12/16/2007 | 10:35 AM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Six people caught H5N1 bird flu in northern Pakistan last month and at least one person with the disease has died, the government said Saturday.
The World Health Organization confirmed all six cases were positive for the H5N1 strain of bird flu in preliminary testing, but said a second round of analysis was being conducted to make sure.
If confirmed, the infections would be the first in humans in South Asia.
The Health Ministry said it had tested several patients and others whom they had come into contact with in late October. The results for six people from the Abbottabad and Mansehra districts of North West Frontier Province were positive, it said in a statement.
''Five of them have fully recovered. One of the confirmed cases died in a hospital, while his brother who could not be tested has also died,'' the Health Ministry said in a statement. It did not explain why the brother could not be tested.
Khalif Bile, the WHO representative in Pakistan, said preliminary tests had been carried out. He said the WHO was encouraging the government to carry out confirmation tests in the same government laboratory and that the results should be available by Tuesday.
The virus has killed more than 200 people worldwide since it began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003, according to the World Health Organization.
While it has been difficult for people to catch, experts fear it could mutate into a form that passes easily among people, potentially infecting millions globally. So far, most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds.
A brother of the two men who died in Pakistan said Saturday he had been hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Mohammed Ishtiaq said he fell ill last month after culling chickens suspected of carrying bird flu at a farm near Abbottabad.
''I was not aware that this was such a dangerous disease,'' said Ishtiaq, a veterinary doctor who works for a government-funded livestock program. He said he wore no protective clothing.
His two brothers did not accompany him to the farm, but visited him in hospital, Ishtiaq told Associated Press Television News in the village of Sukur.
He identified his brothers as Mohammed Ilyas and Mohammed Idrees and said they were both studying at an agriculture college in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
It was unclear if they had other contact with poultry or another potential source of infection.
Ishtiaq said a fourth brother, a primary school teacher, also fell ill after visiting him but recovered. He said doctors had taken blood samples from him and other relatives but gave them no results.
Health Ministry officials could not be reached for comment on how the disease was transmitted.
The Health Ministry said Saturday that it was treating people who had been in contact with those infected, setting up isolation wards in hospitals and procuring drugs for treatment and protective clothing for health workers.
Most of the human cases of H5N1 bird flu have been reported in Indonesia and Vietnam. On Friday, the WHO confirmed the first case in Myanmar, where a 7-year-old girl was infected but recovered.
Pakistan has grappled with outbreaks of bird flu in poultry for the past two years, but had confirmed no cases in humans. - AP
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Topic: First in South Asia: Bird flu downs 6 Pakistanis (Read 888 times)