BEIJING, March 7 (Reuters) - China has suffered an outbreak of H5N1 avian flu among poultry in remote Tibet, while the virus also struck down thousands of wild birds in the region, state media and animal health monitors reported late on Tuesday. In a report submitted to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), China's chief veterinary officer, Jia Youling, said the poultry died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, which can be deadly to humans who have close contact with infected birds. Jia reported that 680 fowl died in the outbreak in Chengguan Village near Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and nearly 7,000 other birds there were culled, according to the OIE Web site (www.oie.int). The poultry died on March 1, the official Xinhua news agency reported. It did not specify what kind of birds were infected. The government has closed the market and is also monitoring the health of wild birds, it added. "Specialists believe the virus was introduced by wild birds migrating from east Africa to west Asia as no outbreaks of the disease had been reported in the source areas of the poultry," Xinhua said. Jia also reported three separate outbreaks of H5N1 among wild birds in Tibet, including one that killed 28 migratory birds near Lhasa and two others that killed 2,579 and 57 wild birds elsewhere in the region. The wild species infected included bar-headed geese, crows and hawks, according to the OIE. There were also two outbreaks that killed 984 wild birds in Qinghai province, which neighbours Tibet, as well as two deaths among wild birds in northeast China's Liaoning province, Jia reported. His report gave no dates for the wild bird deaths. Some scientists believe many outbreaks of bird flu in China's vast poultry sector have gone unreported until human infections in effected places have alerted health officials to the presence of the virus. A woman farmer in China's southeastern province of Fujian has been infected with the H5N1 form of bird flu, China confirmed last week, the first human case in the country in about seven weeks. World Health Organisation officials have gone to the site of that case to investigate. The Ministry of Agriculture said an investigation team it sent down to the woman's village found no trace of the H5N1 virus in poultry samples. China has now reported a total of 23 human cases of bird flu, including 14 deaths, since 2003 and, with the largest poultry population and millions of backyard birds roaming free, it is seen as central to the fight against the virus. China will vaccinate billions of domestic poultry over the next few months to guard against an outbreak of bird flu this spring, when the virus is at its most contagious, state media reported on Monday.
