A nine-year-old Thai girl has died after contracting Asian bird flu.
The girl, who contracted the disease after coming into contact with infected chickens, died last night soon after being confirmed as having the bird flu virus nearly a month after falling ill.
The Thai government has been spurred into action by Thailand's first probable human-to-human transmission of the virus last week.
Volunteers will inspect every village in the country and put anyone showing flu-like symptoms on the government's bird flu watch list, the country's health minister said.
So far, 85 patients in 22 of Thailand's 76 provinces are waiting for test results after being sent to hospital with flu -like symptoms, a ministry statement said.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra gave his government until the end of October to eliminate the virus, but experts say that task is nearly impossible given the resilience of a virus that has survived the slaughter of tens of millions of poultry.
What they fear most is that the H5N1 virus could infect an animal also able to host a human flu virus - most likely a pig - and then mutate and set off a pandemic among a human population with no resistance to the mutated virus.
In 1918, just such a pandemic killed an estimated 20 million people around the world.