Disease/Infection News
Indonesian health authorities have announced another case of
bird flu, bringing the country's total confirmed cases to 130 to
date with 105 deaths.
Indonesia has had the highest number of human deaths from the
bird flu virus in the world.
The latest victim is a 22-month-old girl from Sumatra's Bukit
Tinggi region.
The child fell ill on March 19th and she is currently being
treated at a Padang hospital where she is said to be improving.
Health officials are checking the neighbourhood where she lives
for possible backyard farming, as contact with sick birds remains
the most common way of contracting the deadly H5N1 virus.
Bird flu is endemic in bird populations in most of Indonesia
and the vast archipelago has chickens living in most backyards
amongst families and pets.
Experts continue to worry that the virus will mutate into a
form passed between people causing a pandemic in which millions of
people could die.
Meanwhile leading bird flu expert and microbiologist, professor
Yi Guan, at the University of Hong Kong, says an influenza
pandemic can be avoided if disease surveillance and control
measures are properly and promptly conducted.
Dr. Guan has been studying and tracking the H5N1 bird flu virus
since it first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997.
He says with proper surveillance in both animals and humans and
a long-term strategy, a pandemic influenza can be stopped forever.
Dr. Guan works in a laboratory which is a World Health
Organisation reference facility which helps to analyse H5N1
samples from other parts of the world, particularly Asia and it is
here that he has compared H5N1 samples, traced mutations in the
virus and tracked its footprints.
In research published last week in the Journal of Virology, he
and his colleagues suggest that the H5N1 strains which showed up
in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia in late 2003 probably originated
in China's southwestern Yunnan province.
He says they detected almost identical viruses in Yunnan in
late 2002 and early 2003 and the poultry trade might have been
responsible for the introduction of the virus into Vietnam.
Dr. Guan says surveillance must be a long term effort and from
what is known of past pandemics, surveillance and strict control
measures are the answers. http://www.news-medical.net/?id=36763
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