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June 28, 2002

INTERNATIONAL IMMUNIZATION NEWS

"Research Provides Clues to 1997 'Bird Flu' Outbreak"

Reuters Health Information Services (www.reutershealth.com) (06/18/02); McKinney, Merritt

Hong Kong has taken measures to prevent the most recent 2001-2002 outbreak of bird flu from jumping to the human population as it did in 1997, when six people died after being infected with a flu strain that had previously only infected birds.  As a precaution, water fowl are now slaughtered at a central location to keep the virus from infecting chickens and other poultry; during the 1997 outbreak over 1.5 million chickens were slaughtered in the Hong Kong area in an effort to stop the spread of the virus.  The more recent virus strains do not appear to be identical to the 1997 one, according to Dr. J.S. Malik Peiris of Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong; he noted that the viruses had altered themselves in such a way that enabled them to easily jump from water fowl to land fowl.  Peiris notes in his study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, that measures taken to assure the suppression of the virus in Hong Kong are unlikely to protect the wider regions of East Asia, including southern China, from being impacted by the disease.

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