Scott McPherson's Web Presence

Welcome back, everyone. 

Apparently H5N1 decided to stage an unsettling comeback in the final month of 2007 -- and nowhere is that news more disconcerting than in Egypt.  In no less than six days' time, five Egyptians were reported to have officially contracted the H5N1 virus -- and four of those cases were dead.

All the latest fatalities have been women.

I am just back at the keyboard from a few days of downtime, so I am still sorting through all the various media and blog/posting reports.  The number of confirmed human cases stands at five, but the number of suspected human cases currently rests at 27 or 28.  There may be one or more family clusters.  But from what I can gather, these human infections are not in an isolated location -- that are coming from all over the upper Nile Delta.  Furthermore, the numbers of dead relative to the number of cases is especially troublesome.  A Google Earth map, found on the FluTrackers Website and maintained by Dr. Henry Niman,  shows us the confirmed and suspected human cases.  It is at this link:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=106484775090296685271.000442accf347f22ad5d4&ll=30.575268,31.117401&spn=4.123611,7.976074&t=h&z=7&om=0

If all these cases had come from one geographic area, that might be considered (in some perverse way) good news.  But the fact the confirmed cases are in such a widespread area could (and I cautiously use the word "could") potentially signify the emergence of a more easily transmitted bird-to-human (B2H) strain of H5N1.  It would be otherwise difficult to explain this sudden explosion of H5N1 all over the region simultaneously.

In all of 2006, Egypt reported 18 cases, with 10 deaths. This year, prior to Christmas, Egypt confirmed a total of 21 human cases of H5N1, and 6 deaths.  But in just one week in late 2007/early 2008, Egypt has reported reported 5 additional cases and 4 additional deaths. 

And if we look at a chart prepared by fluposter Laidback Al, we can expect to see the situation worsen in the coming months.  Laidback Al took all the suspected cases and overlaid the actual cases.  What he found was a peaking of the 2007 H5N1 cases in April of 2007.  So we can assume (though the data is admittedly sketchy, for Egypt didn't even have a human H5N1 case until 2006), that the 2007/08 holiday sledgehammer return of H5N1 to the Upper Nile, coupled with a particularly nasty proclivity of the current virus to infect -- and  kill -- younger women, distributed over such a wide geographic area, means trouble for 2008.