Bird Flu Development

Wednesday, May. 24, 2006 - 6:58 a.m.

In the It's Never Too Early To Panic department, I saw this alarming bit of news:

The U.N. health agency described the deaths of six Indonesian family members from bird flu as the most important development in the spread of the virus since 2003, saying the size of the cluster and difficulties in determining the source were worrying.

"This is the first time that we've been completely stumped about possible single-source infection," Peter Cordingley, spokesman for the Western Pacific region of the World Health Organization, said Wednesday, describing the infections as "the mother of all clusters."

Six of the seven people in an extended family in northern Sumatra who caught the disease have died, the most recent on Monday. WHO is investigating whether the H5N1 strain of bird flu was passed from person to person, but said Wednesday there was no evidence the virus had mutated to a form that will spread more easily between humans, possibly sparking a pandemic.

In a nutshell, the reason this is of concern is as follows: Every virus has built into it a mechanism which makes its host behave in a way that will maximize the virus's chance of spreading. Most animal viruses are spread via droppings. Bird flu is spread through droppings, and the few humans who have contracted this virus have had severe diarrhea as one of the signs of the flu, which means the dissemination mechanism was unaffected and the virus was causing a human body to do what a bird body would do in order to spread the disease.

However, in humans, most of our usual flu viruses have a dissemination mechanism that makes us cough or sneeze -- one of the primary ways to spread the contagion and allow a human flu virus to travel from host to host.

The reason the bird flu cluster is so worrisome is because this MIGHT just be the one of the first times the bird flu has been spread via the human respiratory system instead of via the digestive system. In other words, there may now be a mutated strain of bird flu with a dissemination mechanism which will help the virus more easily spread among humans. The health agency in charge of the investigation is still trying to discover what sorts of contact the close family members have had with each other, and whether or not they all stepped in birdshit in recent days.

Fingers crossed.

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Seems to me there's a singing contest on the tee and vee tonight. I forgot the details.

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