LOOKING AT THE NUMBERS

Bird Flu Deaths in 2006 Match Prior 2 Years Combined (Update1)

By Jason Gale and Vesna Poljak

Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Bird flu killed a 39-year-old woman in Egypt, pushing the number of fatalities worldwide this year to 74, as many as reported in the previous two years combined.

Egypt's Health Ministry confirmed the country's seventh death from the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, the World Health Organization said in a statement yesterday. The woman's death on Oct. 30 was linked to diseased poultry she helped slaughter at her home on the Nile Delta in September.

Diseased birds increase the opportunities for human infection and provide chances for H5N1 to change into a form more dangerous to people. The virus is reported to have killed a person about every four days this year, more than double the 2005 rate. Millions could die if H5N1 becomes easily transmissible between people, sparking a lethal pandemic.

``As the distribution among poultry populations increases, more humans are getting exposed and these increased human cases and fatalities are a sign that this is an ever-developing situation,'' David Nabarro, the senior United Nations system coordinator for avian and pandemic influenza, said in a telephone interview from Bangkok last month.

The H5N1 virus is known to have infected 256 people in 10 countries in the past three years, killing 152 of them, the WHO said yesterday. Last year, 42 fatalities were confirmed, after 32 in 2004 and four in 2003. More than five of every 10 reported cases were fatal.

Indonesian Patients

Doctors in Indonesia, the country with the most H5N1 fatalities, are testing three more people for the virus. A 3- year-old girl and her 14-year-old brother are being treated in an isolation ward at Hasan Sadikin Hospital in the West Java city of Bandung, said Hadi Yusuf, a doctor at the hospital.

The siblings from the Banjarnegara district had contact with diseased poultry, Yusuf said. A 62-year-old man from Bandung is also suffering from avian-flu-like symptoms, he said.

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

Disease trackers are monitoring for signs the virus is becoming adept at infecting humans, not just birds. The lethal H5N1 strain was first detected in a farmed goose a decade ago in Guangdong, the same province of China where severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, was reported in 2003.

`Poorly Infectious'

H5N1 is ``still poorly infectious in humans,'' said Peter Doherty, an immunology professor at the University of Melbourne who was awarded a Nobel prize in 1996 for discoveries surrounding the specificity of cell-mediated immune defense. ``The longer it goes on, the longer it looks as though we probably ducked a bullet.

``The question is, if it does change to be highly infectious to humans, will it be as pathogenic?'' Doherty said in an interview last month.

More perilous would be a virus that causes less debilitating disease in humans and fewer fatalities, enabling people to spread to more widely in droplets shed through coughing and sneezing, he said. ``What would be dangerous is if we get an intermediate virus that's not killing 50 percent, but killing 5 percent'' of those infected.

$2 Trillion Cost

He said such a virus would resemble the so-called 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed about 50 million people. A similar pandemic could cause global economic losses of as much as $2 trillion, the World Bank said in June.

The H5N1 virus is reported to have spread in wild birds and domestic poultry to at least 38 countries this year. More than 209 million poultry have died or been culled worldwide since January 2004 because of H5N1, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization said in a June 19 report.

``The virus in birds continues to move at a rapid rate, causing major damage to the poultry industry,'' Nabarro said.

``The work that has been done by many countries to stamp out avian influenza has meant that the human cases and fatalities are unfortunately confined to a few nations,'' he said. ``We have to further increase our efforts to stamp out the virus in poultry and other bird populations and at the same time do more to reduce the contact between humans and sick birds.''

To contact the reporters on this story: Jason Gale in Tokyo at j.gale@bloomberg.net ; Vesna Poljak in Sydney at vpoljak@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: October 31, 2006 23:00 EST