International health experts have been dispatched to Pakistan to help investigate the cause of South Asia's first human bird flu cases and determine if the virus could have been transmitted from person to person, a World Health Organization (WHO) official said yesterday.
Four brothers - two of whom died - and two cousins from Abbotabad, a small city about 50 km north of Islamabad, were suspected of being infected by the H5N1 virus along with a man and his niece from the same area who had slaughtered chickens, said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl in Geneva.
Specimens were never collected from one of the brothers who died, and several of those who tested positive experienced only mild symptoms and were not hospitalized, Hartl said.
He said all four brothers were believed to have worked on a farm and poultry outbreaks had earlier been reported in the area, but Mohammed Tariq, 30, a teacher and brother who was sickened and recovered, said only one worked on a farm. Hartl said WHO has not ruled out limited human-to-human transmission. "It's possible," he said.
The H5N1 virus has killed at least 208 people worldwide since late 2003. So far, most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds.
Another brother who flew to Pakistan to attend the funerals then traveled to the US tested negative for the virus in New York and at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, said CDC spokesman Dave Daigle.
Another surviving brother of the two men who died in Pakistan said he had been hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Mohammed Ishtiaq said he fell ill last month after slaughtering chickens suspected of carrying bird flu at a farm near Abbotabad.
"I was not aware that this was such a dangerous disease," said Ishtiaq, a veterinary doctor.
Source:China Daily/Agencies
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