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HONG KONG, Feb. 1 — A chicken smuggled across the border from mainland China has died here of bird flu, Hong Kong officials announced late Wednesday. The case raised new questions about whether Chinese provincial officials are concealing the true extent of the disease. A villager living near the Chinese border obtained the chicken last Thursday from a mainland relative in neighboring Guangdong Province, which denies having the disease. The chicken fell sick and died Tuesday, said Dr. Thomas Sit, Hong Kong's acting assistant director of agriculture, fisheries and conservation, adding that preliminary tests quickly confirmed that the chicken had...

BANGKOK, Dec. 2 (Xinhuanet) -- The two latest confirmed cases of human bird flu in Thailand might be human-to-human transmissions, a senior health official has said. Dr Charoen Chuchottaworn, a bird-flu expert at the Public Health Ministry's Department of Medical Services, said doctors concluded after reviewing the history of the past two cases that both victims presented very mild symptoms of avian influenza and neither had any physical contact with chickens or birds. One of the victims was a boy in Bangkok and the other was an 18-year-old man from Nonthaburi province, The Nation newspaper reported Friday. This left doctors...

/begin my translationChina: 77 Avian Flu Patients Dead in Liaoning Province...Victim's Name Published on Internet2005/11/21 In Liaoning Province of China, 6 people were infected with H5N1 Avian Flu and had died recently, according to Nov. 20 report by an overseas Chinese language news site, Boxun, quoting the article posted by a poster.Six victims were 4 students in Beining City, 1 epidemic-prevention worker, and another person whose identity is unknown. According to the post, the number of dead people from H5N1 Avian Flu in Liaoning Province has reached 77, including the six new victims. Furthermore, at one of domestic Chinese Internet site,...

Bird flu has been detected throughout the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, with the country's Agriculture Minister Anton Apriyantono admitting: "It's very serious. Based on our research, the virus has spread all over the city." The findings were announced after random samples were gathered from backyard farms throughout the sprawling capital. Authorities Friday also destroyed 400 fowl in a residential area of Jakarta near the home of a young girl who died from the disease. Indonesia has been reluctant to carry out such mass slaughters, citing a lack of money. But affected farmers were Friday offered some compensation. The H5N1 virus has...

China finds first human bird flu cases By Brian Rhoads 39 minutes ago China confirmed on Wednesday its first human cases of bird flu, adding to fears of a global pandemic in which millions of people could die. China's Ministry of Health reported two cases in the central province of Hunan and one in eastern Anhui, the official Xinhua news agency said. The World Health Organization (WHO) said one of the victims in Hunan was a girl of 12 who died last month. The spread of bird flu to people in the world's most populous country is a significant development....

Health officials have warned for years that a virulent bird flu could kill millions of people, but few in Washington have seemed alarmed. After a closed-door briefing last week, however, fear of an outbreak swept official Washington... The day after the briefing, led by Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of Health and Human Services, and other senior government health officials, the Senate squeezed $3.9 billion for flu preparations into a Pentagon appropriations bill. Mr. Leavitt acknowledged in an interview that the United States was not prepared for a pandemic flu outbreak. He plans to spend next week touring Thailand, Vietnam,...

HONG KONG, Oct 5 (Reuters) - Indonesian health authorities have found chickens which tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus but which appear to be healthy, a sign that the bug may become harder to detect, officials in Hong Kong and Jakarta said. Some species of waterfowl, like ducks and geese, are natural hosts of the H5N1 and do not fall ill from it. But the virus has always been known to be virulent in chickens, which fall sick quickly and die within 24 hours of contracting it. Hong Kong's Health Minister York Chow said authorities in Indonesia had...