# 498
Aside from Indonesia, Egypt has had the most human infections over the past few months. The Arabic press carries stories about the fears of bird flu infections, and the fears of a pandemic, on a regular basis.
It is not unusual for 3 or 4 new suspected cases to be reported on any given day, and most of the time, they turn out negative. A nasty strain of seasonal flu has been making the rounds in the mid-east.
Yesterday, however, we saw media reports of at least 16 people being hospitalized with suspected bird flu. Even in Egypt, that's a lot of cases.
Most of these are likely something other than the H5N1 virus, and we will have to await testing to know for sure. One, reportedly, is a health care worker, and that is always a worrisome sign.
Why then, do we bother to look when we know that most will be something other than bird flu?
Simply because, one day, perhaps soon, a rash of cases could signify the beginning of an outbreak. And better we know about it sooner, than later.
We are fortunate to have a number of newshounds on the Internet who scour the Arab press reports, and translate them for us. Otherwise, we'd have no idea that anything might be going on. The Egyptian government, while obviously working very seriously to test people, isn't particularly communicative when it comes to `suspected cases'.
Lest you think this is a bit obsessive, I'd remind my readers that authorities in Russia and Turkey routinely quarantine entire villages when birds are found to be infected with the virus. That the Russians recently tested 5000 citizens living in areas where birds had died. And that in South Korea, when they have an outbreak, they not only cull birds, but anything that moves within the culling zone.
Today, H5N1 is primarily a disease of birds, with rare human infections. Rarer still, are human-to-human transmissions of the virus. Yet governments around the world react as if they expect, at any time, for this status to change.
So we watch Egypt, and Nigeria, and Indonesia, and a dozen other potential hotbeds around the world. Not because we believe every `suspected case' is, in fact, H5N1.
But because we know at some point, they could be.
