Avian Influenza (Bird Flu)

(CIDRAP News) – A 12-year-old Indonesian boy who was identified earlier as having H5N1 avian influenza died Oct 13, raising the country's avian flu death toll to 88, according to news services.

An official at Indonesia's avian flu information center said the boy died suddenly, though he had previously been improving, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report published yesterday.

(CIDRAP News) – Indonesian officials have reported an H5N1 avian influenza case in a 12-year-old boy in the Jakarta area, raising the country's human case count to 109, according to news services.

The boy is from the Jakarta suburb of Tangerang and is being treated in a Jakarta hospital, said Muhammad Nadirin, a spokesman for the health ministry's avian flu center, according to a Reuters report published today.

(CIDRAP News) – A 44-year-old Indonesian woman who died Oct 6 had H5N1 avian influenza, marking the country's 108th human H5N1 case and 87th death, Indonesia and the World Health Organization (WHO) announced today.

The woman, from Sumatra's Riau province, fell ill Sep 27 and was hospitalized Oct 2, said I Nyoman Kandun of the Indonesian Health Ministry, as quoted today by Antara, the national news agency.

(CIDRAP News) – An international research team led by the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UW-Madison) has identified a key mutation that would arm the H5N1 avian influenza virus with one of the tools it needs to more easily infect and spread among humans.

(CIDRAP News) – Researchers from Beijing and New York who conducted pathology studies on tissue samples of a man and a pregnant woman who died of H5N1 avian flu infection found that the virus spread beyond the lungs to other organ systems—even to the fetus.

(CIDRAP News) – Indonesia's health ministry announced today that a 21-year-old man who lived near Jakarta died of H5N1 avian influenza, according to media reports.

(CIDRAP News) – Officials in Bangladesh and Thailand recently reported new H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks on chicken farms, and Canadian authorities today confirmed an outbreak of H7N3 influenza on a commercial poultry farm in Saskatchewan.

The outbreak in Bangladesh occurred in the country's northwestern Bogra district, about 105 miles from Dhaka, the capital, according to a report yesterday from Xinhua, China's state news agency.

(CIDRAP News) – An Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee that studied issues concerning personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers in an influenza pandemic is calling for renewed efforts to learn how influenza viruses spread, promote proper use of PPE, and improve the equipment itself.

(CIDRAP News) – Close to 10,000 ducks died recently of H5N1 avian influenza in a village in southern China not far from Hong Kong, and a local official said the ducks had been vaccinated against the virus, according to news reports.

(CIDRAP News) – A government official in Bavaria said today there was a chance that some frozen duck meat contaminated with the H5N1 avian influenza virus made its way to consumers' tables, according to a German news agency.

The virus was found in 18 frozen ducks from a batch sample at a poultry company slaughterhouse, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reported today.