Health experts probe speed of human bird flu spread

World Health Organisation officials say they are trying to determine why the bird flu outbreak in Turkey has spread so quickly among humans, especially children.

WHO spokeswoman Maria Cheng said the United Nations health agency believed 15 people had become infected with the disease in Turkey during the past week, almost all of them teenagers or younger.

“That’s unprecedented,” Cheng told The Associated Press yesterday.

That is more than China (eight) and Cambodia (four) combined, according to WHO figures. Indonesia has recorded 16 cases since last July.

Turkey has almost as many as Thailand, which has counted 22 human cases since 2003, Cheng said.

“I don’t think there’s something strange going on,” Guenael Rodier, who is heading the WHO team of experts in Turkey, said.

“I was querying myself if we are dealing with a more efficient transmission from animals to humans,” Rodier said. “It’s an open question. I have no answer to that.”

Rodier said it was not surprising that children appeared to be coming down with the disease more than adults. It was probably due to lower immunity as well as the likelihood that they come in closer contact with poultry in playing.

“It’s probably easier to catch a sick chicken than a healthy one,” he said.

He said WHO and Unicef officials were thinking of ways to warn children more effectively of the need to keep their distance from poultry.

“We may need to target messages to children in particular and probably to their mothers,” said Rodier.

He said all indications are that the disease had spread from animals to humans and not person to person.

“There is no element to date that would support person to person transmission,” Rodier said, but added it was probably too soon to determine what changes there had been in the pattern of the disease, in the pattern of transmission or of the virus itself.

He said WHO had no reason to place any restrictions on travel to Turkey.

Rodier and other WHO officials said they were seeing changes in the bird flu virus affecting animals and humans in Turkey, but that it would be a couple of weeks before they could determine whether the genetic alterations were important.

Health experts are watching the virus closely in hopes that it will remain one that primarily infects birds and only rarely is transmitted from them and other animals to humans.

They fear that it could mutate into a form that transmits easily from human to human so that it could set off a flu pandemic.

Cheng said that so far “it doesn’t look like the virus has mutated when it jumped the species barrier. It’s very clear that humans have been infected by an animal virus, and from what we know so far, it doesn’t look as if the virus affecting humans has mutated substantially. It hasn’t acquired any human genes”.

Meanwhile in China, two more people hit by bird flu have died, bringing the total number of humans killed by the disease on the mainland to five, the World Health Organisation said early today.

The announcement came as China’s Agriculture Ministry said 16,000 quails died from January 1-6 in an outbreak in Guiyang, the capital of the southwestern province of Guizhou – the country’s 28th reported outbreak of bird flu in birds since October 19.

Officials culled an additional 42,000 birds in Guizhou, the ministry said on its website.

In the human cases, Chinese authorities said a 10-year-old girl from Guangxi province in the south and a 35-year-old man from Jiangxi province in the east died last month from complications from the disease, said Roy Wadia, a spokesman for the WHO in Beijing.