“Bird Flu” Loose in China?
Posted By John Moore on February 20, 2003
[UPDATE:2/24/03 The H5N1 Influenza has no human influenza genes, and thus cannot spread from human to human.]
Reports of a mysterious pneumonia have been arriving from Guangdong Province of China since November 2002. At least five people have died and 305 hospitalized, including about 100 health care workers.
Recently two cases (one fatal) of “bird flu” (Influenza H5N1) were confirmed in an adjoining province, and may be the cause of the pneumonia outbreak.
Influenza H5N1 caused a scare several years ago when it appeared in Hong Kong and killed several people. Because this virus normally does not infect humans, people have no natural immunity to it. As a result, fears have been raised that it could become another pandemic like the “Spanish Flu” of 1918, which killed 100,000,000 people.
The previous H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong died out with few human cases, suggesting that the strain was not terribly infectious. At that time, large numbers of chickens were killed and poultry meat markets closed to contain the outbreak.
If the new pneumonia outbreak is a result of H5N1, this new strain has already caused many more infections than the previous outbreak.
The moderator of ProMED Mail cautioned:
Readers should be cautioned before interpreting this as proof, as both this moderator’s comment and the above newswire’s comments are based on speculation of an observation that there was an unusual, apparently limited outbreak of pneumonia in a province of mainland China that is geographically located between Hong Kong and Fujian Province, where tthere have now been 2 documented cases of human infection with H5N1 influenza virus. Clearly, we await further information from official sources with results of official testing addressing the question of whether H5N1 influenza virus was responsible for additional human cases.
obviously this was the sars virus
Yes, it was, but before anyone would admit they even had a problem in China.