highest levels, are now taking the threat seriously. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has pledged to wipe out bird flu in the country by the end of October, and last week enlisted more than 900,000 volunteers to cull sick chickens and do spot checks on potential new outbreaks. His biggest challenge is to get poultry-dependent villages like Srisomboon, where Sakuntala Premphasri lived, onto the program. Villagers told a TIME reporter that even though they knew their chickens were likely dying of bird flu in August, they did not alert livestock officials because they believed...
...Alhough Pranee is apparently the first documented case of human-to-human bird-flu transmission, researchers suspect that such dead-end transmissions have occurred in previous outbreaks and simply escaped notice. "It's worrisome on one hand, but on the other hand it's nothing new," says Stohr. "Occasionally it can infect the next person, but then the infection chain stops...