Mar 15, 2007 (CIDRAP News) – Egyptian authorities reported a case of H5N1 avian influenza in a 10-year-old girl yesterday, marking the country's seventh case this year and 25th overall.
The girl was admitted to a hospital in Aswan, 450 kilometers south of Cairo, Mar 13, with fever and muscle pains, according to a Reuters report based on information from MENA, the state news agency.
An Egyptian health ministry laboratory in Cairo confirmed the girl's infection, according to a Kuwait News Agency story quoting a ministry spokesman, Abdul-Rahman Shahin. The girl's condition improved after she was treated with oseltamivir, he said.
Hassan al-Bushra, a regional communicable disease official with the World Health Organization (WHO), said the case occurred in an urban area, according to the Reuters story.
The WHO has not yet included the girl's case in its H5N1 tally for Egypt. The WHO's global count is 278 cases with 168 deaths. Thirteen of Egypt's cases have been fatal.
Meanwhile, Shahin said the 4-year-old boy who was identified Mar 11 as Egypt's 24th H5N1 case-patient has recovered and was to be discharged from a hospital today, according to the Kuwait News Agency story.
In other developments, an Egyptian agriculture official said avian flu had been found on nine farms in Egypt where the poultry had been vaccinated, according to a Mar 14 Agence France-Presse (AFP) report.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said almost 10,000 of 41,684 birds raised on the farms had died since the beginning of this year.
A UN Food and Agriculture Organization official, who also spoke anonymously, told AFP the situation was not alarming. "No vaccine is 100% effective," he said.
