Bird Flu Kills One Person, And Five Infected In Pakistan

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Main Category: Bird Flu / Avian Flu
Article Date: 15 Dec 2007 - 9:00 PDT

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Bird flu has killed one person and infected five to possibly seven others in Pakistan; the Health Ministry has confirmed five other patients were infected with the virulent H5N1 virus strain. Another patient who died is suspected of having bird flu. All the patients became infected in late October and came from the North West Frontier Province.

Confirmation was made in a national laboratory (Pakistan), the samples have been sent on to the WHO H5 Reference Laboratory for confirmation and further analysis.

The patient died in hospital, as did his brother - the brother has not had H5N1 infection confirmed yet.

According to a statement by the Ministry of Health, the other five infected patients have made a full recovery.

These are the first recorded cases of humans becoming infected with H5N1 bird flu in Pakistan. The country has had outbreaks among birds, which started last year. Most of the multiple poultry outbreaks occurred in the 'poultry belt' of North-West Frontier Province, particularly in the Abbottabad and Mansehra area.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has received reports of eight humans suspected of H5N1 infection in the Peshawar area. These human cases were detected during a culling operation that was dealing with an outbreak among poultry.

The WHO reports that Pakistan's Ministry of Health has taken steps to contain the spread of bird flu in. Cases have been isolated, experts are trying to find out exactly how the patients became infected, and Tamiflu (oseltamivir) has been administered. Inspectors are also checking local hospitals for infection control measures. WHO is providing the Ministry of Health with technical support in epidemiological investigations, reviewing the surveillance, and the implementation of prevention and control measures.

Bird Flu and H5N1

H5N1 is a strain of the bird flu virus - the strain everyone is concerned about because humans have no immunity against it, it is very strong and dangerous (virulent).

Scientists fear that the H5N1 bird flu virus strain will eventually mutate and become easily human transmissible. This has not happened yet. It is still extremely difficult for birds to infect humans, and even harder for a human to infect another human.

It is believed that one of the ways H5N1 could mutate would be by infecting a person who is sick with the normal human flu virus. The bird flu virus would then have the opportunity to exchange genetic information with the bird flu virus and acquire its ability to spread easily from human-to-human (become easily human transmissible). If this happened, we could be facing a serious, global flu pandemic.

If we can keep the number of outbreaks among birds down to a minimum, then the number of humans becoming infected is also low - giving the bird flu virus fewer opportunities to mutate.

One theory is that the main reason humans do not catch it easily is that it has to reach deep down into the lung(s) to take hold and make the person sick - for this to happen exposure must be close (contact) and there has to be a lot of the virus about. It is even harder for a human to infect another human because the infected person expels hardly any viruses when he/she coughs for the same reason - the virus is deep down in the lungs. If H5N1 mutated so that it could infect higher up the respiratory tract it would then spread more easily as more of it would be expelled after each cough/sneeze and it would not have to go so deep down into the next human in order to make him/her sick. However, if this happened the flu would probably be less deadly as upper-respiratory tract infections are spotted earlier on and can be treated earlier compared to lung infections that are deep down. This is all theory - things could develop in a completely different way.

Written by - Christian Nordqvist


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