International health experts express concern over unprecedented bird flu spread

If this continues to grow and mutate, it could be a very great concern for all of us.

GENEVA - International health experts have expressed concern over the unprecedented spread of bird flu from Asia to Europe and Africa, but said the spotlight is on Indonesia because of its continuing high infection rate among people and poultry.
Fourteen countries - from India to Nigeria and Egypt - have reported their first cases of birds infected with the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu since the beginning of February, the World Health Organization said.
“It’s absolutely unprecedented,” WHO spokeswoman Maria Cheng told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “We’ve never seen so many outbreaks of the same virus in so many different regions, and our concern obviously is that humans could potentially come into contact with birds infected with H5N1, which would mean populations worldwide are potentially at risk.”
WHO says it remains difficult for humans to catch H5N1. The agency has confirmed 170 human cases, including 92 deaths, since 2003 - mostly in east Asia. But WHO experts fear that the virus could mutate into a form that is easily transmitted from person to person, and that that could set off a flu pandemic.
Many of the locations of recent outbreaks were in Europe, where wild birds have tested positive for the disease. But poultry cases in India, Egypt and Nigeria are causing international health authorities more concern because of the close contact chickens and other domestic fowl can have with humans who keep them around their homes, increasing the chance of the disease jumping the species barrier.
“At the moment we don’t have very good information about how extensive these outbreaks are,” said Cheng. “Certainly cases like India and Egypt where population density is quite high and people tend to keep birds at home, that’s a concern.”

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