nThailand grappled yesterday with the specter of human-to-human bird flu infection after confirming that a woman has died of the virus after likely contracting it from her daughter.
Pranee Thongchan, 26, became the 10th confirmed fatality from the disease in Thailand after tests on a piece of her lung revealed she had the deadly H5N1 virus, Charal Trinwuthipong, director general of the Disease Control Department, told a news conference.
PHOTO: AP
She died Sept. 20 in a hospital, eight days after her 11-year-old daughter Sakuntala passed away. A Public Health Ministry statement said Sakuntala was a "probable avian influenza case" who got the virus from chickens in her house. She was cremated before final tests could be done.
Pranee had not come into contact with chickens but had "very close and face-to-face exposure" to her daughter while tending to her in the hospital, the statement said.
"We have all agreed that a probable human-to-human transmission has occurred through close, direct, face-to-face and long contact," said Dr Kumara Rai, the acting Thailand representative of the World Health Organization.
The development "should be viewed by the international community with concern," said Scott Dowell, director of the International Emerging Infections Program.
The "documentation of human-to-human transmission in this situation is better than it has been in previous cases," Dowell said.
Nineteen human fatalities also were reported in Vietnam this year, and tens of millions of chickens and other poultry have been killed by the disease or culled to curb its spread through much of eastern Asia.
Most human cases have been traced to contact with sick birds. Human-to-human transmission was suspected in some Vietnamese cases, but never confirmed. Scientists fear a pandemic if the virus mutates to mix with human influenza to create a form that could easily jump from one human to another.
However, the Thai government played down such fears.
"There is no evidence to suggest that the virus has mutated or re-assorted. This probable human-to-human transmission of avian influenza was related to a single index case and was limited within a family," said the health ministry statement.
Also, Charal said "we cannot point out 100 percent" whether Pranee was infected by human-to-human spread of the virus or got it from the environment.
Rai said even if was a confirmed human-to-human transmission, "it doesn't pose a significant public health threat, so there is no reason to be panicked" because the case was isolated.
Pranee's sister, Pranom, 32, was also confirmed on Monday as suffering from bird flu, and is now in a hospital isolation ward. Pranee lived outside Bangkok while her daughter lived in a village in the northern province of Kamphaengphet.
No other members of the village where Sakuntala lived, or health care workers in the hospitals where she and her mother were admitted, are so far found to be ill, the ministry statement said.
"Although the finding of probable human-to-human transmission is clearly of concern, there is currently no evidence of ongoing chains of transmission or risk to persons outside the affected provinces," it said.
"Today's announcement reinforces the need to control and eradicate [the virus]," Dr He Changchui of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization told yesterday's news conference.
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