PARIS - North Korea, officially acknowledging an outbreak of bird flu in the country, has asked for international help in combating the problem in the isolated country, a conference on avian influenza heard here Thursday.
Bernard Vallat, director general of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), said the message had been received "through diplomatic channels" from North Korea on Thursday.
"They are requesting international help" especially for diagnosis, he said. North Korea said these had occurred in "numerous chicken farms", Vallat told a press conference.
The OIE and the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) are hosting a two-day conference on the outbreak of avian influenza in Asia.
Bird flu deaths in Asia reached 50 Wednesday when Vietnamese medical officials reported a 10-year-old girl had died in the capital. Since the end of 2003, the bird flu virus has killed 36 Vietnamese, 12 Thais and two Cambodians.
Health experts have warned the H5N1 virus could lead to a pandemic if it mutated into a form which could be easily transmitted between humans.
But United Nations experts said in Beijing Wednesday after a mission to North Korea that the outbreak there is unlikely to spread to humans,
The avian flu strain that has emerged in North Korea is probably H7, which is not capable of being transmitted to humans, according to analysis conducted by officials of the FAO.
"It`s indirectly confirmed that it was H7, but we still have to conduct some laboratory analysis," said Noureddin Mona, the Beijing-based FAO representative in charge of China, Mongolia and Korea. "No human cases have been reported."
Since the bird flu was discovered in North Korea last month, a total of 219,000 birds have been culled at three different poultry farms, Mona said.
No new cases have been discovered since the cull, he said, adding the FAO was keeping a regional diagnosis coordinator in North Korea for the time being.
04/07/2005 17:26 GMT