How Did Seven Family Members Get Infected With Bird Flu?

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Main Category: Bird Flu / Avian Flu
Article Date: 19 May 2006 - 10:00 PDT

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We still don't know how seven members of the same family in Indonesia became infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus strain. Six of them have died. It is vital to know whether some of them infected each other. If they did, this would mean that the virus might be changing.

The World Health Organization says that it is highly unlikely that H5N1 has mutated in this case. If it had, WHO believes more people from outside the family would have become infected.

The problem is that many days have passed and no one has managed to find any other source. If they had become infected by sick chickens or ducks, surely they would have been traced by now.

Henry Niman, Ph.D., President of Recombinomics, is calling for the release of the human H5N1 bird flu sequences from the dead family members which are held in the WHO database. He said the bimodal distribution of infection, starting with the index case who became ill on April 27, to family members in early May, indicates the possibility of human-to-human transmission. It is vital to know whether/how the H5N1 genome has changed.

Scientists fear that when the H5N1 bird flu virus strain mutates, it will gain the ability to transmit from human to human. At the moment it cannot do that easily. If it does manage to mutate in this way, we could be facing a serious flu pandemic. Nobody knows what the mutated virus will be like - it could be extremely lethal or relatively harmless.

Nowhere in the world so far, except in this case in Indonesia, have so many people of the same family become infected within a few days of each other.

Indonesia's neighbours are increasingly nervous at its inability to stop the bird flu spread. New cases of sick chickens have been reported in the eastern Papua province - which has alarmed Australia.

Over 200 million chickens live in people's backyards in Indonesia. This makes it especially hard to contain the bird flu spread and to really know how many sick chickens there are.

Indonesian authorities seem unable to cope with the task of implementing measures to control avian flu at the district level. Different regions of the country are doing what they can with very little supervision from central authorities.

WHO has urged Indonesian authorities to do more to raise public awareness.

Thailand and Vietnam have been praised for their effective efforts in containing the spread of avian influenza.

Bird flu = Avian Flu
Flu = Influenza

Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today