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 » Pandemics and scares  |  Flu 101  |  How vaccines work  |  Special Report

Lethal bird flu strain spreads

Worst case economic cost is $4.4 trillion

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The bird flu is being spread around the world through migratory routes.

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(CNN) -- France says a dead duck has the lethal strain of H5N1 bird flu that is spreading around the world, as India says it is testing eight people for the illness and culling poultry.

The duck was one of seven found dead outside Lyon, near the Swiss border, France's Ministry of Agriculture said Saturday.

While Agriculture Minister Dominique Bussereau stressed before the final results no bird flu has been found in France's poultry, and "there is no danger in consuming poultry meat," veterinarians are inspecting all poultry farms as a precaution.

Poultry and pet birds on chicken farms are being confined, with disinfection measures taking place.

Some 900,000 birds in the three western French districts of Landes, Loire-Atlantique, and Vendee will be vaccinated starting Wednesday, Bussereau added. They are more than 300 miles (480 km) away from where the ducks were found.

Experts are worried that the H5N1 strain, which has become an epidemic among birds and has occasionally spread to humans who have direct contact with them, may mutate and spread easily between people.

Since re-emerging in 2003, after a deadly bout in Hong Kong in 1997, the disease has claimed more than 90 human lives -- almost all in Asia.

But as the disease spreads to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, about 200 million birds have died or been culled.

While several European nations have reported avian flu in birds, including Greece and Italy, no humans have caught the virus in the European Union. Twenty people contracted H5N1 in Turkey, which straddles the continents of Europe and Asia. Of those cases, four were fatal.

India worries

Fearing that the lethal strain could be affecting birds within its borders, India also took precautionary measures Saturday ahead of official test results.

After an emergency cabinet session Saturday, Indian authorities ordered over 300,000 poultry to be culled in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

Health Secretary P.K. Hota said preliminary tests on eight chickens from Maharashtra confirmed the presence of bird flu, but it was not clear if it was the H5N1 strain which has been transmitted to humans in seven other countries, six of them in Asia.

Final tests will be conducted next week.

Some 750,000 vaccines will also be rushed to vaccinate other poultry in Maharashtra, as a precaution, and poultry are being confined.

The eight chickens being tested are among 28,000 birds that have died over the last two weeks in Maharashtra, but it is unclear what caused all of the deaths.

India is the fifth biggest exporter of eggs in the world and the bird flu scare could cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollars.

'Worst case' scenario

This spread of the disease from Asia to Europe in recent weeks has prompted the United States, the EU and countries such as China and Japan to commit hefty financial resources.

A sobering new study released this week said as many as 142 million people around the world could die if bird flu mutates into a "worst case" human form of the disease with global economic losses running to $4.4 trillion -- the equivalent of wiping out the Japanese economy's annual output. (Full story)

The study, prepared for the Sydney, Australia-based Lowy Institute think tank, says there are "enormous uncertainties" about whether a flu pandemic might happen, and where and when it might happen first.

But it says even a mild pandemic could kill 1.4 million people and cost $330 billion.

The report says the major difficulty with vaccine development is "the need to hit the constantly moving target as the virus mutates very rapidly."

Their observation follows a study released last week which said bird flu was much more diverse than previously thought, with at least four distinct types of the deadly H5N1 virus. (Full story)

One of the researchers, Dr. Malik Peiris, professor of microbiology at Hong Kong University, told CNN on February 8 that regional virus types meant there was a need to look for "broad cross-protection" rather than a single vaccine.

CNN Correspondent Ram Ramgopal contributed to this report

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