Word: h5n1
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...thing is certain about avian influenza: it's deadly. All three people who contracted the H5N1 strain of the virus in China last year died. In the first six weeks of 2009, eight people have come down with bird flu, and five have died. Another thing is that while the disease has yet to go pandemic, as many doctors fear it could, it remains worrisomely persistent. Every year since 2003, about 100 people in Asia, the Middle East and Africa contract the disease. Last year, in a rare exception, the number dropped below...
...about half its live wholesale markets, and culling 80,000 birds from farms near the outbreak's locus. York said Tuesday that there were no reports of humans sickened by the virus, and that the government had not yet determined whether the birds were infected with the potentially lethal H5N1 or a less virulent strain of influenza. (See pictures of the bird...
...according to the government. Lo Wing-lok, president of the Hong Kong Medical Association and an expert on infectious disease, says that Hong Kong uses an older version of the H5 vaccine than mainland China, where there are more frequent outbreaks and farmers vaccinate poultry specifically against the H5N1 strain of the virus. (See pictures of Hong Kong from...
...about 20% in recent weeks. A specially appointed panel of doctors has examined the cases of the children who died in order to ascertain whether it the flu was the cause - and whether the flu strains circulating in Hong Kong were particularly deadly or showed any signs of the H5N1 bird flu virus. The panel found no evidence of H5N1; both children who died with confirmed cases of the flu had a common flu strain, and both are thought to have died from complicating factors - not the flu itself. (A third child's death has not yet been linked...
Public health experts are still worried, however, that the current flu outbreak will lead to even greater use of the antiflu drug Tamiflu. The powerful treatment has been proven particularly effective against H5N1 and has become widely prescribed in Hong Kong - it is increasingly available illegally, without prescription, in pharmacies - so resistance to the drug is growing fast here. Doctors say the overuse of Tamiflu is creating a manifold risk, not only of weakening a weapon against a potential bird flu outbreak, but also of helping to spread a virulent strain of drug-resistant common flu in the wider population...