UNITED NATIONS, March 22 (UPI) -- The World Health Organization Tuesaday confirmed five human bird flu fatalities in Azerbaijan, sending the global death toll past 100.
With seven new Azeri cases of the H5N1 virus, five of which were fatal, there have now been 184 human cases in eight Asian and European countries, and 103 deaths, all but 15 of which occurred in Asia.
"There have been something like 180 million birds that have died either directly from the disease or been culled because they were exposed to it," said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson, giving the 100-death milestone a positive spin. "Yet it's taken us all this time -- more than two years, almost three years now -- to cross this barrier."
Over the weekend, the WHO found evidence of unburied dead swans near the village of Daikyand, Azerbaijan, where the cluster of victims lived and where the de-feathering of birds is commonly undertaken by young girls and women.
Last week the virus spread deeper into Cameroon and Nigeria, appeared in at least two human cases in Egypt, and saw Israel the 29th country to discover infected birds.
With almost all human infections caused by close contact with sick or dead birds, the WHO stressed that it was an animal pandemic and had found no sign the virus was mutating in order to spread more quickly from animal to human or human to human.
The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic killed an estimated 20 to 40 million people worldwide over the course of two years.
