Friday March 26 2:05 PM ET

Malaysia May Gas Pigs To Check Deadly Virus

By Benjamin Low

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (Reuters) - Malaysia said Friday it was considering gassing pigs en masse, because troops sent in to prevent the spread of a deadly virus linked to pigs could not shoot the animals fast enough.

Some 1,000 soldiers in protective gear and masks have killed more than 70,000 pigs in the worst-hit central state of Negeri Sembilan since Saturday to try to contain the outbreak.

Authorities had planned to shoot more than 350,000 pigs over 10 days, but because it was taking too long they were expected to use carbon monoxide to help kill the 280,000 remaining pigs.

Authorities admitted they knew almost nothing about a second virus that might have caused many of the 62 deaths blamed on an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis, one of the country's worst viral epidemics.

The World Health Organization said Friday that it was ready to provide technical advice and mobilize additional global resources to help control the outbreak. Health experts from Australia, Taiwan and the United States are already in Malaysia.

In a statement to Malaysia's national news agency Bernama, the WHO said it had been monitoring the situation and been in regular contact with Malaysian authorities since the outbreak, which began in October but has worsened in recent weeks.

The deaths in pig-farming regions had long been linked to encephalitis, carried by mosquito and harbored in pigs.

But health director-general Abu Bakar Suleiman said Friday that only 18 people were confirmed to have died from encephalitis and the rest could have been infected by a mysterious second virus.

He said this virus, also linked to pigs, had been found in the blood samples of at least 12 people previously suspected to be encephalitis victims.

Only 42 of 171 people in hospitals with symptoms of encephalitis -- such as high fever, headaches, dizziness, convulsions and loss of consciousness -- were confirmed infected with the encephalitis virus, officials said.

Nordin Mohd Nor, director-general of the veterinary services department, said authorities were puzzled about how the virus was spread.

Little is known about the second virus, said to be related to the Hendra virus which is a fruit bat virus discovered in Australia in 1994 that causes encephalitis-like symptoms.

This virus, named after an Australian town, killed two people and 15 horses in Australia during outbreaks in 1994 and 1995, experts said.

Officials said victims sometimes died within a week of being infected, before they developed enough antibodies to show the presence of encephalitis. Therefore, they said, it was difficult to confirm which virus had infected the patients.

Authorities believe the second virus is not highly contagious and is transmitted through direct contact with body fluids, including urine, of infected animals.

Tom Ksiazek, a U.S. health expert from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a news conference the new virus could have come from fruit bats that had infected pigs in Malaysia, not horses brought from Australia.