Bird flu kills woman in Nigeria

2007-02-01 09:41

Lagos - Bird flu has claimed its first human victim in Africa's most-populous nation, killing a young Nigerian woman due to graduate from university and be married this year, say officials.

The January 17 death of the woman in Lagos, a teeming city where chickens and other fowl were kept in close quarters with humans, was a worrisome development in a vast nation with poor health care systems and weak government oversight.

Her fiance said the victim, whose name was not released by the information ministry, was finishing her accounting degree and got engaged last month.

The fiance who asked not to be named said: "She was a young girl, full of life, looking forward to this year."

Egypt confirms H5N1 human cases

The 25-year-old financial consultant said: "For the last two weeks, I've been lost. If they find a cure, I hope they name it after her."

An outbreak of H5N1 bird flu hit Nigeria last year, but no human infections had been reported until Wednesday. Until the Nigerian report, Egypt and Djibouti were the only African countries that had confirmed infections among people. Eleven people had died in Egypt.

The bird flu virus remained hard for humans to catch, but health experts feared H5N1 might mutate into a form that could spread easily among humans and possibly kill millions.

According to the World Health Organisation, the H5N1 virus had claimed at least 164 lives worldwide since it began ravaging Asian poultry in late 2003.

Information minister Frank Nweke said that in Nigeria, another female member of the deceased's household was infected, but was responding to treatment.

Human-to-human transmission

Health officials earlier said 14 human samples had been taken and Nigeria's top bird-flu expert, Abdullahi Nasidi, said there might be more cases, including deaths.

Nigeria lacked the sophisticated laboratory facilities to determine exactly which of the many bird flu subtypes killed the Nigerian woman.

Nweke said samples taken from the infected women had been forwarded to a lab affiliated with the WHO for further testing.

International health officials said workers would be looking for signs of human-to-human transmission.

Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesperson in Geneva, said: "From a public health point of view, it would be most important to follow up H5N1 cases to see if there are any chains of transmission.

"H5N1 is an animal disease, but as long as it is widespread in poultry, we can expect to see sporadic cases in humans, as we have in Vietnam, Indonesia, and other countries."

Amid a new H5N1 outbreak reported in recent weeks in Nigeria's north, hundreds of kilometres from Lagos, health workers had begun a cull of poultry. The H5N1 strain had been confirmed in 15 of Nigeria's 36 states.

- AP