Excerpt:
Government officials met Tuesday in Phnom Penh to outline a strategy to prevent the spread of bird flu as millions prepare to travel from the provinces—where five cases of the virus have been reported in the past two weeks—to attend the late King Father Norodom Sihanouk’s cremation in Phnom Penh.
The meeting was attended by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
“These are poor people coming from provinces. There is some likelihood they will bring their own food and own poultry,” Sonny Krishnan, spokesman for the WHO in Cambodia, said of the estimated 1.5 million people who are expected to arrive for the cremation on February 4.
“We are advising them that if you have to cook chicken, cook it well. We do hope animal health people will do inspections on the movement of poultry,” Mr. Krishnan said.
The WHO on Tuesday confirmed that four people have died in the past two weeks from the H5N1 virus, also called bird flu, and that they all became infected from contact with live poultry. An 8-month-old boy from Phnom Penh’s Pur Senchey district survived infection from the normally lethal virus.
The WHO noted that in all cases, chickens were reported as being sick or dying in the area, and that no entomological link between the five reported cases had been found.
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