7 children suspected with bird flu in Indonesia's Riau


www.chinaview.cn 2007-10-23 19:27:12      Print

    Special report: Global fight against bird flu

    JAKARTA, Oct. 23 (Xinhua) -- Seven children aged between one and 10 years old have been suspected of having bird flu in Indonesia's Riau province, where four people have died of the virus in recent months, an official said Tuesday.

    "It is only suspicion but we are serious to handle the case," local head office head Hasanul Irbai was quoted by leading news website Detikcom as saying.

    The seven children live in Merampi Hulu village, Siak regency in the province on Sumatra island.

    "The Siak government will immediately send the children to the Arifin Achmad Hospital in (provincial capital) Pekanbaru," he said.

    Earlier this week, the government confirmed that bird flu was the cause of the death of a 10-year-old girl in Riau, bringing the total of national casualties to 89, the highest among other bird-flu affected countries in the world.

I see nothing on Havaria alert map?                                http://visz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index.php?lang=eng                              

I just read about this on birdflubreakingnewscom. This is serious...

Topic: Indonesian girl thought to have bird flu dies     Posted: 21 October 2007 at 4:51am

A young girl suspected of having bird flu has died on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a hospital official said today. “She was admitted on Saturday but died less than 12 hours later, at around 11pm (0200 AEST),” said Azizman Daad, a doctor at the Arifin Achmad hospital in Riau province. Daad said that samples from the 10-year-old’s body were to be sent to the capital Jakarta for testing to confirm the cause of death. Local tests indicated that she had bird flu. The official human death toll from bird flu in Indonesia is 88, the highest in the world. Most human cases have come from contact with infected poultry, but Daad said it was not immediately clear if that was the case for the girl. The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is endemic in birds across nearly all of Indonesia. Scientists worry that the virus could mutate into a form more easily transmissible between humans, triggering a global pandemic. Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, has reported 109 bird flu infections, including the fatalities, since it recorded its first case in July 2005. JAKARTA

IMHO This cluster is significant and being monitored closely. Unpublished items include involvement of health care workers, and more information which can be found with some serious digging. Significantly, if this is the beginning, it will spread quite quickly and a sequence of the rather unique form of the virus of the 4 year old will demonstrate some important differences. Entire school districts each year come down with "the flu" in many states of the U.S.- sometimes all of them; and tens of thousands of people die.

Whether this gets further notice will be based on basically two facts - how many die of those who get it - and how many get it.

posted by Medclincian

Once upon a storytime,My mother told me a group of young boys picked up a pet and died in Stockingford. You would think it was a cat but the way she told me not to touch dogs when I was little it might have been one of them