Fears for bird flu pandemic rise after six members of a family die

THE deaths of six members of the same family from bird flu has raised fears that a pandemic form of the disease is about to break out.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) described the outbreak in a village in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, as the most important development in the spread of the virus for three years.

Six out of seven family members who have caught the disease have died - the most recent on Monday - in one of the largest human clusters of the H5N1 virus reported.

However, the WHO decided against raising the level of pandemic alert after genetic tests appeared to show the virus, which has so far killed 124 out of 218 people infected worldwide, had not undergone the mutations necessary to make it highly infectious among humans.

There was speculation that some people may be more prone to catching the existing form of H5N1 because of their genetic make-up, which may account for the limited number of cases where human-to-human transmission is thought to have occurred.

A WHO spokesman said it would be "premature" to sound the all-clear and 33 people who were in contact with the last person to die were being monitored to see if they developed the disease. If this happened, it would strongly suggest the disease was acquiring the ability to pass between humans, which could potentially kill millions worldwide.

Peter Cordingley, a spokesman for the WHO's western Pacific region, said: "We have a team down there, they are examining what is going on and they can't find an animal source of this infection. This is the first time that we've been completely stumped. What we are looking out for is any sign of this virus going outside of this family cluster into the community, that would be very worrying."

Professor Hugh Pennington, an Aberdeen University microbiologist, said the outbreak sounded like an extreme case of previously suspected human-to-human transmission, which is thought to have taken place in Thailand and Vietnam.