Bird flu killing a person every 4 days this year!

Tests for bird flu are being run on 9 people from a province of Indonesia's
eastern island of Sulawesi, where one of the patients, a 1-year-old boy,
probably died of the virus this week.

The child from the South Sulawesi district of Maros died 17 Oct 2006, hours
after he was admitted to the Wahidin Sudirohusodo Hospital in Makassar with
flu-like symptoms, said Halif Saleh, a doctor who treated the infant.
Samples from the boy are being tested for the H5N1 strain of avian
influenza, Runizar Ruesin, head of the Health Ministry's Avian Flu Center,
said in a phone interview today.

If confirmed, the child would be the 152nd person to die from the virus
since 2003. World health experts say millions could die if H5N1 mutates to
become easily transmissible between humans. Almost half the 109 cases
reported this year have occurred in Indonesia, the world's 4th-most
populous country.

Tests for the H5N1 virus are being run on 8 others being treated in the
Wahidin Sudirohusodo Hospital. They are all from South Sulawesi province,
where the disease is known to have infected poultry, Ruesin said. It wasn't
immediately known whether the patients are related, he said.

A 14-year-old girl died on 24 Jun 2006 of the H5N1 strain in the provincial
capital, Makassar, the World Health Organization said last month.

The virus is reported to have killed a person every 4 days worldwide this
year, more than double the 2005 rate, creating more chances for it to
become more contagious to people. At least 256 people in 10 countries have
caught H5N1 since late 2003, the WHO said on 16 Oct 2006. Almost all human
H5N1 cases have been linked to close contact with sick or dead birds, such
as children playing with them or adults butchering them or plucking
feathers, according to the WHO.


While the virus doesn't spread easily between people, some human-to-human
transmission may have occurred.

Indonesia attracted international attention in May 2006 when 7 members of a
family from the island of Sumatra contracted H5N1, 6 of them fatally. The
cases represented the largest reported cluster of human cases and the 1st
laboratory-proven instance of human-to-human transmission.

[Byline: Karima Anjani]