Posted on 02/03/2004 3:44:17 PM PST by blam
Bird flu virus claims 13th victim
Agencies
Tuesday February 3, 2004
A deadly strain of bird flu today took its 13th life when a seven-year-old Thai boy died in Bangkok after having tried to fight off the virus for more than a month. The boy, named by government officials as Virat Phraphong, from the chicken farming province of Suphanburi, had been suffering from pneumonia for a month before being put on a respirator at the Thai capital's children's hospital.
Officials said that the dead boy's twin brother, who had briefly been hospitalised with suspected bird flu, had turned out not to have the virus.
Since the government's admission last month that Thailand had suffered an outbreak of the virus, 11 more of its suspected victims have died. Laboratory tests have not yet confirmed whether the deaths were attributable to bird flu.
Four people are confirmed as having died from the virus in Thailand, with nine having died in Vietnam.
Despite its similarities to the influenza virus in humans, bird flu very rarely jumps species to infect people.
However, the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease, which can infect humans, has been found in bird populations in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia since it first emerged in Vietnam at the end of last year.
China, which has the world's largest poultry population, today said the H5N1 strain had been detected in poultry in the southern Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong. Three other regions on the mainland have also reported the strain.
Despite the rising death toll, Thai officials said they hoped to defeat the deadly virus this month, adding that poultry farmers should be able to resume business by June.
"We want to end it quickly. We will try to finish it within this month," the deputy prime minister, Somkid Jatusripitak, who is the head of the government's bird flu crisis management team, told reporters.
The World Health Organisation has described the rapid spread of the virus as "historically unprecedented", calling on the global scientific community to accelerate the search for a cure.
One theory is that infected migratory birds could have passed the strain to domestic fowl, which then infected humans.
But the biggest concern is that H5N1 could mix with a human flu and become more infectious among humans, producing a pandemic.
To stave off the threat to Asian tourism, officials meeting in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, considered strategies such as joint marketing campaigns, fewer curbs on travel and discounts on air travel and hotel stays.
The bird flu outbreak comes a year after the Sars virus devastated Asian economies.
The United Nations has warned that Asia's bird flu epidemic is not under control and will get worse unless emergency response measures are taken.
The organisation says the virus is likely to spread to other countries - and to more people - unless measures such as targeted vaccinations are taken.
The warning come as the bird flu death toll rises to 17.
Not getting much press.
THE 1918 influenza pandemic that killed some 20 million people worldwide was likely made possible by a virus that evolved from an avian virus, with slight changes that made it bind to human cells with deadly ease, researchers said today.
While the findings do not apply directly to the avian flu strain afoot, researchers say the data underscore how slight alterations in the influenza virus's infectivity could spawn a major epidemic.
The studies released on the website of the US journal Science detail the research of international researchers who were able to sequence parts of the genome of the 1918 influenza.
They emerged from a long collaboration between the late Don Wiley of Harvard University, who died in an accident in 2001; and Sir John Skehel, of the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research in London.
Skehel said researchers sought to understand how the 1918 version of the protein hemaglutinin could bind to receptors on human cells while retaining characteristics of its avian precursor virus.
Skehel said the current strain of avian flu that has killed people in Asia exposed to infected birds is closer to that of the Hong Kong flu.
"But presumably what's blocking this current flu from spreading person-to-person is that its hemaglutinin structure has not yet evolved such that it can efficiently infect humans," Skehel said.
Is it juat a matter of time?
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