Bird Flu Spreading both ways in Pakistan

World Health Organization in its latest reports said that there is a possibility that the reported Bird Flu in Pakistan might be spreading both from person to person and from poultry to humans.

The health officials in Pakistan had come out with the reports of the first human death due to bird flu in the country a few days back. Recent estimates say that as many as eight people have been infected with this virus which is spreading as a combination of infections from the poultry and limited person-to-person transmission from close contact.

The Pakistan Health Ministry confirmed the death of the brother of the man, who was a worker at a poultry farm in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. W.H.O. officials think there is a high probability that he also died from the bird flu.

Keiji Fukuda, who is the coordinator of W.H.O.’s global influenza program, said that there is no need to panic right now as they think that this won’t spread to large areas of population. The United Nations agency was not raising its level of pandemic alert for the time being, he added.

Fukuda said that the cases that have been reported till now have had a poultry cases and there is no confirmation that it is a pure human to human transmission type disease.

"It is definitely possible that we have a mixed scenario where we have poultry to human infection and possible human to human transmission within a family, which is not yet verified," he said.

The Bird Flu is caused by the virus strain called H5N1 which infects mainly the poultry animals but can also infect humans by undergoing mutations. This is a very deadly virus and if it spreads to the masses, it has the potential to kill millions of people in the place where it spreads.

The outbreak of this virus has previously been reported in Indonesia and Thailand especially in the poultry belts of these countries. The authorities said that if the outbreak in Pakistan turns out to be of the human-to-human spreading type disease, it would be similar to previous outbreaks in Thailand and Indonesia, affecting close family members caring for sick loved ones.

Indonesia's Ministry of Health also announced the death of a 47-year-old man from Banten Province, who died on December 13. Of the 115 confirmed cases in Indonesia, 93 have been fatal, according to the data provided by W.H.O.

Since 2003, the health agency has tallied 341 cases among people in 14 countries, 210 of them fatal.

A team of W.H.O. officials led by Mr. Hassan El-Bushra, is investigating the cases of infection and the starting results point out that the brother of the person who died caught the infection while taking care of his sick brother.

"This type of close contact we know can result in human to human transmission sometimes," he said.

So, W.H.O. is not raising the alarm bells right now and will wait for more results to come out before declaring pandemic alert level in the area.

"In terms of public health implications, we are looking for human to human transmission where casual contact can lead to infections and allow big outbreaks in communities," Fukuda said.

Further tests will be conducted by a team from the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit NAMRU-3 laboratory in Cairo. WHO uses a series of six phases of pandemic alert to gauge the level of threat and the current situation is in the 3rd phase.