(AP)
Updated: 2006-03-12 19:35

YAOUNDE, Cameroon - Cameroon has become the fourth African country to be struck by the deadly bird flu virus, as the government announced its first confirmed case on Sunday.

The H5N1 bird flu strain was detected in a duck on a farm close to the northern town of Maroua, near the border with neighboring Nigeria, the government said in a statement broadcast on state radio.

The fatal virus was first discovered in Africa on a commercial poultry farm in Nigeria in February. It has since been reported in Niger and Egypt.

Experts have expressed concern that bird flu was likely to be spreading undetected in Africa, which is ill-prepared to deal with the virus and lacks laboratories to detect the virus.

The statement did not say when the duck died, but said it was among 10 other birds that died recently in Maroua and were tested.

Cameroon's government said the tests that confirmed the H5N1 strain were carried out in a laboratory in Paris.

In response to the discovery, the government said it was reinforcing a ban "on the importation of chicken (and) its associated products ... from Nigeria and all countries affected by the bird flu." Authorities imposed the ban shortly after the fatal strain was reported in Nigeria.

The government said it would "take care" of the poultry of any affected farms, but there was no word on whether any birds would be slaughtered to prevent the disease's spread.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed or forced the slaughter of more than 140 million chickens and ducks across Asia since 2003, and has recently spread to Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Health officials fear H5N1 could evolve into a virus that can be transmitted easily between people and become a global pandemic.

That has not happened yet, but at least 97 people have died from the disease worldwide, two-thirds of them in Indonesia and Vietnam, according to WHO figures. No human cases have been detected so far in Africa.

Humans and poultry live close together on small farms across Africa, as in Asia where the current H5N1 wave began and where the virus first jumped to humans.