Pandemic Potential Increases as H7N9 Spreads to Hong Kong at the Start of Regular Flu Season

Chris Carrington

An Indonesian resident in Hong Kong has become the island's first H7N9 bird flu victim. The woman who is 36 years old is in isolation and is in a critical condition.

She recently traveled to Shenzhen on the mainland and had contact with live poultry.

The World Health Organization has said that although:

There is no evidence of sustained human to human transmission, H7N9 is an unusually dangerous virus.

Hong Kong's food and health secretary Dr. KO Wing-man said the woman

…has a history of travelling to Shenzhen, buying a chicken, slaughtering and eating the chicken. 

She is now in critical condition at Queen Mary Hospital, four people in close contact with her were showing signs of flu-like symptoms.

H7N9 was first identified in April and has sickened 139 people since then, killing 45 of them. Scientists fear that the virus will have much more effect this winter when influenza outbreaks are far more common.

New strain of swine flu emerges

Maggie Fox
Reuters

The H1N1 swine flu virus may be starting to mutate, and a slightly new form has begun to predominate in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, researchers reported on Thursday.

More study is needed to tell whether the new strain is more likely to kill patients and whether the current vaccine can protect against it completely, said Ian Barr of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza in Melbourne, Australia and colleagues.

"However, it may represent the start of more dramatic antigenic drift of the pandemic influenza A(H1N1) viruses that may require a vaccine update sooner than might have been expected," they wrote in the online publication Eurosurveillance.

It is possible it is both more deadly and also able to infect people who have been vaccinated, they said.

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