Bird flu's human toll sets off alarms

By MARTIN JOHNSTON and agencies


Medical experts are on alert for a global influenza epidemic after an Asian chicken outbreak jumped to humans, killing at least six people, five of them children.

The bird flu has swept through chicken farms in six Asian countries and more than 10 million birds have died from the disease or been slaughtered in a bid to stamp it out.

Five children and a 30-year-old woman have died of bird flu since December 30.

Thailand says two boys are infected with the virus. An elderly breeder of fighting cocks is suspected of having died from it and a chicken butcher, from whom more samples are being tested, died on Friday.

Following Sars - severe acute respiratory syndrome, the killer of about 800 people in an epidemic which ended last year - the bird-flu outbreak has reignited fears of infection speeding around the globe.

Influenza epidemics typically strike three or four times a century and some consider that one is overdue. The 1918-19 Spanish flu caused an estimated 40 million to 50 million deaths worldwide.

New Zealand's Ministry of Health is worried about human-to-human spread of bird flu - which has not happened yet in this outbreak - but says the country is not at immediate risk.

"There is a potential for this to develop into an influenza pandemic. If that should happen, this would be a potentially very large global public health problem," the acting director of public health, Dr Doug Lush, said last night.

While the World Health Organisation had not recommended travel restrictions, people travelling to Asia should avoid contact with live poultry.

New Zealand did not import live chickens or poultry products and no one had reported any cases of unusual poultry deaths at the country's chicken farms, Dr Lush said. Migratory birds could potentially introduce the disease and agriculture officials run a monitoring programme.

The national pandemic planning committee met on January 9 to discuss bird flu. Its chairman, Christchurch virus expert Dr Lance Jennings, is at the WHO's western Pacific regional office in the Philippines to help handle its response to the outbreak.

An editorial in the Lancet medical journal says the big fear is that the bird flu might combine with a human flu virus and spread between people.

"In view of the high mortality of human influenza associated with this strain [of bird flu, called H5N1] the prospect of a worldwide pandemic is massively frightening."

Quarantine measures used against the Sars coronavirus are unlikely to control influenza, because flu is more contagious.

"The possibility of a human pandemic with a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus must be taken very seriously indeed," the editorial says.

Since 1997, when the H5N1 bird flu was first known to have infected humans, fewer than 30 cases had been laboratory confirmed. The 1997 outbreak in Hong Kong infected 18 people and six died.