Bird Flu Found in Cats in Asia; Canada on Alert

[rodbarnett]

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Two domestic cats in Thailand have died of the same bird flu that has killed at least 22 people in Asia, a veterinarian said on Friday, a day after Canada announced its first case of a different strain of the virus.

<snip>

"It is a pandemic threat constantly simmering," Dr Marion Koopmans, of the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, told Reuters in London.


San Smey, 4, eats a piece of roasted rat in the provincial town of Battambang, 181 miles northwest of the capital Phnom Penh February 19, 2004. With meat-eaters shying away from chicken because of the deadly bird flu virus rampant across Asia, sales of rat are rocketing in the impoverished southeast Asian nation. (Chor Sokunthea/Reuters)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/birdflu_dc

[Bozita]

1. CBC News did a piece recently on how Canada would deal with a pandemic

Broadcast on "The National."

very timely

[molok555]

2. Rat ain't that bad

Little light on the meat tho'.

As the saying in southern China goes, "If it walks, flies, crawls, swims or moves in anyway, you can eat it!"

[iverglas]

3. "More Countries Ban Canadian Poultry"

-- in the interests of not proliferating bird flu threads. ;)

http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/02/20/Avianban_040220

VANCOUVER - Four countries in Asia have banned imports of poultry and birds from Canada because of the avian flu found on a chicken farm in British Columbia.

... The H7 virus found on the Lower Mainland farm on Thursday is the same low-risk strain discovered last week in the United States.

(I understood from Newsworld this morning that it isn't yet certain whether it's the H7N2 virus found in the States, or the H7N7, slightly more problematic but nothing near the H5N1 Asian strain.)

... "We get outbreaks of this strain every two to three years," said Dr. Perry Kendall, B.C.'s provincial health officer. "There's actually no reason to stop eating chickens or eggs."

.