abcdefg wrote:
I knew of two times when Human to Human transmission was considered to be a possibilty. I think one was in Vietnam where a woman got the disease and then had her family over to her home and the whole family got sick. . | I covered this story 2 1/2 years ago and it was a cluster. We had 4 people - 2 were nurse both who came down with symptoms - several deaths -
the nurse lived in an apartment and was not at all exposed to birds - and then one relative passed to another (their time they got sick was spaced out like an incubation period)
also -
2004
The World Health Organization says it cannot rule out the possibility that
two women in Vietnam have caught bird flu by human-to-human transmission.
Such transmission has been feared by health authorities, as it could signal
the start of a dangerous new phase in the epidemic. However, there is so far no
evidence that the virus has undergone changes that would make it highly
contagious among humans. The greatest fear is that the bird flu will recombine
with a human strain, making it both highly pathogenic and easily transmitted
from person to person.
Klaus Stöhr, head of influenza surveillance at the WHO, points out that some
human-to-human transmission took place when the same type of bird flu virus,
H5N1, first infected humans in Hong Kong in 1997.
Another bird flu virus, H7N7, spread between people in the Netherlands in
2003. In both cases the second person to get the virus did not pass it on to a
third. That also seems to be what happened in Vietnam, says Stöhr.
Wedding feast
The WHO revealed on Sunday that two Vietnamese women who died from bird flu
may have been infected at a wedding. A 31-year-old man and his sister died
shortly afterwards.
The man and his sister had both slaughtered and prepared a duck for the
wedding reception. Another sister, and the man's wife, aged 23 and 30, also went
on to develop the disease, and the wife died. But neither is known to have had
contact with poultry.
"The investigation failed to reveal a specific event such as contact with
infected poultry or an environmental source that might explain the source of
infection," said a WHO spokesman. "The WHO considers that limited human-to-human
transmission is one possible explanation."
In a separate development, a woman in Germany was admitted to hospital in
Hamburg on Monday suffering from suspected bird flu. The woman had recently
returned from a holiday Thailand.
"We are now running a PCR test on her to see whether we can identify whether
she has the flu virus or not," says Bernhard Fleischer, director of the Bernhard
Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine. But he told New Scientist: "At
this stage its rather premature to fear that she has flu."
If the tests do prove positive, investigators will want to determine whether
the tourist had contact with any poultry or is more likely to have caught it
from another person. Medclinician
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