INDONESIA: As avian flu claims its 98th victim, a 12-year-old Indonesian girl, the disease continues its spread in three continents.
Burma reported its first case of the bird flu yesterday as Afghanistan said it also feared it had found the disease.
Cameroon became the fourth African country to have a confirmed case of H5N1 strain of avian flu.
It now joins Nigeria, Egypt and Niger, where the disease has already been confirmed.
In Europe, German authorities are bracing themselves for the possibility that the disease may have entered commercial poultry flocks. The authorities said yesterday that seven dead ducks in a Bavarian poultry farm were found to have a form of influenza and were being tested for bird flu, in what could be its first case of the virus in domestic fowl.
The World Health Organisation confirmed that the virus has now killed at least 98 people since late 2003, saying the girl in Indonesia was the 22nd person killed by the virus there.
The girl died on March 1st. Her 10-year-old brother died the previous day after being diagnosed with dengue haemorrhagic fever, a mosquito-borne virus.
The WHO said it would never be known if he was also infected with H5N1, however bird flu had been found in chickens in the children's household. Human victims of H5N1 contract the virus through direct contact with infected birds.
The International Monetary Fund warned yesterday that an avian flu pandemic would probably cause significant harm to the world economy, with widespread disruptions in workplaces, trade and payment systems, and prompt a surge in demand for access to money.
In a report on the impact of a flu pandemic should the virus mutate and be spread from human to human, the IMF said the biggest impact would be from absenteeism as people would stay away from work to avoid infection.
The report also warned of possible disruptions to global trade and transportation as countries imposed restrictions on exports to control the spread of the virus.
It added that capital flows to emerging markets might also be temporarily reduced and some governments might be forced to draw on their reserves to ease balance of payments pressures.
A pandemic would also increase fiscal pressure on government spends on health.