Spread of Bird Flu Continues

Posted on February 20, 2006

The spread of bird flu in Europe, Asia and Africa continues with Egypt, France and India recently added to the growing list of countries that have birds or people sick with the H5N1 virus. The BBC reports that India is culling hundreds of thousands of chickens in an effort to stop an outbreak in the town of Navapur.

For years, the people of Navapur had to contend with bad roads, poor electricity and social issues such as deaths of children due to malnutrition.
Now they have to deal with bird flu - and many of them do not even know what it is, let alone how it is spread.
All areas within 3km (nearly 2 miles) of Navapur have been quarantined and 60 medical teams have been deployed in the area with a clear brief of slaughtering all the chickens - nearly 900,000 in number.

The H5N1 blog has a frightening report that thousands of dead birds are on the streets in Egypt. They also have a post that says 50,000 chickens have been killed by H5N1 in India. All of this news indicates that bird flu is spreading rapidly across several continents. We are fortunate that there has not yet been a mutation in the virus that would allow H5N1 to easily transmit from human to human. The WHO has a chart showing the human cases and deaths from the avian flu. The chart, which was updated today, shows a total of 170 cases and 92 deaths. 16 of those deaths occured this year.

H5N1