United Nations health agency officials are monitoring an area of Laos following the first human case of bird flu to be reported in the South-East Asian country, bringing to one dozen the total number of States with human infections.
The 15-year-old female patient is currently in Nongkhai public hospital in neighbouring Thailand where she remains in stable condition.
The Lao Government is providing samples of the virus to a collaborating examination centre of the UN World Health Organization (WHO), which is coordinating global efforts to monitor the disease for any possible mutations into a human pandemic that in a worst case scenario could kill millions of people.
Thai, Lao and WHO officials have examined the girl?s village and those districts where poultry deaths had occurred earlier. Close contacts of the girl have been identified and are being monitored daily. The adults were given prophylaxis with oseltamivir medicine and to date all of them remain healthy.
There have so far been 275 confirmed human cases worldwide, 167 of them fatal, the vast majority in South-East Asia. UN health officials have been on constant alert to detect any mutation that could make the disease more easily transmissible in humans. Nearly all human cases so far have been traced to contact with infected birds.
The so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920, which spread easily between humans, is estimated to have killed from 20 million to 40 million people worldwide.
More than 200 million birds have died from either the virus or preventive culling in the current outbreak.