Tests on the five year old Indonesian girl who died last week in a Javan hospital confirm she had the deadly strain of H5N1 bird flu, according to an announcement by the World Health Organization earlier today.

The little girl developed symptoms on the 8th of May, was hospitalized on the 15th and died on the 17th. She came from Wonogiri district, Central Java Province, and most probably caught the disease from touching dead diseased poultry.

This brings the country’s total deaths from the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu to 77. This is the highest number of deaths from the disease of any country in the world.

Meanwhile according to global news agency AFP, the WHO is investigating a case of suspected H5N1 infection in a 30 year old farmer who is in a critical condition in a Hanoi hospital. It appears he helped a neighbour to slaughter chickens on a farm where a number of birds were later reported to have died from an infection. A veterinary team is currently investigating the farm.

If confirmed, this would be the first human infection in Vietnam for 18 months. Up to 2005 there were 93 confirmed cases and 42 human deaths due to H5N1 in the country.

So far cases of H5N1 infection in humans have occurred in 12 countries: Azerbaijan, Cambodia, China, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam.

The total number of laboratory-confirmed cases of avian flu in humans reported to the WHO since 2003 is 307, of which 186 have been fatal.

The number of cases in humans is fortunately still low, in comparison to the spread of the virus among bird populations. This is because the virus cannot spread from human to human, it can only spread from infected bird to human. However, experts fear that the more opportunity the virus has to exist in bird populations, the more chance there is one day that it will mutate into a form that spreads from human to human.

In Pakistan, reports in various media by the press agency DPA say that more than 6,000 birds have been culled this month to control an outbreak of H5N1 at three chicken farms in Islamabad. Tests have confirmed the presence of the deadly virus, but so far no humans have been infected. This brings the total number of outbreaks in birds in Pakistan to 23 this year.

There have been no reported cases of human infections from H5N1 in Pakistan, according to the WHO statistics.

In February this year, Bangladesh officially announced its first H5N1 avian influenza outbreak. Since then the virus has spread to 11 out of 64 districts.

According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the way the virus is spreading should be carefully investigated and a national strategy deployed. They suggest it is spreading through the collection and distribution of eggs and day-old chicks. They recommend full scale culling in all affected areas and that the authorities control the movement of people, animals and goods in those areas.

Bangladesh is a densely populated country with a thriving poultry industry employing 5 million people directly. Millions of families also have their own small poultry farm for their own consumption and to supplement their income. Altogether, around 220 million chickens and 37 million ducks are farmed throughout Bangladesh.

Three funding organizations, the Asian Development Bank, USAID and FAO’s multidonor Special Fund for Emergency and Rehabilitation Activities (SFERA) have already given funds to help Bangladesh control the spread of H5N1. Also the FAO is supplying a team of experts to help the Bangladeshi government.

The development of new vaccines to protect against a possible outbreak of a human to human version of H5N1 was the subject of the annual World Health Assembly in Geneva this week. The countries present failed to agree on the rules for sharing virus samples. Virus samples are important for vaccine development because the virus keeps mutating.

Indonesia took a tough stand recently when it stopped sharing virus samples because it did not think it was fair that a country that was hardest hit by the virus should be denied affordable vaccines.

Apparently, according to a report in the Financial Times, all countries did agree to a compromise whereby they would all forward virus samples to WHO laboratories, but they did not agree to allow vaccine manufacturers to have access to the samples. This decision was deferred for another time.

Click here for WHO Avian Influenza site.

Click here for FAO Avian Influenza site.

Written by: Catharine Paddock
Writer: Medical News Today