Avian Influenza (Bird Flu)

(CIDRAP news) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today confirmed that a 12-year-old Indonesian boy from East Jakarta died of avian influenza.

The boy was not part of the extended family case cluster in northern Sumatra that involved at least six people, five of whom died. Officials are still investigating the source of that outbreak and whether it involved human-to-human transmission.

(CIDRAP News) – Romania has fired two top veterinary officials and arrested a private veterinarian amid spreading outbreaks of avian influenza in the past 2 days, according to news agencies.

Meanwhile, Denmark has found an H5 avian flu virus in domestic birds for the first time, and Nigeria is reporting a new outbreak of H5N1 in poultry after a lull of several weeks, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

(CIDRAP News) – An international team of scientists from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) arrived today on Indonesia's Sumatra island to investigate the largest cluster to date of confirmed human cases of H5N1 avian influenza, according to news services.

In addition, the WHO reported today that a 75-year-old Egyptian woman died of H5N1 infection, becoming the sixth fatality in Egypt.

(CIDRAP News) – World Health Organization officials have confirmed five cases of H5N1 avian influenza in an Indonesian family in North Sumatra, plus a fatal case in a woman from East Java, news services reported today.

Additionally, Indonesia's health ministry said local tests revealed the H5N1 strain in a 12-year-old Jakarta boy who died 4 days ago, according to a Reuters report. This case, however, has yet to be confirmed by the WHO.

(CIDRAP News) – Researchers in Thailand recently reported that they isolated live H5N1 avian influenza virus from the blood of a 5-year-old boy, an unusual finding that raises concern about possible transmission of the virus via blood.

(CIDRAP News) – Indonesian authorities have attributed the deaths of five members of one extended family to H5N1 avian influenza, and three surviving relatives are also suspected of having the virus, according to news services.

(CIDRAP News) – A 2-year-old girl from a small rural village in Djibouti, on the border of Somalia, has been found to have the country's first case of H5N1 avian influenza, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today.

(CIDRAP News) – An analysis of more than 600 H5N1 avian influenza viruses collected from several Asian countries suggests that two older antiviral drugs could be more useful in fighting a flu pandemic triggered by H5N1 than previously believed.

(CIDRAP news) – In a human trial in France, an experimental H5N1 avian influenza vaccine with an adjuvant showed modestly better performance at a lower dose compared with a similar H5N1 vaccine that was tested earlier in the United States.

(CIDRAP News) – The creators of the fictional ABC-TV movie "Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America" blended medical facts from the 1918 influenza pandemic with current predictions from flu experts to portray a contemporary flu pandemic, but they added a liberal dash of sensationalism.