CAIRO, 20 March 2006 — Egypt reported yesterday that a man was suspected to be suffering the potentially deadly strain of bird flu after a woman was said to have died of the disease last week.
Mohammed Bahaa Abdel Moneim, 28, has been in hospital since Thursday after suffering symptoms of the H5N1 strain, Health Minister Hatem Al-Gabali was quoted as saying by the MENA news agency.
MENA said the man, from Banha north of Cairo, owned a poultry farm.
The report followed the death on Friday of a woman, Amal Mohammed Ismail, 30, from what Egyptian authorities said was H5N1. The Cairo-based US Naval Medical Research Unit also confirmed it was a human case of H5N1.
But the World Health Organization said there would need to be further tests before it could confirm whether the virus caused the woman’s death.
Gabali said the man’s fever had gone down and described his condition as stable after he received the drug Tamiflu.
The death of the woman, who came from the same province as Abdel Moneim, has caused alarm in the Middle East, where two other human fatalities resulting from bird flu have already been reported in Iraq.
In Israel, a cull of tens of thousands of birds around four affected farms continued yesterday, with Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calling for calm.
Israel banned all meat imports from the Gaza Strip on Feb. 17 following the discovery of the H5N1 strain in birds in neighboring Egypt.
Elsewhere, Egyptian vets have detected foot-and-mouth disease in eight calves on a government-owned farm in southern Egypt, an official said yesterday.
Mohammed Marzouq, head of veterinary medicine for the governorate of Assiut, said 80 other calves were being tested for infection with the disease, which does not affect humans but can have a serious impact on the livestock industry.
Farmers say Egypt’s poultry industry, which supports up to 3 million people, has been devastated after the bird flu virus was discovered in the country last month.
Marzouq said local health officials had arrived at the farm which was on the outskirts of a village about 300 kilometers south of Cairo. They were treating the infected calves in the hope they would recover.
The disease cripples the reproductive capacity of cloven-hoofed animals.
