40th Human Bird Flu Death Confirmed In Indonesia

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Main Category: Bird Flu / Avian Flu
Article Date: 03 Jul 2006 - 10:00 PDT

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Indonesia has confirmed that a 5-year-old boy is the country's 40th human bird flu death. A World Health Organization laboratory in Hong Kong confirmed that the boy, from Tulungagung, East Java, was infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus strain - the most virulent one.

The boy was admitted to hospital on 8 June and died eight days later.

Authorities say there had been sightings of a dead chicken near the boy's house.

If the human bird flu death rate in Indonesia continues as it has done this year, it will not be long before the country overtakes Vietnam and become the country with the most human deaths.

About one third of Indonesia's 1.2 billion chickens live in people's back yards.

Monitoring and controlling the spread of bird flu in Indonesia is extremely difficult. The country has 220 million people, 17,000 islands which spread over three thousand miles. Experts say bird flu is now established there.

Unlike other countries which saw the appearance of bird flu in their poultry and ordered mass cullings, Indonesia has not done so. Authorities there say it would be far too expensive. Some vaccinating of poultry stocks have taken place.

The problem for humans when bird flu becomes established in poultry in a country is that the incidence of human infection rises. The more cases of human infection there are, the more likely it is that H5N1 mutates. For the moment, humans cannot catch bird flu easily. Humans very, very rarely infect other humans. If H5N1 mutated it could acquire the ability to spread easily among humans. This could bring about a serious flu pandemic.

For the H5N1 virus strain to mutate and become easily human transmissible it needs to exchange genetic information with the normal human flu virus. If it infects a human who has the normal human flu it could do this. The fewer humans that are infected with bird flu, the more difficult it is for H5N1 to mutate in a way that could be a danger to human public health.

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

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