# 6781
My thanks to Gert van der Hoek on FluTrackers for picking up this report from Indonesia’s Ministry of Health, announcing a recent bird flu (H5N1) fatality in West Java.
The following is a machine translation of a press release. Additional information will no doubt be posted on this FluTrackers thread.
Report of 192nd Case of Bird Flu
DECEMBER 14, 2012 | 3:56 PMMinistry of Health, Directorate General of Disease Control and Environmental Health announced a new case of H5N1 has been confirmed by the Center for Basic Biomedical and Health Technologies, Balitbangkes.
Case on behalf of the IT (male, 4 years old) residents of Kampung Nagreg, Gorowong Village, District Parung Panjang, Bogor regency, West Java. Dated 30 November 2012 symptoms of fever, December 1, 2012 the case went to Pustu. Dated December 4, 2012 because there was no change in the case of seeing a private doctor, dated December 5, 2012 morning the case went to the health center and in the afternoon the case was referred to the Private RSIA for hospitalization. Dated December 6, 2012 the case was referred to the Tangerang District Hospital because of fever, cough, and shortness. The situation gets worse case and the case eventually died at 23:40 pm.
Epidemiological investigations have been conducted into the hospital, and the case surrounding the Integrated Team MoH and local health service, possible risk factors that come in direct contact with poultry carcasses (entog) in the neighborhood.
With the increase of these cases, the cumulative number of bird flu in Indonesia since 2005 until this news broadcast is 192 cases with 160 deaths.
Director General of Disease Control and Environmental Health, Prof. dr. Tjandra Yoga Aditama as the focal point of the International Health Regulations (IHR) has been informed about the case to the WHO.
This information is released by Center for Public Communication, Secretariat General of the Ministry of Health. For further information, please contact via telephone: (021) 52907416-9, Fax: (021) 52921669, Rapid Response Response Centre (PTRC): 500-567 and 081 281 562 620 (sms), or e-mail contacts @ depkes.go.id
As Gert helpfully points out in a following post, `Entog’ means `duck’ in Bahasan.
Possibly related: we’ve recently seen reports of large die offs of ducks on the island of Java due to the recently arrived strain of H5N1 – clade 2.3.2.1 (see VOA Report On The Indonesian Duck Die Off).
This is the first report of a human H5N1 infection since August, although it is certainly possible that some cases are not being picked up or reported by surveillance programs around the world.
For now, H5N1 remains primarily a threat to poultry and wild birds, and to a lesser extent people in close contact with them. While human to human transmission transmission has been documented, it is very rare, as the virus remains poorly adapted to human physiology.
But around the world more than 600 widely scattered human infections have been reported, and the mortality rate has been a horrendously high 60% among known cases.
And so we track these scattered human infections with considerable interest, in case they herald a change in the behavior of the virus.
