’Bird flu is hard to get, and even harder to beat’

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   http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1497915.cms

'Bird flu is hard to get, and even harder to beat'
[ Thursday, April 20, 2006 07:42:33 pmAP ]

HANOI: Bird flu remains extremely hard for people to catch, but it strikes with deadly force in the unlucky few who become infected, new research suggests. 

It's a good-news, bad-news message that has frustrated scientists trying to understand the disease and head off a possible pandemic. 

In one of the largest studies of its kind, scientists in Cambodia took blood samples from 351 people in a small village where one of the country's six bird flu deaths traced to the H5N1 virus was confirmed. 

They found no antibodies for H5N1 in any of the specimens, indicating nobody became infected but recovered after falling only mildly ill or displaying no symptoms whatsoever. 

The results mirror similar studies conducted in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia � where the virus has shown up in birds and the people it has infected. 

While experts stress more research is needed to determine the disease's true virulence, the research strengthens the WHO's grim assessment that H5N1 kills about 56% of those infected. 

The good news, doctors say, is that most people don't catch the virus in its current form. The bad news is that those who do are in grave danger. 

"Clearly, we're not seeing widespread classical influenza infections with this virus or we would have picked it up by now," said Michael Perdue, a WHO virologist in Geneva. "I think the case fatality rate probably is pretty significant given the data that we have." 

The authors said they expected to find bird flu antibodies in at least 2% of the people they sampled, and were baffled why only one 28-year-old farmer died. Dead birds were reported in the village in Cambodia's Kampot province and the H5N1 virus was detected in poultry there. 

Many villagers said they had very close contact with the birds. "That supports data from all over the region suggesting it's very inefficient to transfer from birds to humans," said Benjamin Coghlan, a WHO epidemiologist from Australia who participated in the study.