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Woman infects family with H5N1
23/06/2006 15:19 - (SA)
Jakarta - An Indonesian woman transmitted bird flu to several members of her family, but the virus had not significantly mutated to pose a higher threat, said a World Health Organisation official on Friday.
Keiji Fukuda, co-ordinator of the WHO's global influenza programme, said that a woman in a cluster case in North Sumatra last month had stayed in the same room as several family members while she was sick.
He said: "So when she was coughing, they were very close to her, so there was close contact in a small room for many hours. We describe it as limited non-sustained transmission of person to person."
But, he said a very slight mutation that had taken place was insignificant.
Influenza viruses mutate all the time
Fukuda said: "We have not seen any mutation changes, any kind of reassortment changes that we believe have changed the transmissibility of the virus. There's very slight mutation, but all influenza viruses mutate all the time.
"The slight mutation, without a change in how these viruses can function, they don't mean so much. It doesn't represent something which has made us more worried or set an alarm bell."
Fukuda said that it was important to note that not all human-to-human transmission was the same.
He said: "This virus appeared 10 years ago and back at the first outbreak, we saw person-to-person transmission already, but again under the same kind of close, intimate contact."
Human-to-human transmission
He was referring to the first cases in Hong Kong.
According to Fukuda: "What we were looking for is the kind of person-to-person transmission, which can cause large neighbourhood outbreak, big community outbreak."
He said the North Sumatra cluster "does not teach us anything new about the transmission or the epidemiology of the virus".
Scientists feared that a significant mutation in the H5N1 virus would raise the spectre of efficient human-to-human transmission and moved the world closer to a global bird flu pandemic with the potential to kill millions.
Indonesia had recorded the highest number of H5N1 deaths in the world this year and was on track to become the worst affected country, with 39 reported deaths. Vietnam had reported 42, but none of them had been this year.
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