Deadly bird flu hits chickens in Nigeria

The rapidly spreading bird-flu virus has been detected for the first time in Africa, infecting chickens at a large commercial farm in Nigeria, the World Organization for Animal Health reported Wednesday.

Tests conducted at a laboratory in Italy have confirmed the virus as the dangerous H5N1 strain, which has killed 88 people and sickened 160 in Asia and the Middle East.

While there are no reports of the virus infecting humans in Africa, health officials expressed deep concern over the outbreak spreading to a new continent.

"It's a very worrisome situation because it's in a big country with a lot of poultry farms," said Joseph Domenech, the chief veterinary officer for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. "It has good conditions to have several outbreaks."

Over the past three years, this bird flu has spread from its epicenter in Southeast Asia into Europe and the Middle East.

The virus, which is deadly to many types of birds, rarely infects humans. But each new human cases increases the chances of it mutating slightly, allowing it to infect humans more easily, leading to a pandemic.

The spread into Africa raises particular concerns for public-health officials because in Nigeria, like Southeast Asia, many villagers live in close quarters with chickens, said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization.

As it is, public-health systems in Africa are straining to control polio, AIDS, malaria and other serious diseases, Cheng said.

Nigerian authorities first noticed the outbreak Jan. 10 in Jaji, a village in the northern part of the country, according to the World Organization for Animal Health.

Since then, 42,000 poultry have caught the virus and 40,000 have died, according to the agency.

Domenech said his organization and others have not yet determined the cause of the outbreak but plan to send investigators to Nigeria Thursday.

"If it's not wild birds, it will be difficult to understand," he said. "There is no real trade between the Middle East and Asia and Nigeria."

The Nigerian birds do not represent any direct threat to the U.S., bird flu experts in the U.S. said Wednesday. Migrating birds in Nigeria do not cross the path of other birds that journey from Asia and Siberia to Alaska, said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology in New York.

Nigeria is also not a major chicken-exporting country, said Will Hueston, director for the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety at the University of Minnesota.

"The good news is Nigeria stepped up and reported it," he said. "One of the challenges in dealing with this disease is that some [countries] are historically not forthcoming in reporting, confounding efforts to control this disease globally."