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.)

Swine flu - not gone away

Over the last few days, some of the initial alarm about swine flu has dissipated, but now scientists from Imperial College, London have suggested that one person in three across the world could catch it. So far we know of more than 5,720 confirmed cases in 33 countries, and 61 people have died. 56 of the deaths have happened in Mexico which has had 2,059 cases. The United States has had three deaths from more than 3,000 cases, while the UK has 68 cases and no deaths.

This suggests that the virus is behaving in a much more virulent way in Mexico, where about one person in every 40 infected is dying. In the USA, the rate is more like one in a thousand. Professor Neil Ferguson, the lead investigator, has pointed out that every year about one person in ten catches seasonal flu, and up to half a million die.

In Professor Ferguson’s view, we are not facing an epidemic on the scale of 1918, when perhaps 70 million people died across the world, but he thinks we could be in for one like 1957’s “Asian flu” which killed up to four million. Science has advanced enormously since then, and we have new vaccines and anti-viral drugs to defend us. On the other hand, globalisation will allow the virus to spread much further and faster, and if 2 billion people do indeed catch swine flu, we need to be braced for many deaths.

See also my blog of April 30th.