Indonesian boy ill with bird flu as Asia struggles to control outbreak

INDONESIA said yesterday a 16-year-old youth is suffering from bird flu and several other countries also reported more suspected cases in people.

Avian influenza is known to have killed 64 people in Asia and infected 125.

There are at least a dozen other suspected cases as governments in Asia struggle to control outbreaks in poultry to prevent more people from catching the H5N1 avian flu virus that experts fear could trigger a pandemic.

Adding to the sense of alarm, a team of scientists say they know why the virus has proved so deadly in people, while researchers in Vietnam say H5N1 has mutated into a form that allows it to replicate more easily inside humans and other mammals.

Indonesia, Vietnam and China all said they had had more suspicious cases in people, while Thailand said a toddler confirmed infected with bird flu was recovering.

In the Indonesian capital, tests were being conducted on two patients, aged 20 and 13, who died over the weekend in the Sulianti Saroso Hospital, Jakarta’s hospital for treating bird flu patients.

Tests in Indonesia showed the 16-year-old youth was infected with H5N1. But the test results for him and a 16-year-old girl who died last week have to be confirmed by a laboratory in Hong Kong.

The laboratory, affiliated with the World Health Organisation, has confirmed five people have died of bird flu in Indonesia. But President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono put the toll higher, telling a news conference yesterday seven of the 11 people who had contracted avian influenza in Indonesia had died.

In Vietnam, scientists at the Ho Chi Minh Pasteur Institute who have been studying the genetic make up of H5N1 samples taken from people and poultry, said it has undergone several mutations this year.

“There has been a mutation allowing the virus to (replicate) effectively in mammal tissue and become highly virulent,” the institute said on its website at www.pasteur-hcm.org.vn.

State media said bird flu might have infected two more people in Vietnam, where 42 people have died from the virus since the latest outbreak in Asia began in late 2003.

China is probing a possible human case of bird flu in northeastern Liaoning province, the WHO said yesterday, the latest suspected case in the country.

More than 10 million birds have been culled in Liaoning, where a female poultry worker has bird flu-like symptoms, such as pneumonia, said Roy Wadia, the WHO’s China spokesman.

The WHO is also sending a team this week to the southern province of Hunan to investigate three other pneumonia cases, which China said could not be excluded as bird flu as the three lived close to the site of a poultry outbreak.

One of the pneumonia patients, a 12-year-old girl, died.

China has not confirmed any cases in people and bird flu remains hard for humans to catch. It is essentially a disease of birds. But scientists fear the H5N1 virus will mutate into a form that passes easily among people. If this happens, humans will have no immunity and millions could die. The disease has so far killed half the people it has infected and scientists believe they might know why the virus kills so many young adults.

Scientists in Hong Kong said H5N1 apparently causes a “storm” of immune system chemicals that overwhelms the patient.

The study, published in the online medical journal Respiratory Research, might suggest that if H5N1 does cause a pandemic, it could disproportionately affect the young and healthy.

Michael Richardson, a senior research fellow of the Institute of Southeast Asia Studies in Singapore, said bird flu was a major threat to mankind.

“A pandemic triggered by H5N1 could become a fearsome insurgency against human health, with the potential to be far more lethal than terrorism,” he said in a briefing paper.