The Hindu : International / Globescan : Avian flu could kill 70 million: expert

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Thursday, Apr 14, 2005

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International - Globescan

Avian flu could kill 70 million: expert

LYON (FRANCE): Avian flu — caught directly from birds, and which kills in seven cases out of 10 — could suddenly sweep through the human population, killing 70 million people, according to World Health Organisation estimates, a Nobel laureate warned on Tuesday. Peter Doherty, of the University of Melbourne, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Medicine, was speaking at an assembly of laureates in Lyon, France, 50 years to the day after the first announcement of an effective vaccine against the disease poliomyelitis. World health teams hope to eliminate polio altogether by the end of 2005. But, Prof Doherty warned the Biovision conference, there were more immediate hazards. Avian flu has killed people who worked with poultry in South-East Asia. Prof Doherty warned that a simultaneous epidemic of human and bird flu could prove a lethal mix, opening the way for the two viruses to mutate into a dangerous infection that could spread swiftly through the human population.`If it comes, it will probably come out of somewhere like South-East Asia and it will probably come very fast,'' he said. ``It is highly lethal in birds, and in humans, when they catch it, it is something like 70 per cent lethal. So it is very dangerous.'' Influenza is a very simple virus with a genetic code in eight segments that can only replicate in an infected host. If a human infected with flu from ducks was also infected with human flu, then the two viruses could swap genes. It happened 30 years ago, with Hong Kong flu, which also began in ducks, he said. In countries like Cambodia and Vietnam, where influenza vaccines were rare, a human version of avian flu would spread rapidly. —

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