THAILAND: Thailand said yesterday it had found its first probable case of a human infecting another with bird flu, but insisted it was an isolated incident that posed little risk to the greater population.
The government said a 26-year-old woman who died on September 20th could have caught the H5N1 virus in the village where her daughter lived but probably was infected by the 11-year-old girl while looking after her in hospital. "It would have been due to close and prolonged face-to-face exposure," the government statement said, adding that no health workers at the hospital had fallen ill.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been part of the investigation of the case from the beginning and agreed it "would not pose a significant public health risk", the statement said.
The mother's death took to 10 the number of Thais killed by the H5N1 virus. In Vietnam, 20 people have died of the disease.
Experts have long feared the H5N1 bird flu virus, which swept through much of Asia early this year, could mutate into a form that could be passed from person to person and set off a pandemic like the one in 1918, which killed 20 million people.
But, they say, the H5N1 virus would have to go through an animal - most likely a pig, although cats can also get it - capable of harbouring the human influenza virus, with which it could merge to forge a virus that could trigger a pandemic.
The experts agreed "there is no evidence to suggest that the virus has mutated", the statement said.
"This could be just a dead end. That's what it looks like now. But we really need to finish the studies we have ongoing. We'll know more this week," WHO spokesman Mr Dick Thompson said in Geneva.
Thai Prime Minister Mr Thaksin Shinawatra called an emergency meeting of provincial governors for today to review and consolidate measures against the disease. CDC expert Dr Scott F. Dowell said the Thai case was a "fluke" in that the mother and daughter lived apart, whereas in families living under the same roof it was impossible to tell if infected people caught bird flu from chickens or from each other.
Suspicions of people-to-people transmission in Hong Kong in 1997, when the H5N1 virus first appeared, and in Vietnam this year could not be substantiated for that reason, he said. "Because the mother lived in a separate city, it was much easier to be confident that the likely mode of transmission or the probable mode of transmission was person to person," he added.