More than 60 people have died of Avian flu since late 2003, all of them in Asia. This fatality is the first in Thailand in about a year. Most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds, but health officials warn the virus could mutate into a form that can be easily passed between humans, possibly triggering a global pandemic.
Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra says Thursday new lab results confirm the country's 13th death from Avian flu. Initially, authorities said the man tested negative for the virus, but Shinawatra says Bang-on Benphat had butchered and eaten a sick bird in Kanchanaburi province.
Shinawatra says, "The guy was infected with bird flu because he took a sick chicken, slaughtered it and then ate it." Health officials say eating well-cooked chicken meat is not consdiered to be dangerous, but contact with infected chickens or fowl is a known method of transmission.
The victim was hospitalized with pneumonia-like symptoms on Sunday, shortly after he cooked and ate meat from one his neighbor's dead chickens.
According Dr. Thawat Suntrajarn, director-general of the Department of Communicable Disease Control, Bang-on's 7-year-old son, who also had contact with the chickens, is hospitalized in Bangkok with a fever and lung infection -- and is also suspected of having contracted Avian flu.
Suntrajarn adds, "The people in this area should have known better. They took sickly chickens and killed and ate them. This is extremely dangerous."
