Serious findings about bird flu

2005-02-17 12:36

Paris - Bird flu may have infected more people than thought, according to a study published on Thursday which suggests the virus can attack all parts of the body, rather than just the respiratory tract, but this has not been spotted by doctors.

The research focuses on two Vietnamese children, a brother and sister, who were admitted to hospital suffering from gasto-enteritis and acute encephalitis, which are common in Vietnam.

However, they did not have respiratory problems considered typical of the H5N1 avian flu virus.

The four-year-old boy had traces of the H5N1 virus in his faeces, blood, nose and in the fluid around the brain, according to lab research reported by doctors for Britain's Wellcome Trust medical research charity.

Those findings indicate "H5N1 can attack all parts of the body, not just the lungs," Wellcome Trust said in a press statement.'

Keeps on changing

The boy's nine-year-old sister died in February 2004, and she is also suspected to have been infected by the virus.

Lead author Menno de Jong, a virologist at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit based at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, said the discovery should be an early warning for doctors.

"When someone is suffering from any severe illness we should consider if avian flu might be the cause," he said.

"It may be possible to treat, but you have to act in the early stages, so awareness of the whole spectrum of symptoms in an emerging disease like avian flu is vital."

De Jong added: "It appears this virus is progressively adapting to an increasing range of mammals in which it can cause infection."

The study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in the United States.

The brother and sister lived in a single room with their parents in southern Vietnam.

Crowded living conditions with poor sanitation are excellent conditions for transmitting the virus from one person to another.

How the children contracted the virus is unclear, according to the researchers.

Avian flu is known to be transmitted from ducks and chickens to humans.

The worry is that it could mix its genes with other forms of flu, becoming a pathogen that is not only highly contagious but also life-threatening, as the human immune system has no defences against novel viruses.

If that occurred, the putative virus could spread around the world within days, helped by jet travel.

In January, a study, also published in the NEJM, gave the first lab evidence, based on a cluster of family cases in Thailand, that H5N1 could be transmitted from human to human.

Twelve people died in Thailand and 20 in Vietnam during an initial outbreak in late 2003 and 2004. Another 13 have died in Vietnam since the end of December including a Cambodian woman.

- AFP