 Seven cases of humans diagnosed bird flu in Indonesia have caused concern around the world. However, health officials in that country now maintain that all seven infected people are part of a definite cluster that can be linked to other patients. Disease trackers maintain that the H5N1 virus in these cases can be directly traced to other patients. With that said, they have been yet unable to identify the animals than may have infected these people in the first instance. Despte a team of international experts trying to trace the source of the infections in Indonesia, the animals have yet to be identified or found. The Indonesia cases represent the first time that medical experts have been able to identify evidence of a three person chain of infection, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO reported that a ten year old boy appears to have caught the infection from his aunt. It further appears that the boy passed the infection on to his father. Six of the seven infected people are now dead. Since 2003, nearly all of the 218 cases of H5N1 or bird flu infections can be traced to direct contact with diseased birds. With that said, strong evidence of human to human transmission may now prompt the WHO to convene a panel of experts to consider the possibility of raising the pandemic alert level, according to WHO spokesperson Maria Cheng. Health experts are concerned that the spread of bird flu from human to human contact might set off a lethal and global outbreak of the disease. Most flu pandemics have been relatively mild. However, in 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic killed approximately 50 million people around the world. Health officials did find strong evidence of human to human transmission of the bird flu virus in Thailand in 2004. Scientists writing in the New England Journal of Medicine believed that the virus in Thailand probably spead from an eleven year old girl to her aunt and mother, killing the mother and the girl. People who actually had more casual contact with the child did not end up infected with the bird flu virus. WHO spokesperson Cheng notes that in order to raise the pandemic alert level, it would have to be demonstrated that bird flu can be transmitted through more casual contact between people. |
