BANGKOK: Thai health officials have confirmed that the son of a man who died from bird flu Wednesday is also infected with the virus, but have denied reports of human-to-human transmission, local media reported yesterday.
Doctors said Ronarit Benpad, 7, was responding well to treatment at a Bangkok hospital after being infected with the H5N1 virus about the same time as his father, Bang-on, who died from the disease.
The Nation newspaper reported yesterday that relatives alleged the government was concealing information that the boy caught the virus from his father. A Thai senator also called for independent laboratory tests on the cells of the two newest victims.
But Paichit Warachit, director of the Medical Science Department, said the virus gene sequence taken from Bang-on had not mutated from the specimens found in victims who died in 2004.
He said that led doctors to conclude that the virus could not have been transmitted from one human to another.
Warachit said the boy had likely been infected by poultry along with his father in western Kanchanaburi province, where the virus is common among fowl.
Some doubts were raised after initial tests on both the father and son were negative for H5N1, but later analyses proved positive.
Warachit said multiple testing was normal and necessary procedure, as the virus can be difficult to detect.
Kulkanya Chokephaibulkit, a paediatrician and infectious-disease specialist treating the boy, called it the first mild case of avian flu to be found in the country, the Bangkok Post reported.
“His condition is different from the other bird flu victims, Kulkanya said. “His body responded very quickly to Oseltamivir, the anti-viral drug.”
First appearing in Southeast Asia in 2003, the H5N1 virus has caused 63 human deaths in the region, but no cases of human-to-human transmission have been confirmed. Bang-on Benpad, 48, was Thailand’s 13th human fatality, and the first since October 2004.
Many international health experts warn that the virus will eventually mutate into a strain that can be passed among humans, causing a pandemic that could kill millions of people.
China will close its borders if it finds a single case of human-to-human transmission of bird flu there, a Hong Kong newspaper reported yesterday.
Saving lives would be Beijing’s top priority in efforts to contain a possible outbreak of bird flu, even if it meant slowing the economy, Huang Jiefu, a vice-minister of health, was quoted as saying by the South China Morning Post.
In Finland, the head of the World Bank said that while prevention measures would cost a lot, the economic damage from a pandemic would be far worse.
Speaking to health officials from China, Hong Kong and Macau in Yunnan province on Friday, Huang said any suspected human case would be quarantined.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said that the strain is endemic in poultry in China and across much of Asia, and it may only be a matter of time before it develops the ability to pass easily from human to human.
China’s sheer size and its attempts to conceal the Sars epidemic in 2003 have prompted fears among some experts that it has had more bird flu cases than officially recorded.
Since breaking out in late 2003 in South Korea, the deadly H5N1 strain of influenza has killed more than 60 people in four Asian countries and reached as far west as European Russia, Turkey and Romania, tracking the paths of migratory birds.
Amid growing fears about the spread of the disease, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche AG has come under pressure to pump up output of its antiviral avian flu drug Tamiflu.
The company agreed on Thursday to meet four generic drug makers with a view to possible tie-ups.
The World Health Organisation’s director of epidemic and pandemic alert, Mike Ryan, told the Financial Times yesterday it would cost billions of dollars to prepare the world fully for a potential pandemic with large-scale production of vaccines and other measures.
World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz told world parliamentarians in Finland that prevention would still be far cheaper than cure.
He said Sars, despite being contained relatively early, had cost east Asian countries two or three per cent of their gross domestic product for a quarter.
“Stop and think what a larger epidemic that spreads death and disease around the world would do in damage to commerce and the international economy,” he said.
“The cost of prevention, while it may be expensive, would be much cheaper than the cost of dealing with an outbreak.”
The Asian Development Bank said it hoped to provide $58mn to help fight the spread of bird flu — half of it to combat the virus in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and the rest to help international technical agencies.–Agencies
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