Proof That Bird Flu Killed Man In Hong Kong Prompts Alarm

Doctors confirmed yesterday that a man who died of a viral illness in Hong Kong last Sunday had been suffering from "bird flu", in the first known fatality from the disease since 1997.

Health authorities in Hong Kong urged people to stay calm amid fears that the outbreak, thought to be caused by the transmission of the virus from chickens, could be the beginning of a pandemic.

The man's nine-year-old son is in hospital with the rare strain of flu, A(H5N1). One of hisdaughters died last month and his wife fell ill.

The World Health Organisation alerted its global influenza surveillance network and warned on Wednesday that the outbreak was "potentially very serious" if the virus was proved to have spread from person to person.

Yesterday, a spokesman for WHO said new information suggested this was unlikely because medical workers who had been in contact with the family had not been infected.

The spokesman said: "Occasionally bird flu escapes into humans but we have never seen a case transmit from human to human. It would be of utmost concern if it did." As news of the infection spread, some of the family's neighbours donned surgical masks and cleaners disinfected their apartment building.

Yeoh Eng-kiong, the Health Minister, urged residents to stay calm. "The source is direct from poultry, not from humans, so there should be no alarm." Officials have advised people to wash their hands after contact with chickens and to tell doctors if they have been in contact with poultry.

In 1997, the first known outbreak of A(H5N1) in humans infected 18 people and caused six deaths, leading to the slaughter of Hong Kong's 1.4 million chickens. This time, the authorities have killed nearly 20,000 chickens and other poultry since December.

'Bird flu' death in Hong Kong raises fears

15:04 20 February 03
NewScientist.com news service

A man in Hong Kong died and his son fell critically ill after contracting avian influenza or "bird flu", the World Health Organization has confirmed.

Genetic tests show that the virus is the H5N1 strain that emerged in 1997, killing six out of 18 people it infected. But the new cases in a single family have raised fears that a more contagious mutation of the deadly virus may have surfaced.

"Obviously, we are very concerned about the situation," says Yeoh Eng-kiong, Hong Kong's secretary for health, welfare and food. "But there is no need to panic."

The boy and his father contracted the virus after making a trip to the Fujian province of China in January. The 33-year-old man died on Sunday, but the boy has recovered and is now in a stable condition. The boy's sister also died after developing similar symptoms, but her illness has not yet been identified as bird flu, while the mother of the family has recovered from her illness.

Person to person

The 1997 outbreak was the first time the H5N1 strain had crossed the species barrier from poultry to humans. It prompted the slaughter of Hong Kong's entire stock of over a million birds. Most of the infected people were thought to have contracted the virus directly from birds.

Alan Hay, a virologist at the UK's National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, near London, says: "The concern is similar to that in 1997 - that the new virus may be able to spread from one person to another, and therefore spread more widely in the community."

If this is the case, "then it is far more serious", a WHO spokesman told The Independent newspaper. "The virus will be taken apart genetically. We will then be able to tell if it is exactly the same as in 1997 or whether it has changed and what the significance of any changes are."

But Hay cautions that there is no evidence so far to indicate this is the case: "We do not have information on the precise relationship between the virus that infected the father and that which infected his son."

Scientists have feared for some time that Hong Kong's crowded farms and live fowl markets could act as a breeding ground for new strains of the virus.

Genetic tests performed at St Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee, US, in August 2002, showed that the 1997 outbreak followed a single genetic mutation to the H5N1 virus.

The same researchers later linked two outbreaks among poultry in 2001 and 2002, showing that efforts to eradicate the virus by slaughtering chickens had not succeeded.

Major pandemics of influenza in 1918, 1957 and 1968 and left many millions of people dead.

Will Knight

They're not exaggerating the dangers.

The 1918 flu pandemic caused more deaths than had World War One.

My great-grandmother's brother died of the flu.

Here is a transcript from a Boulder CO newspaper article:

Died of the Flu.
Benjamin Harrison Little (Boulder Newspaper)
D: December 10, 1918

Benjamin H. Little Dead From The Influenza
Benjamin H. Little of 1103 Sixth Street died last night at eight o’clock at University Hospital of influenza. He reported at the Wolf Market December 10 for work but became too ill and went home. He was a fine young man and his death is regretted by a wide circle of friends. He leaves a wife and three children. Mrs. Little’s mother, Mrs. Grass, makes her home with her.

See? My great-granduncle WENT TO WORK, fell ill, went home, and died. All within 12 hours. This virus had spread worldwide within days, almost totally by air circulation. There was almost no air transport then (none intercontinental) and highway speeds approached 20 mph on a good day. Trains and ships were of limited scope.

Now you and I can get from point "A" to point "B", usually in hours, and seldom more than a day or two. Our mobility is a disease vector's opportunity. And if terrorists get some pathogens to spread around, causing an epidemic, we will have a world crisis that dwarfs anything on the stage now.

Thanks for the link! This paragraph is very interesting:

Flu epidemics kill mostly at the demographic fringes--the very old, whose immune systems are the least robust, and the very young. Other adults do get sick, but they rarely die. In 1918, however, the usual pattern of mortality was reversed. The Longyearbyen seven, for example, were all between the ages of nineteen and twenty-eight, and that was by no means unusual. In the United States, men between twenty-five and twenty-nine died of the Spanish flu at several times the rate of men between seventy and seventy-four.

My great-granduncle (mentioned in post 6) had just turned 30 years old.

Thanks for the link! This paragraph is very interesting: Flu epidemics kill mostly at the demographic fringes--the very old, whose immune systems are the least robust, and the very young. Other adults do get sick, but they rarely die. In 1918, however, the usual pattern of mortality was reversed. The Longyearbyen seven, for example, were all between the ages of nineteen and twenty-eight, and that was by no means unusual. In the United States, men between twenty-five and twenty-nine died of the Spanish flu at several times the rate of men between seventy and seventy-four. My great-granduncle (mentioned in post 6) had just turned 30 years old.

My grandmother died of the flu in 1922, when she was in her early twenties...my mom was just six months old. Could this have been the same flu or was that flu only active in 1918?

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