Amid mounting reports of irregular poultry deaths in many areas, leading virologist Professor Prasert Thongcharoen expressed strong doubts yesterday about the accuracy of official reports of avian-flu tests on dead birds by livestock authorities.

"From my experience, when they say 'no, nothing' it means 'yes, it is' [bird flu]," he told The Nation in a telephone interview after returning from a trip to Phitsanulok, one of the provinces where mass deaths of poultry have been reported recently.

"I will give it eight out of ten that what has caused such an abnormal pattern of poultry deaths was it [the bird-flu virus]."

Prasert has previously confronted the government by telling the media that a patient sent to Siriraj Hospital, where he works as a professor of microbiology, had died of avian flu while the government kept insisting the virus did not exist in the country. The government later admitted that the death was the first case in Thailand of a human dying from the virus.

"To be fair, they might have checked the samples and simply could not detect the virus," said Prasert. "Yet, once again, things are so obvious."

Some epidemiologists at the Public Health Ministry have complained to Prasert, their adviser, that they were put under pressure to travel to examine areas where poultry deaths were reported.

Since the Public Health Ministry is not in a position to test for the avian-flu virus in birds, the best they could do is to be pro-active in screening patients for possible infection, he said.

Meanwhile, Dr Paijit Warachit, head of the Medical Sciences Department that is responsible for testing suspected human cases of bird flu, said 19 tests for the lethal H5N1 virus had been negative. Eight had the H1N1 influenza strain.

At the moment, he said, there were between 10 and 20 cases sent for testing per day and none had yet been positive.

The department might need to dispatch a mobile testing unit to Phichit, which has the highest number of samples to be tested.

Arthit Khwankhom

The Nation