Bird Flu...pandemic???
The above remarks by US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, support the comment that an H5N1 infection of a 34 year-old physician at Vietnam-Sweden hospital in Quang Ninh led to the executive order of April 1, allowing the US to quarantine bird flu cases.The monitoring of the outbreak in the US has been elevated to a daily briefing, which almost certainly includes additional notifications of unusual events. Therefore, when the physician developed Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) on Friday, April 1, in Vietnam (Thursday night in the US), he was probably tested with a quick test for H5N1. When he tested positive, an alert was issued.This alert then went to HHS in the US, which resulted in the recommendation for the executive order, which was signed on April 1.It is unclear if the three suspect bird flu cases at the hospital were patients who were recently admitted because of bird flu symptoms, or were patients who were tested because there was a concern about further H5N1 transmission within the hospital.In either event, ARDS, followed by death on Sunday without a known source, has provided yet another signal that the flu pandemic of 2005 has begun. H5N1 that is efficiently transmitted to humans appears to be generating a range of outcomes. The family of five in Haiphong appears to be on the way to recovery. Results on their neighbors, admitted on or about March 25, have not been released. The family of five was H5N1 positive, clearly showing efficient transmission.Although there has been minimal or no reporting of H5N1 in poultry in Thai Binh, Haiphong, and Quang Ninh provinces, the three adjacent provinces each have set a record related to efficient transmission (longest transmission chain, largest cluster admitted on the same day, first fatal infection of a health care worker - from an unknown source).Thus, H5N1 is clearly transmitting efficiently in northeastern Vietnam. However, since many of the cases are mild, most of this transmission is not being detected and/or reported. The time between this efficient transmission in northeast Vietnam, and a pandemic resulting in millions of fatalities may be weeks or months, but the efficient transmission is the missing requirement for the start of the pandemic, and that requirement has now been met.
posted by ARDS Survivor @ 3:55 PM
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By Ho Binh Minh
HANOI, March 25 (Reuters) Mar 25 - A 17-year-old woman became Vietnam's 35th bird flu victim on Friday, although tests on a third Cambodian suspected of contracting the virus, which has now killed 49 people since 2003, proved negative.
The teenager, who died on March 23, according to hospital emergency unit head Nguyen Hong Ha, was from Nam Dinh province, 90 km (56 miles) south of Hanoi.
A 40-year-old Vietnamese woman from Quang Ninh, along the Chinese border, was also confirmed as having the highly lethal H5N1 virus, which doctors fear could mutate into a more contagious form and unleash a global pandemic of killer flu.
Provincial health officials said neither patient lived in an area where bird flu outbreaks had occurred.
H5N1, which has also claimed 12 Thais and two Cambodians, has killed about 70 percent of the people known to have been infected, but it does not pass easily from birds to humans.
Cambodia's Health Ministry and the World Health Organization said test results on an 18-year-old bird flu suspect in the southern province of Kampot, home to both previous cases, had proved negative.
In Vietnam, the afternoon edition of the state-run Hanoi Moi (New Hanoi) daily said five members of one family were hospitalised on Wednesday in the northern port city of Haiphong with coughing and breathing difficulties.
Doctors suspected they had bird flu, the paper said. It quoted Nguyen Van Vy, director of Haiphong's Health Department, as saying poultry at the family's house had been slaughtered earlier to stop bird flu outbreaks.
Bird flu tests on the five were under way, Vy said.
Before the latest death, the WHO put Vietnam's official death toll at 33, but this did not include a boy Vietnamese doctors said died of encephalitis, but who was later found also to have had bird flu.
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