Human burd flu cases top 200
The number of people worldwide who have been infected with the deadly H5N1 strain bird flu since 2003 has risen above 200, the UN health agency said today.
The World Health Organisation said the total number of confirmed human infections since the current outbreak began has reached 204, adding eight people who previously tested positive for the disease in Egypt.
WHO raised to 113 its official death toll from H5N1, adding two Egyptians and a Chinese man whose deaths already had been announced by national authorities. Virtually all the individuals were exposed to the disease in poultry.
The health agency’s tally has generally lagged behind reports in individual countries because it had waited for further confirmation on samples sent to its partner laboratories.
WHO spokeswoman Maria Cheng said the agency has changed that policy and will now accept results from approved national laboratories.
In some cases long delays occurred because health officials in some countries were unable to arrange acceptable shipping of samples to reference labs.
The eight new cases occurred in Egypt and all were verified only in the country, Cheng said.
“The new guideline is that the initial cases of an outbreak of H5N1 should be tested in an external lab or have verification done on site – as long as one or the other is available,” Cheng said.
“We had two teams that went to Egypt and they verified that the laboratories there do have the ability to make an H5N1 diagnosis.”
Egypt’s Health Ministry considers a case confirmed after tests come back positive for H5N1 from either the country’s national public health laboratory or the US Naval Medical Research Unit 3 (NAMRU-3).
There have been 12 confirmed human cases of H5N1 in Egypt, four of them fatal, WHO said. The virus has infected 17 people, killing 12, in China since last year, according to the agency’s figures.
