Bird Flu deaths raise human transmission fears

Indonesian and World Health Organisation officials today were investigating eight suspected human bird flu cases, four of them fatal, in a district on Sumatra island.

WHO spokeswoman Sari Setiogi in Indonesia said tests on villagers’ blood samples in northern Sumatra’s Tanah Karo district had yet to be completed.

A WHO team has “checked the village and at this stage we can say they are still suspect at the moment,” Setiogi said.

Nyoman Kandun, head of the Health Ministry’s office of communicable disease control, said the samples have been passed on to a WHO lab in Hong Kong for confirmation.

He said the possibility of human-to-human infection ”could not be ruled out.”

Kandun said all of the suspected victims were part of a large family, with most living near each other in the same village.

“We have found negative signs of bird flu in all the livestock near where the families live, and now investigators are trying to further check livestock such as chicken, ducks and pigs there,” he said.

Indonesia’s death toll from the H5N1 bird flu strain stands at 25 – the world’s second-highest toll after Vietnam.

Several fatalities were members of the same family or lived near each other.

Health officials closely study such groups of cases, know as “clusters,” to see whether the virus, which currently is almost always transmitted from birds to humans, has mutated into one that can easily pass between humans – a scenario that many fear could turn into a global human pandemic.