CAIRO, 12 October 2006 — Egypt has detected its first human case of the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu virus since May in an Egyptian woman who raised ducks from her home, a World Health Organization official said yesterday.
Hassan El-Bushra, regional adviser for communicable diseases surveillance at the World Health Organization, said the woman had tested positive for the avian influenza virus in tests carried out by Egyptian health authorities.
The new infection brings the number of human cases in Egypt to 15, of whom six have died. All the previous infections were detected between March and May after the virus first surfaced in Egyptian poultry in February.
The woman, 39-year-old Hanan Aboul Magd of the Nile Delta province of Gharbiya, has been in hospital since Oct. 4 and has been treated with the drug Tamiflu, state news agency MENA said.
The woman was on a respirator but her condition was stable, MENA said. Her family was being tested for the virus. Egypt has had the largest cluster of human bird flu cases outside of Asia, and the fresh case came a month after authorities found a cluster of new cases in birds following a two-month lull in detected poultry cases.
The initial bird flu outbreak caused panic in Egypt, where poultry is a major source of protein and where poor families frequently breed chicken domestically in cities and rural areas to supplement their diet and income. MENA reported that the newly infected woman had raised a flock of 11 ducks from her home north of the Egyptian capital. Two became sick and died, and she then slaughtered the rest before she was hospitalized.
Most of the people infected with bird flu in Egypt became ill after coming into contact with so-called “backyard” birds, officials say. Egypt has culled 30 million birds since February to contain the virus.
Chickens on rooftops may be particularly susceptible to catching the virus from infected migrant birds, which fly along the densely populated Nile valley during migration, experts have suggested.
Bushra had earlier said that the fresh cases of bird flu in Egyptian poultry showed that there was still a risk for human cases, but a large outbreak was less likely to take hold or spread so long as Egypt continued to vaccinate poultry. The vast majority of Egyptian commercial poultry flocks have been vaccinated, while about 20 percent of domestic birds had received vaccines, officials say.
Two separate officials said the onset of warm weather, combined with Egyptian government measures, may have helped keep the virus at bay during the summer months.
