New bird flu case reminder pandemic still a threat

MARK COLVIN: A two-year-old Egyptian boy has caught the virulent H5N1 bird flu virus. He's the tenth person to contract the disease in Egypt this year.

Researchers have described the spate of new outbreaks in Egypt and in China as worrying. The number of cases appeared to have peaked three years ago but these outbreaks seem to buck that trend.

David Mark reports.

DAVID MARK: Egypt is the new ground zero for bird flu. The two-year-old boy is the sixth Egyptian to get the disease in the past month.

Professor Anne Kelso is the director of the WHO collaborating centre for Influenza in Melbourne.

ANNE KELSO: The WHO is reporting cases and deaths at the moment in China, Egypt and Vietnam. I think particularly worrying are the number of cases in China, which are scattered throughout different provinces.

DAVID MARK: The avian influenza of H5N1 virus first jumped from birds to humans in 2003. The number of cases grew steadily. In 2006 115 people in nine countries caught the disease; 79 of them died. Bird flu was a big story.

(Montage of archival stories)

REPORTER: China says it's made the first discovery of a deadly flu…

REPORTER 2: The extremely infectious avian influenza…

REPORTER 3: The World Health Organisation says international…

REPORTER 4: The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture last night confirmed that…

DAVID MARK: Since then the numbers of cases and deaths from bird flu has been steadily declining.

ANNE KELSO: It's interesting because the virus, or at least I should call it a family of viruses is still spreading very widely throughout the world and there are many poultry outbreaks still occurring in many countries of the world.

ALAN HAMPSON: Well, it certainly hasn't gone away and I think there's probably a degree of media fatigue about the whole thing.

DAVID MARK: Dr Alan Hampson is the chair of the Australian Influenza Specialist Group. As he explains, the danger with bird flu is that it could mutate.

If the virus could jump from human to human, the chances of a deadly pandemic increase greatly.

ALAN HAMPSON: I certainly wouldn't write this virus off. I think if it does acquire, if it can acquire that potential, then the longer that it's there the more human cases we see, then the chances are continuing to grow that it will actually adapt.

DAVID MARK: The good news is that it hasn't happened yet. While 256 six people have died from the disease, that number pales in comparison to a possible pandemic.

Tens of millions died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak.

Some people have suggested that the fact avian influenza hasn't mutated in the past six years, mean that it won't.

Dr Hampson and Professor Kelso disagree:

ALAN HAMPSON: There's no inherent reason in the virus that we've been able to date that would suggest that it can't adapt to humans.

ANNE KELSO: It hasn't yet undergone the mutation that would make it easily transmissible. Maybe there's some reason; maybe there's some property of the virus that means it's not particularly prone to undergoing those mutations, but I don't know of any scientific evidence for that.

And so we simply have to assume that there's still some possibility, even if it's small, that that virus could cause a pandemic.

DAVID MARK: The years without a pandemic have bought time. Professor Kelso says a huge amount of progress has been made into researching the H5N1 virus and possible vaccines.

ANNE KELSO: So that if one has a vaccine for one influenza virus the person who's vaccinated will have some degree of protection against quite different influenza viruses.

DAVID MARK: A key to the research is countries sharing information. But Professor Kelso is concerned that one country, Indonesia, isn't reporting cases.

Crucially, Indonesia is the country where the virus is mostly widely spread among flocks of poultry and where the human death toll far of 115 far exceeds any other country.

ANNE KELSO: Because they're not sharing viruses with WHO it's harder for the rest of the world to assist or to help to monitor how those viruses are changing. So, yes, we're concerned about Indonesia.

DAVID MARK: Avian influenza may no longer be a sexy story, but those working in the field argue governments around the world can't afford to assume the danger from this disease is over.

MARK COLVIN: David Mark.