bird flu spreads to humans
Posted by fredifish tonight a general news article on bird flu
Thursday, February 03, 2005 Commentary | Home Asian bird flu beginning to spread among humans An alarming report by the New England Journal of Medicine says an 11-year-old Thailand girl spread a deadly bird flu virus to several members of her family. This is the first documented case in which the disease has spread between humans. Health officials all across Asia have been taking steps to keep poultry from spreading the virus to humans. This new report now presents a new challenge to keeping the disease in check.
In what may be the first documented case that the dangerous avian flu can be transmitted between humans, a new study concludes an 11-year-old girl in Thailand likely transmitted avian flu to her mother and aunt last summer. These would be the first documented cases of person-to-person transmission of the H5N1 avian flu, which has wreaked havoc across Asia in the past year, according to an article in the Jan. 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. With this new evidence, an editorial and perspective article in the same issue of the journal call for preventive measures that would avoid a worldwide pandemic of the disease. The avian flu in Asia has been particularly bad, with more than 120 million poultry dying or destroyed between January and March 2004, stated an editorial in the journal. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 52 people in Thailand and Vietnam have been infected and 39 have died over the past year. In Vietnam, two more people died from bird flu last Saturday, the Associated Press reported, bringing the total to nine dead in just three weeks. WHO officials are investigating whether there was human-to-human transmission in the case of two Vietnamese brothers who tested positive for the virus, the AP reported. "The concern is that the H5N1 avian strain can change, eventually emerging as a virus that can easily spread from human to human," said Dr. Mark Beilke, an associate professor of medicine at Tulane University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. "Right now, human-to-human transmission has been limited to this report." "We know it can happen," Monto said. The girl lived with her aunt in a province of Thailand and slept and played in an area under the elevated house where the family's chickens often wandered.
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