Via CIDRAP, Lisa Schnirring offers some useful background: Egyptian woman hospitalized with H5N1 infection. Excerpt:
Egyptian officials have confirmed H5N1 avian influenza in a 20-year-old woman who is hospitalized in critical condition in Cairo, according to MENA, the country’s news agency.
Health ministry spokesman Abdel Rahman Shahin said the woman, from Qalyubia governorate, about 30 miles north of Cairo, was admitted to the hospital Jul 21 with fever and breathing difficulties, Daily News Egypt reported yesterday, citing MENA. He said the woman is undergoing treatment with oseltamivir (Tamilfu) and is under careful monitoring.
Reports have not said if the woman had contact with sick or infected birds.
If the World Health Organization (WHO) confirms the woman’s infection, she will be listed as Egypt’s 110th H5N1 case-patient. The country’s 109 confirmed cases include 34 deaths.
In the first 4 months of 2010 Egypt reported 19 human H5N1 cases, 7 of them fatal. The newly confirmed case is the country’s first in nearly 4 months.
Earlier this month the Egyptian government instituted a ban on the sale of all live poultry to help prevent the spread of the H5N1 virus, which is endemic in the country, according to the Daily News Egypt report. The only exception is licensed slaughterhouses that employ veterinarians to assess the health of the birds and supervise slaughtering, cleaning, and sales of the birds.
The pace of H5N1 detections in Egyptian poultry has slowed since the end of May, with only 11 reports since Jun 1, according to Strengthening Avian Influenza Detection and Response (SAIDR), a project, funded by the US Agency for International Development with assistance from Johns Hopkins University. SAIDR is designed to help Egypt coordinate avian flu efforts with its international partners.
We have a persistent problem with covering something like H5N1. As a general rule I try to link to the nearest news source for a human case or an outbreak in animals.
But those sources tend to be in countries whose media don’t like to annoy their governments. So we’re lucky if the story is reported at all, and we almost never get follow-up stories.
Suspected bird flu? We rarely hear the test results. Poultry culled? How many nearby poultry escaped?
Even if it’s a good-news story, we don’t get a follow-up. Back in 2006, I was following the case of a little Chinese girl in Sichuan province who caught H5N1 and then recovered. (The link will take you to a four-year-old rant about this same problem.)
I’ve often wondered what became of her—and whether the local medical authorities have done any kind of monitoring of her and other H5N1 survivors. Is she generally healthy? Has she suffered any delayed effects?
Whatever the answers, they would throw light on this rare disease. And then we could begin to understand it.
Instead, governments and media alike tend to treat H5N1 cases like fatalities due to meteorites: strange, inexplicable events having no long-term consequences. That’s been the standard governmental and media response ever since 2003, so I’m grateful that CIDRAP, at least, takes the trouble to provide more details than we usually get.
