By Yoong Chee Weng KAMPUNG PAYA JARAS HILIR, Malaysia, June 7 (Reuters) - Malaysia has confined bird flu to three villages near its capital as teams of government workers and volunteers cull flocks of chickens and ducks to stamp out the H5N1 virus, health officials said on Thursday. Malaysia has reported no human cases of the infection, but Wednesday's incident was the first time avian influenza had been found in the southeast Asian nation since March 21 last year when several chickens tested positive for the virus. The disease had been limited to three villages after authorities culled about 8,000 ducks and chickens in the central state of Selangor, where the virus was found, one official said. "All precautionary measures have been taken, bird flu has been localised," said Lim Thuan Seng, a state health official. Malaysian commercial farms have not been hit by bird flu but neighbouring Singapore has suspended imports of chicken and eggs from Selangor. Shares of Malaysian poultry and fast food firms fell as much as 4 percent on Thursday. Authorities have alerted medical centres in a 10-km (6-mile) quarantine area around the site of the incident to watch for people with symptoms of virus infection, Lim said. "Right now, we are putting medical clinics and the people on alert on possible infections," Lim said. "But there are no cases of humans getting infected." Volunteers wearing rubber gloves and masks, and some even with bare hands, went from village to village catching chickens as they scrabbled about on farms and in people's homes. "It is easier to catch them at night, in the morning they are very active and they run very fast," said a veterinary worker as he put a squawking bird into a plastic bag. "We have finished most of the chickens in this area and now we are looking for the remaining ones," said G. Krishnamoorthy, a member of a veterinary team. Health authorities were alerted by a poultry farmer whose flock of 67 chickens dropped dead in batches over the last week despite being fed medicine, the New Straits Times newspaper said. "The medicine did not work and they kept dying until none was left," former railwayman Udzuluddin Abd Karim, 71, who has been rearing chickens since 1975, told the paper. After the carcasses of his last two chickens were confirmed to have bird flu, authorities swung into action, spraying the chicken coop with disinfectant and ordering check-ups for his family that gave them a clean bill of health. The disease could have come from fowls belonging to Indonesian neighbours who engaged in cock-fighting, the paper said. Officials called the incident an isolated case. "We expect our operations to destroy the chickens to be completed in 36 hours," the New Straits Times quoted Malaysia's veterinary chief, Abdul Aziz Jamaluddin, as saying. The World Health Organisation says H5N1 has infected more than 300 people in 12 countries, 188 of whom have died since the disease re-emerged in Asia in late 2003. Most human cases have involved people who have had contact with infected fowl. Experts fear if the virus mutates into a form that allows easy human-to-human transmission, it could trigger a pandemic that could kill millions around the world. (Additional reporting by Niluksi Koswanage in KUALA LUMPUR)
