Posted on 02/21/2003 9:38:57 AM PST by dead
A strain of flu that jumped from birds to humans has killed a man and infected his son in Hong Kong, alarming health officials who fear that such cases could signal the emergence of a potentially deadly virus.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has alerted its global influenza surveillance network.
But scientists said the virus had not yet mutated into a form that could pass from human to human, the type which in the past caused global pandemics.
A leading microbiologist in Hong Kong said the virus could cause a pandemic only if it got mixed up with human flu strains.
The illnesses are clustered in a family from Hong Kong that went to China's Fujian province in late January to visit relatives. While there, an eight-year-old daughter became ill and died.
After other members of the family became ill they returned to Hong Kong, where the father, mother, son, a second daughter and a grandfather were admitted to a hospital.
The father died on Sunday. The boy, aged 9, and his 10-year-old sister remain hospitalised. Research into whether the other family members have the same strain of the flu virus as the father and son is continuing.
According to the WHO, the boy and the father were infected with a virus known as influenza H5N1. That strain of virus is common in ducks and causes high rates of death in chickens.
It had never been seen in humans, though, until 1997, when it was diagnosed in a Hong Kong three-year-old.
The virus ultimately brought illness to 18 people and killed six, an unusually high death rate for flu. Health authorities slaughtered all 1.4 million chickens in Hong Kong, hoping to break the chain of transmission between birds and people.
The virus discovered this week in Hong Kong is not exactly the same as the 1997 strain.
Hong Kong's Secretary for Health, Yeoh Eng-kiong, urged residents to stay calm. "The source is direct from poultry, not from humans, so there should be no alarm," Dr Yeoh said.
The Health Department said it was working closely with officials on mainland China, which has denied any links with bird flu cases found in Hong Kong.
The region imports 80,000 live chickens a day from China.
A Health Department spokeswoman said the boy's relatives raised chickens at home.
The cases hint at a pattern familiar to scientists.
Flu viruses change slightly every year. Every few decades, though, they mutate dramatically, producing a significantly different strain to which humans are more vulnerable.
A virus that jumped from animals to humans would produce a significant mutation.
Health authorities will be studying the new H5N1 strain for any sign that it can be transmitted from person to person. The 1997 virus could not be passed between people; all 18 cases came from individual exposures of humans to infected birds.
But there were fears at the time that, if the virus cross-bred with a milder flu that did move from person to person, it could produce a dangerous strain that would move rapidly around the world.
Cox News, The New York Times, agencies
EHemm....Cross BREEDING viruses....Unless there has been some radical change of understanding which I am not aware of of Viruses don't breed they replicate. I understand that there is a mechanism by which bacteria may pick up and incorporate genes from their environment but a virus? Anyone know anything about this?
Wonder if can do a flu / common cold species virus jump.
Yeah any viral infection anywhere is the world must be the work of terrorists . . .
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