Via Bloomberg.com: Thai bird flu case suggests under-reporting in fowl. Excerpt:
A 17-year-old man who died of bird flu in Thailand last week, the country's first case this year, suggests the virus is being under-reported in poultry, the influenza team at the European Centre for Disease Surveillance and Control said.
The youth from a northern province was hospitalized on July 18 suffering fever, cough and headache and died six days later, the Thai Bureau of General Communicable Diseases said in a July 26 report. A week before his symptoms appeared he buried 10 dead chickens, touching the carcasses with his bare hands. His phlegm tested positive for the H5N1 avian flu strain.
The case "could be an example of the phenomenon of a sentinel human already seen in other countries, where it is only the severe illness or death of a person from H5N1 that triggers detection or reporting of H5N1 in poultry,'' the team in Stockholm said in a report. "This suggests under-detection or under-reporting of poultry deaths.''
In other words, poultry owners are watching their birds die and quietly disposing of them, rather than face the losses of a mass cull. And that understandable human desire to keep problems to a minimum is likely to maximize problems instead.
Update: Thanks to the reader who found the link to the original Eurosurveillance article, which has a lot of information and a helpful map.
