Scott McPherson's Web Presence

Events in both Egypt and Indonesia are troubling, and the situation in Wales continues to remind us that a pandemic needn't start in Guangdong, China.

In case you missed it, two young patients in the southern Nile region have been diagnosed with H5N1, and one has died.  The death, a 10-year old girl, we the first death in the southern Nile region.  This is significant, because previous H5N1 cases from that region were considered mild.  That, in turn, led experts to believe the virus had mutated/recombined into a less lethal strain.  In the meantime, the central and northern Nile delta continued to produce extremely lethal H5N1 cases, despite some focused response from the Egyptian government.

In Indonesia, meanwhile, we continue to get wildly mixed signals.  Government authorities continually produce 40-point headlines, while the WHO comes in behind them and says, in effect, "Move along, nothing to see here, move along."

For example, an official disclosed recently that chickens were testing positive for H5N1 antibodies without exhibiting symptoms of the disease.  That is remarkable, since the "symptoms" of H5N1 in poultry resemble Ebola in humans.  Another official reported a few weeks ago that the H5N1 virus had significantly mutated and was becoming easier for humans to catch, due to changes in the receptor binding domain (hemagglutinin, or the "H" in influenza A).  Think of those Velcro dart games with the ping pong ball.  Hemagglutinin is the amino acid that allows the virus to "stick" to the walls of a throat, nasal passage or lung.

Other revelations coming from Indonesian scientists and officials include the discovery of cats as a possible vector (transmitter) of the disease.  Jakarta television news accounts graphically showed Army forces and public health professionals grabbing and swabbing the throats of housecats all over the sprawling city.  Bet you didn't see that on your local news!

Finally, in Wales, the "low path" H7N2 aftermath continues to show up in news accounts.  Human cases seem to have peaked, but remember this axiom:  If unchecked, low path bird flu goes in; high path bird flu comes out.  British authorities may have successfully beaten back any further spread of H7N2, but it serves as a cautionary tale that pandemics, like 1732 and 1918, can start in the New World and not just the Old World.