ASIA Two more countries confirm bird flu cases

At least eight people who contracted the virus have died.
BEIJING (AP) -- China confirmed today that it found bird flu in dead ducks on a southern farm and was tracking "suspect" cases in two other provinces. Thailand said a young boy became the eighth victim of the disease in its deadliest outbreak since 1997.
Laos joined China today, taking the total number of countries hit by the flu to 10 as the virus sweeping Asia also has prompted the slaughter of tens of millions of birds.
In China, the official Xinhua News Agency's dispatch was the first government confirmation that avian influenza has surfaced there.
Authorities immediately isolated the area around the farm in the Guangxi region of south China adjacent to Vietnam where six people have died from the disease.
Some 14,000 birds within a two-mile radius of the farm in Dingdang were slaughtered, and all poultry for three miles around it was quarantined, Xinhua said.
The farm is about 60 miles from Vietnam.
No human cases
"Local governments have made necessary measures of slaughter or quarantine to prevent a spread," Xinhua said. "No people have been found infected so far, and the epidemic has been in control."
Roy Wadia, a spokesman for the World Health Organization in Beijing, said China's Health Ministry had informed the U.N. agency of the bird flu cases.
"There are no cases known in people so far," he said.
WHO believes the virus can be transmitted by migratory water fowl.
Bob Dietz, a WHO spokesman in Hanoi, Vietnam, said it "wouldn't be surprising" that bird flu could travel across the border.
"We're seeing it in other countries in southeast Asia," Dietz said. "There's no reason to assume China would be immune."
Xinhua also said reports of bird deaths in a "chicken-raising household" in central Hubei province and a "duck-raising household" in nearby Hunan province had been diagnosed as "suspect" bird flu. It emphasized that those diagnoses were preliminary.
China's openly aggressive campaign to combat the disease starkly contrasts with the government's initially secretive response last year to the SARS outbreak. Severe acute respiratory syndrome killed 349 people on the mainland before retreating in June.
Still, there were contradictions in the government's account. Xinhua said anti-flu efforts were going on at the duck farm since Friday, but Yan Qibin, an official with the Food Quarantine Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture, said today his agency was investigating whether any ducks died there.
Also today, other Chinese quarantine officials said they would impose poultry bans on Pakistan and Indonesia, bringing to eight the number of countries whose bird products have been banned from the region's largest economy.
China stopped such shipments from Cambodia, Thailand, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading to its poultry.
Laos and Taiwan also have reported the virus, but the mainland has not mentioned poultry bans from those areas.
Fatalities
In Thailand, the Public Health Ministry confirmed that a 6-year-old boy died from the disease today, becoming the country's second fatality and the region's eighth. Thai officials awaited lab results on five other deaths believed linked to the virus, meaning the toll could reach 13.
Thailand's first death, announced Monday, also was a 6-year-old boy, who carried a dying chicken to a butcher.
In Laos, a sample taken from a chicken farm near the capital, Vientiane, tested positive for the disease, said Singkham Phounvisay, director general of the country's Livestock Department.
The tests were conducted after hundreds of chickens died. The results were known Monday, but the exact strain of the virus has not been identified, he said.
Agriculture Ministry officials were expected to begin slaughtering about 3,000 chickens at a farm on the capital's outskirts today. The carcasses then would be burned.
A joint document circulated at a meeting of Laotian government and U.N. representatives last week said chicken farms in other parts of the country had been hit by the disease.
The scope of this year's outbreak has widened alarmingly, with countries reporting new outbreaks in poultry stocks over the past three days.
The other nations reporting some strain of bird flu include Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan. Some countries say their version of bird flu is milder than the one that has jumped to humans.
Pakistan said strains of the disease killed millions of chickens but had not infected humans.
"We are safe," Pakistan Health Minister Mohammed Nasir Khan said today.
"There is right now no need to panic in Pakistan."