Another bird flu case in Indonesia - expert says surveillance and strict control measures are the answer

Indonesian health authorities have announced another case of bird flu, bringing the country's total confirmed cases to 130 to date with 105 deaths.

Indonesia has had the highest number of human deaths from the bird flu virus in the world.

The latest victim is a 22-month-old girl from Sumatra's Bukit Tinggi region.

The child fell ill on March 19th and she is currently being treated at a Padang hospital where she is said to be improving.

Health officials are checking the neighbourhood where she lives for possible backyard farming, as contact with sick birds remains the most common way of contracting the deadly H5N1 virus.

Bird flu is endemic in bird populations in most of Indonesia and the vast archipelago has chickens living in most backyards amongst families and pets.

Experts continue to worry that the virus will mutate into a form passed between people causing a pandemic in which millions of people could die.

Meanwhile leading bird flu expert and microbiologist, professor Yi Guan, at the University of Hong Kong, says an influenza pandemic can be avoided if disease surveillance and control measures are properly and promptly conducted.

Dr. Guan has been studying and tracking the H5N1 bird flu virus since it first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997.

He says with proper surveillance in both animals and humans and a long-term strategy, a pandemic influenza can be stopped forever.

Dr. Guan works in a laboratory which is a World Health Organisation reference facility which helps to analyse H5N1 samples from other parts of the world, particularly Asia and it is here that he has compared H5N1 samples, traced mutations in the virus and tracked its footprints.

In research published last week in the Journal of Virology, he and his colleagues suggest that the H5N1 strains which showed up in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia in late 2003 probably originated in China's southwestern Yunnan province.

He says they detected almost identical viruses in Yunnan in late 2002 and early 2003 and the poultry trade might have been responsible for the introduction of the virus into Vietnam.

Dr. Guan says surveillance must be a long term effort and from what is known of past pandemics, surveillance and strict control measures are the answers.