The death of a woman in West Java’s Banten province has
brought
The 32-year-old woman died on January 10 at home after her
family had taken her out of a hospital where she had been receiving treatment a
day before as she was accusing fever and difficulty in breathing, said Suharda
Ningrum of the health ministry’s bird flu centre, according to Reuters.
Two laboratory tests had confirmed that she was infected
with the bird flu virus.
"She bought a live chicken and some eggs from a market
and cooked them," Ningrum said, adding there were also chickens living in
her backyard.
A 24-year-old woman from
Humans are infected with bird flu by direct contact with
infected poultry, but health experts fear the H5N1 virus may mutate into a form
easily transmissible between humans, which could start a pandemic. However, the
risk seems to be overestimated, according to Bernard Vallat, director general
of the Worls Organization for Animal Health. He stated that the virus proved to
be very stable although there were concerns that it could mutate into a form
that could spread easily among humans.
On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) has
warned that the virus, in time, can suffer mutation into a form that can easily
be transmitted from a person to another. The health organization fears that
this could turn into a global pandemic. However, most human cases so far have
involved contact with infected poultry.
Last week, Chinese authorities confirmed that a Chinese man who
became infected with H5N1 likely from his son died, although there was no
scientific evidence that the virus suffered mutations in this case.
The concern stems from past influenza pandemics. In 1918, a
flu pandemic killed 20 million people worldwide, just after the end of World
War I.
Since 2003, there have been 340 cases of human bird flu all over the world, 208 of which have died.