Bird Flu bug spreads person to person

 

Worrying news from China that the new bird flu strain H7N9 has managed to pass from human to human. A 32 year old woman, who had had no contact with birds, died after nursing her father, who was also killed by the disease.

So far there have been 133 cases and 43 deaths from the strain.  Most victims had either had close contact with live poultry or had visited poultry markets. Researchers said there was no evidence of the virus being able to spread easily from person to person, but that there was ‘potential for pandemic spread’.

Dr James Rudge, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said limited transmission of this kind was not surprising and that it had also been seen with the H5N1 strain which has killed more than 370 people since 2003.  There are worries that the world is due, indeed overdue, for a new pandemic.

The most devastating flu epidemic the world has ever seen came in 1918 when up to 70 million people died, while the ‘Asian flu’ outbreak of 1957 killed up to 4 million. (See also my blogs of 5 Feb; 14, 30 April; 13 May; 6, 11, July; 24 Oct, 13 Dec, 2009 and April 15, 2013.)

Flu - here we go again?

 

We’ve been here before.   The world is once again anxious about a strain of bird flu spreading through China.    This one is called H7N9. It has infected 60 people and caused 13 deaths.

The World Health Organisation says it is being spread by direct contact with infected birds, and that there is no evidence of direct human-to-human transmission.   Nor it seems are there yet any cases outside China.

Another strain of bird flu, H5N1, (viruses pictured above) has caused the deaths of more than 320 people in China and four other countries since 2003.     In 2009, the WHO declared a pandemic alert over H1N1 swine flu, which killed more than 18,000 people.  

So-called ‘Spanish flu’ caused one of the worst epidemics in history at the end of the First World War, carrying off up to 70 million people.    (See also my blogs of 5 Feb; 14, 30 April; 13 May; 6, 11, July; 24 Oct, 13 Dec, 2009.)