Bird flu flutters closer to Gulf countries

Two years after the former peak in cases of bird flu, the deadly H5N1 virus appears to fighting back in countries neighbouring the Middle East.

The virus, which is capable of being transmitted from birds to humans, has been recorded in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam Egypt, Cambodia and China during December.A 16-year-old girl in Egypt and a 2-year-old in Indonesia have died in the same month. A United Nations report in October said that initiatives to improve surveillance and rapidly cull infected birds have contributed to a two-year decline in the number of human deaths from H5N1.But scientists are warning that the world cannot afford complacency about what remains a clear and present danger. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, speaking to the Los Angeles Times, says  H5N1 has continues to "at the very least smolder, and many times flare up." Osterholm says his greatest fear is that some sort of "pandemic-preparedness fatigue," could set in as authorities and the public become blasé about the threat from H5N1. Statistics do not currently help to stir fear. Since the outbreak of bird flu in 2003, while millions of birds have died or been culled, only 247 people have died from the disease. The H5N1 strain of the virus is extremely difficult to transmit from bird to human, but scientists fear a mutation to a different strain could quickly change that fact.

Robert Webster, a virologist and avian flu expert at a US-based research hospital says, "We still have to treat this as a potentially very, very dangerous virus."