AVIAN Influenza Virus (H5N1) Coniutes to Infect Humans!

The World Health Organization's website has released a series of Global Alert and Responses (GARs) in the past few days. There seems to be several cases of Avian Influenza, specifically H5N1, in four separate locations. Avian Influenza Viruses normally don't infect humans, however recently there has been a string causing concern that the virus could mutate and become more easily passed from birds to humans.

In most of the cases, the people infected had been in close contact with infected poultry or with objects contaminated by their feces. I summarized three of the most recent cases here:

Most recently, a 40-year old female from Dakahlia Governorate began getting symptoms on March 6, was hospitalized on March 12, and was in critical condition until she died on March 15, 2012.Her case states that she was exposed to "sick backyard poultry".

The next case was a 24 year-old female from Bengkulu Province. She began getting sympotoms on February 23, and was hospitalized the following day. It is said that she had breathing difficulty, her condition deteriorated and she died on March 1, 2012. She was "exposed to a potentially contaminated environment where sudden deaths of poultry had recently occurred".

Another case of a H5NI victim is a 31 year-old male from Dak Lak province. He developed symptoms on February 29 but got medical treatment that same day. He was brought to a hostiptal on March 4 and diagnosed with viral pneumonia. He is still being treated their today. This mad was "the man was involved in the slaughter and consumption of sick poultry".

This specific disease H5N1 is described as being a "highly pathogenic avian influenza". Because this disease is so potentially dangerous, the World Health Organization has been tracking all of the cases to make sure it doesn't spread and more people don't get infected.

Right now in Egypt there have been 164 cases confirmed, in Indonesia187 cases (since 2005), and in Vietnam 123 cases.

H5N1 viruses can currently be found in poultry in parts of Asia and northeast Africa. This specific strand has been causing human disease and deaths since 1997. Other avian influenza subtypes, including H7N7 and H9N2, and although they have found a way to affect humans too, they are less common and less severe.

Avian Influenza is a topic we just recently finished learning about in class. To see that there are some cases of people getting Avian Influenza is very scary to think about. Because this gene so easily mutates, who knows how deadly it can become. The best step right now is to keep tracking the disease and make sure people are educated about Avian Flu, and that they stay away from potentially harmful situations. The WHO and animal health sector partners are working in countries where birds are an important source of food, and direct contact can be found. Hopefully they can help reduce animal health and public health risks to stop an Avian Pandemic from breaking out.

To read more about this topic you can go to:

http://www.who.int/csr/don/en/

OR

http://www.who.int/topics/avian_influenza/en/