Re: Pakistan: Bird Flu claims 2 lives; more suspects
Re: Pakistan: Bird Flu claims 2 lives; more suspects
Sunday, December 16, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: International health experts have been dispatched to Pakistan to help investigate the cause of South Asia's first human bird flu cases and determine if the virus was transmitted from person to person, an official and local media said Sunday.
Pakistan's Health Ministry said Saturday six people last month had tested positive for the H5N1 virus and one man had died, but officials have yet to comment on how the disease was transmitted.
The brother of the dead bird flu victim also died, but he had not been tested.
The H5N1 virus has killed at least 208 people worldwide, mostly in Southeast Asia and China, since it began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003.
So far, most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds. There have only been a few reported cases of it spreading from human to human, all among blood relatives.
Experts fear the virus could mutate into a form that passes easily among people, potentially sparking a pandemic.
The World Health Organization reported on its Web site that it had been informed of eight cases, not six, in Pakistan. Poultry outbreaks had earlier been reported in the area and slaughtering operations took place, WHO said.
The cases involved several family members. The Health Ministry confirmed two brothers died, but specimens were only collected from one. Another case has fully recovered, the WHO statement said. The condition of the other patients and their relationship to each other were not immediately available Sunday.
A WHO team was scheduled to arrive in Pakistan on Sunday and was expected to visit the affected areas to try to determine how the infections occurred and whether human-to-human transmission could have occurred, Khalif Bile, the WHO representative in Pakistan was quoted as saying in the Dawn newspaper.
A man who had been in contact with the Pakistan cases and then traveled to the United States tested negative for the virus in New York and at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said CDC spokesman Dave Daigle.
"There was a tie to the suspected human-to-human cases in Pakistan," he said.
A team from the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit in Cairo was being dispatched to Pakistan to help with the investigation, Daigle said.
People who came into contact with those infected in Pakistan are being monitored, the WHO said.
Bile told The Associated Press on Saturday that preliminary tests had been carried out. He said the WHO was encouraging the government to carry out confirmation tests in the same government laboratory and the results should be available by Tuesday.
A brother of the two men who died in Pakistan said Saturday he had been hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Mohammed Ishtiaq said he fell ill last month after slaughtering chickens suspected of carrying bird flu at a farm near Abbottabad.
"I was not aware that this was such a dangerous disease," said Ishtiaq, a veterinary doctor who works for a government-funded livestock program. He said he wore no protective clothing.
His two brothers did not accompany him to the farm, but visited him in hospital, Ishtiaq told Associated Press Television News in the village of Sukur.
He identified his brothers as Mohammed Ilyas and Mohammed Idrees and said they were both studying at an agriculture college in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
It was unclear if they had other contact with poultry or another potential sources of infection.
Ishtiaq said a fourth brother, a primary school teacher, also fell ill after visiting him but recovered. He said doctors had taken blood samples from him and other relatives but gave them no results.
The Health Ministry said Saturday it was treating people who had been in contact with those infected, setting up isolation wards in hospitals and procuring drugs for treatment and protective clothing for health workers.
Pakistan has grappled with outbreaks of bird flu in poultry for the past two years, but had previously not confirmed cases in humans.
___
Associated Press medical writer Margie Mason in Hanoi, Vietnam, Zarar Khan in Islamabad and APTN cameraman Inam ur-Rahman in Sukur contributed to this report.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8762434
Re: Pakistan: Bird Flu claims 2 lives; more suspects
Sunday, December 16, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: International health experts have been dispatched to Pakistan to help investigate the cause of South Asia's first human bird flu cases and determine if the virus was transmitted from person to person, an official and local media said Sunday.
Pakistan's Health Ministry said Saturday six people last month had tested positive for the H5N1 virus and one man had died, but officials have yet to comment on how the disease was transmitted.
The brother of the dead bird flu victim also died, but he had not been tested.
The H5N1 virus has killed at least 208 people worldwide, mostly in Southeast Asia and China, since it began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003.
So far, most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds. There have only been a few reported cases of it spreading from human to human, all among blood relatives.
Experts fear the virus could mutate into a form that passes easily among people, potentially sparking a pandemic.
The World Health Organization reported on its Web site that it had been informed of eight cases, not six, in Pakistan. Poultry outbreaks had earlier been reported in the area and slaughtering operations took place, WHO said.
The cases involved several family members. The Health Ministry confirmed two brothers died, but specimens were only collected from one. Another case has fully recovered, the WHO statement said. The condition of the other patients and their relationship to each other were not immediately available Sunday.
A WHO team was scheduled to arrive in Pakistan on Sunday and was expected to visit the affected areas to try to determine how the infections occurred and whether human-to-human transmission could have occurred, Khalif Bile, the WHO representative in Pakistan was quoted as saying in the Dawn newspaper.
A man who had been in contact with the Pakistan cases and then traveled to the United States tested negative for the virus in New York and at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said CDC spokesman Dave Daigle.
"There was a tie to the suspected human-to-human cases in Pakistan," he said.
A team from the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit in Cairo was being dispatched to Pakistan to help with the investigation, Daigle said.
People who came into contact with those infected in Pakistan are being monitored, the WHO said.
Bile told The Associated Press on Saturday that preliminary tests had been carried out. He said the WHO was encouraging the government to carry out confirmation tests in the same government laboratory and the results should be available by Tuesday.
A brother of the two men who died in Pakistan said Saturday he had been hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Mohammed Ishtiaq said he fell ill last month after slaughtering chickens suspected of carrying bird flu at a farm near Abbottabad.
"I was not aware that this was such a dangerous disease," said Ishtiaq, a veterinary doctor who works for a government-funded livestock program. He said he wore no protective clothing.
His two brothers did not accompany him to the farm, but visited him in hospital, Ishtiaq told Associated Press Television News in the village of Sukur.
He identified his brothers as Mohammed Ilyas and Mohammed Idrees and said they were both studying at an agriculture college in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
It was unclear if they had other contact with poultry or another potential sources of infection.
Ishtiaq said a fourth brother, a primary school teacher, also fell ill after visiting him but recovered. He said doctors had taken blood samples from him and other relatives but gave them no results.
The Health Ministry said Saturday it was treating people who had been in contact with those infected, setting up isolation wards in hospitals and procuring drugs for treatment and protective clothing for health workers.
Pakistan has grappled with outbreaks of bird flu in poultry for the past two years, but had previously not confirmed cases in humans.
___
Associated Press medical writer Margie Mason in Hanoi, Vietnam, Zarar Khan in Islamabad and APTN cameraman Inam ur-Rahman in Sukur contributed to this report.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8762434
However, it is not impossible, and if this mode of transmission is confirmed, there would be good reason to fear that the virus is mutating to a point where people could catch the infection from one another quite easily. Such a situation would have horrendous implications for the spread of a disease which medicine cannot cure and that has caused more than 200 human fatalities globally since 2003.
