Indonesia Reports 42nd Human Bird Flu Death

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Main Category: Bird Flu / Avian Flu
Article Date: 16 Jul 2006 - 6:00 PDT

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A 44-year-old man has died as a result of bird flu infection, say authorities in Indonesia. The man was from eastern Jakarta. He was hospitalized on 10 July with a temperature, breathing problems and a bad cough.

Authorities said the man had been in close contact with live poultry.

Local tests indicated he died of H5N1 avian flu infection. As with all local confirmed tests, samples have been sent on to a WHO recognized laboratory in Hong Kong for final confirmation.

This last case will bring Indonesia equal to Vietnam regarding total human bird flu deaths. Thirty people have died so far in Indonesia this year alone, while not one confirmed death has been reported in Vietnam (this year).

As Indonesia's efforts to combat the bird flu spread have not been organized in a uniform, systematic way, experts say it is most likely the virus will thrive in the country for many years to come. Authorities in Indonesia have been reluctant to organize mass culls of poultry in areas where infections have been found because of the huge costs involved in compensating farmers and smallholders.

It is becoming a widely accepted theory among the scientific community that the virulent H5N1 bird flu virus strain will eventually mutate into a more human transmissible form. For the moment, H5N1 cannot infect humans easily. For it to spread easily from human-to-human it will need to mutate. In order to mutate, it will most likely infect a human who has the normal flu. The bird flu virus could exchange genetic information with the normal human flu virus and gain its ability to transmit easily from human-to-human. If, or when this happens, we could be facing a serious pandemic. How serious the pandemic is depends on how virulent the new, mutated virus is.

The reason why humans cannot catch bird flu easily is that it needs to get deep down in the human lung to make a person ill. In order to do that a person must have a large cluster of H5N1 around him/her for some of them to get deep down. H5N1 does not infect the human upper-respiratory tract. Precisely for this reason humans cannot infect other humans easily. An infected person who coughs and/or sneezes does not expel many bird flu viruses because they are too deep down. For H5N1 to spread easily among humans it will need to mutate so that it infects the upper-respiratory tract. On the positive side, upper-respiratory tract infections are easier to treat than lower-respiratory tract infections. Hopefully, if and when the virus mutates, even though there may be many more human infections, each one will be easier to treat and survival rates will be much higher than they currently are.

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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