The South Korean government on Sunday confirmed a new outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu among live poultry in the capital city of Seoul.

Bird flu has spread to the hilly Darjeeling district of eastern India which has been hit by avian influenza several times already this year, a minister said today. Meanwhile, a dead swan tested positive for the virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu in northern Japan, local authorities said today, the third confirmed case in the past month in the country.

South Korea will double its stockpiles of antiviral flu medicine Tamiflu as avian flu has spread through most the country, health officials said Saturday. South Korea has not recorded any human cases, however the deadly H5N1 strain was detected in an aviary in Seoul this week, the first time bird flu has been found in the capital.

Authorities in India's West Bengal state today confirmed a new H5N1 virus outbreak in the Darjeeling district, as agriculture officials in South Korea reported that the virus had struck birds in the eastern part of the country, pushing the number of recent outbreaks to 35. Rajesh Pande, a senior government official in Darjeeling, one of India's primary tea-growing regions, said about 300 backyard poultry died last week near the town of Siliguri in the foothills of the Himalayas, according to a report from Reuters today.

Japanese officials are worried that the H5N1 bird flu virus may be spreading among wild birds in the north after the body of a swan tested positive for the disease, the third case in recent weeks. No poultry have been affected so far, said Shigeki Oda, a farm official in the northern island of Hokkaido.

The world still faces a substantial threat of a flu pandemic and countries need to speed up preparations for a global outbreak, health experts said Tuesday. Scientists fear that the H5N1 strain of bird flu virus _ which began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003 _ could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans, potentially sparking a pandemic that kills millions. So far, most human cases have been linked to contact with infected birds.

In the backstreets of a Bali village, all hell has broken loose. The Balinese rural calm has been invaded by men with megaphones and masks, there are sirens wailing down the main street, and at the centre of it all, Putu Arini sits quietly on the porch of her house, waiting for the police. A few hours ago, her husband was taken to the local health clinic, with bird flu-like symptoms, and now investigators have told her she is being quarantined. Luckily, all this comes as no surprise to Putu Arini. In fact the village has been planning this for months.

A row involving Indonesia, the United States and the World Health Organization over the sharing of bird flu virus samples is jeopardizing the global early warning system for a potential influenza pandemic and putting lives at risk, say experts and officials. The row centers on the issue of profits made by multinational pharmaceutical companies from vaccines developed using the samples. Indonesian officials say their country -- and other poorer nations that send samples to the WHO -- is being cheated out of the benefits and cannot afford the vaccines manufactured using the virus samples they provide.

Indonesia does not want money for its bird flu virus samples — it wants governments and pharmaceutical companies to come up with a mechanism that will ensure future pandemic vaccines are accessible to developing nations. That could include creating a multilateral trust that would enable price tiering or bulk purchasing of lifesaving vaccines, an adviser to Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said Wednesday. Widjaja Lukito was responding to comments made by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, who accused Indonesia of withholding virus samples from the World Health Organization since early 2007 because it wanted royalties or other monetary benefits.

South Korea will slaughter at least 5.32 million birds to contain its latest outbreak of bird flu, the highest-ever number of poultry killed in the country to stop the disease's spread. South Korea has killed 4.85 million birds since the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu broke out earlier this month for the first time in more than a year, said Agriculture Ministry official Jin Pil-sik on Monday.