WHO suspects human bird flu transmission in Indonesia
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-05-24 10:56
An Indonesian man who died of bird flu after nursing his sick son may have
caught the virus in a case of direct human-to-human transmission, but the virus
did not spread very far if this did happen, the World Health Organization said
on Tuesday.
Children ride their
bicycles near a sanitary worker guarding an entrance to a bird flu
quarantined area on the outskirts of Bucharest, May 22, 2006.
[Reuters] |
It would not be the first case of human-to-human transmission of H5N1. WHO
believes some limited human-to-human transmission has occurred before in other
countries, but as in the Indonesian case, it did not last for long.
Nonetheless the news affected some Asian markets and helped the dollar edge
up against the Japanese yen and the Taiwan dollar.
WHO gave its first details of the case of a family cluster of H5N1 avian
influenza infections in which six people have now died, and said it was still
looking for the source of the outbreak. It also said genetic sequencing of the
virus that killed them showed nothing unusual.
The 32-year-old man from Kubu Sembelang village in the Karo District of North
Sumatra is the latest to die and WHO said Indonesian health officials had
confirmed he was infected with the virus.
"The father was closely involved in caring for his son, and this contact is
considered a possible source of infection," WHO said in a statement posted on
its Web site at http://www.who.int.
Investigators have had trouble finding out just what happened in the village,
where a woman appears to have been the first to become ill at the end of April.
"Preliminary findings indicate that three of the confirmed cases spent the
night of 29 April in a small room together with the initial case at a time when
she was symptomatic and coughing frequently," the WHO statement reads.
"All confirmed cases in the cluster can be directly linked to close and
prolonged exposure to a patient during a phase of severe illness. Although
human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, the search for a possible
alternative source of exposure is continuing."
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