Materia Medica Malaysiana

M'sia quarantines 600 over bird flu fear

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP/dpa) - Health officials in Malaysia's northern Perak state have quarantined 600 pupils after 25 came down with fever following the deaths of 90 chickens in a compound at their school, a report said Sunday.

The Mingguan Malaysia, a Malay language daily, said health authorities had issued the quarantine order immediately due to fears over the spread of bird flu.

However, Hawari Hussein, director-general of the Veterinary Services Department, told AFP that the blood and other samples taken from the dead birds had proved negative for avian influenza.

Tan Chin Meng, chairman of the state health committee, said all students at the Technical Secondary school in Teluk Intan had been ordered to undergo a blood test at a public hospital. The birds died on Friday, and 25 students suffered symptoms of fever and flu on Saturday.

There has not been an outbreak of bird flu in Malaysia despite outbreaks in neighbouring Southeast Asian countries.

China, Thailand and Vietnam have all reported new cases in recent days, sparking fears of a resurgence of the winter outbreak that left 24 people dead and devastated the region's poultry industry.

However, experts in China found no sign of mutation in new samples of the avian influenza virus taken from infected birds in eastern China's Anhui province, state media said on Sunday.

"The laboratory test proved that the virus was the H5N1 strain, which is a stable type of the bird flu virus," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Wei Jianzhong, an expert from the provincial bird flu control office, as saying.

The strain identified in the latest outbreak was the same as that found earlier this year, when bird flu infected poultry in four areas of Anhui, Wei said.

Some scientists had expressed concern that the bird flu virus may mutate and form a new influenza strain that could spread among humans. The latest bird flu outbreak, the first in China for four months, hit a hillside poultry farm near Anhui's Chaohu lake.

Workers slaughtered 22,000 birds and immunized 120,000 in a bid to prevent the spread of avian influenza from the farm.

Officials were still monitoring human influenza and pneumonia cases, but had found no people infected by bird flu, the agency said.

Doctors placed under observation 37 people who had close contact with infected birds, but none showed flu-like symptoms and all 37 were released on Saturday.