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Bird Flu Appears Increasingly Contagious

Posted on: Thursday, 25 May 2006, 06:00 CDT

By Anita Manning

International health officials are in Indonesia investigating what appears to be the first time a human infected with bird flu has passed it from one person to another, and then on to a third.

Experts say the cluster of cases in a remote village is worrying, but genetic analysis of the virus taken from patients in the outbreak has found no evidence it has changed in ways that would allow it to spread easily among people, possibly sparking a flu pandemic.

"There is no sign of an impending pandemic," said Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking by phone from Geneva, where she is attending the World Health Assembly. She said officials are in the village looking for additional cases and monitoring those who had contact with sick people.

Gerberding said an analysis shows the virus is similar to viruses circulating among poultry in the region. Almost all of the 218 people known to have caught the H5N1 bird flu have had close contact with infected poultry, but Gerberding said this is "probably the third example where we've seen pretty good evidence'' that the virus passed from one person to another. Previous cases have been in Thailand in September 2004, when the virus passed from a sick child to her mother and her aunt, and in Vietnam in January 2005, when it went from a mother to her daughter.

In this case, it has gone one more step: from the sick person to a family member who then passed it to another family member. That extra transmission "is very important," Gerberding said. "That's why such attention and effort has been made to get people there to investigate. The worrisome possibility is finding a change in the virus, but, fortunately, we're not seeing that."

The World Health Organization reported this week that seven members of a family in a village in North Sumatra were infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus, and six have died. An eighth person, the first in the family to fall ill, died of a respiratory illness on May 4, but tests were not performed that would confirm she had the bird flu virus. WHO experts believe she did have it and say it may have spread to other family members.

Gerberding said there is no sign of H5N1 infection outside the family. She said scientists are looking at the possibility that there may be families more genetically vulnerable to the virus. She said health workers and other family members are being given the anti-viral drug Tamiflu as a precaution.

WHO spokeswoman Maria Cheng said, in an e-mail, that what scientists are looking for "is some sign that the virus has become more adapted to human transmission, and we haven't yet seen that." But the investigation is continuing, and "that possibility cannot be fully discounted yet."

(c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

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