The question of whether a 24-year-old woman from Takeo province was the first Cambodian to die from avian influenza may remain unanswered, as no blood samples appear to have been taken before she was cremated, a World Health Organization official said Tuesday.
The Takeo woman died Thursday at Choudoc Hospital in Vietnam, where she was transported after suffering from respiratory symptoms for about a week.
Dr Ly Sovann, head of the surveillance bureau for the Health Ministry’s Department of Communicable Diseases, said Sunday that the hospital had taken blood samples that were being analyzed by the WHO in Vietnam to determine if the woman died of bird flu.
But the Vietnamese Ministry of Health has reported through the WHO office in Ho Chi Minh City that no samples were taken from the woman, whose body was cremated shortly after her death, said Sean Tobin, an epidemiologist with WHO.
“She may well remain a suspected case [of bird flu], unable to be identified,” Tobin said.
On Tuesday morning, Ly Sovann said that the Cambodian Ministry of Health was awaiting the test results from Vietnam. He did not answer his mobile phone Tuesday afternoon.
Sok Touch, director of the Department of Communicable Diseases, said Tuesday that he did not know anything about the samples or why they had not been taken.
Bringing the official number of birds killed in response to the epidemic to just less than 5,000, some 1,500 birds were culled at two farms in Takeo province Feb 4 and Feb 5 after several hundred fell ill, said Ith Sarun, director of the provincial agriculture department.
Also in Takeo province, the Phnom Tamao Zoo and Wildlife Rescue Center, where dozens of birds died last month, is not closed as the government had announced Thursday, said Matt Hunt, an assistant animal husbandry specialist with WildAid.
The zoo is open, but the aviary section is sealed off, he said.
The farms where the birds fell ill in Takeo last week were not close to the dead woman’s family farm in Kiri Vong district, Tobin said.
Those chickens, in addition to 3,300 birds killed last month near Phnom Penh, are the only birds that have been slaughtered in Cambodia in response to the bird flu epidemic, said San Vanty, deputy director-general of the Ministry of Agriculture.
The number of birds killed in Cambodia pales in comparison to Vietnam and Thailand, where more than 40 million chickens have been killed, Agence France-Presse reported Monday.
San Vanty attributed the difference in numbers to this country’s smaller poultry population. Vietnam and Thailand have large commercial farms where mass kills have occurred, he said.
One official working with the government, who declined to be named, said the numbers of birds killed in Cambodia could be much higher.
“I am quite sure they have already killed more than this,” the official said Tuesday. “I see my colleagues going out to the fields quite often.”
San Vanty added that there are currently no bird flu cases suspected in Cambodia’s poultry.
“At the moment, no,” he said. “But I don’t know about tomorrow.”
Some farmers whose birds are not sick have asked the government to kill their flocks, saying that they cannot sell them in the depressed poultry market caused by the epidemic and cannot afford to care for them, the official added.
“They can’t sell the product. The only option is to kill or destroy” the birds, said Suon Sothoeun, deputy director of the Agriculture Ministry’s Department of Animal Health and Production.
Some chicken farmers in Sa’ang district, Kandal province no longer want to feed their birds because there was no market for them, said Tea Leang Huot, deputy director of the provincial agriculture department.
