First human case of avian flu

Health authorities in Djibouti have reported the first human case of the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain. In a radio and television address on Thursday, Djibouti’s health minister, Abdallah Abdillahi Miguil, announced that a young girl had been hospitalised with the H5N1 strain of the avian flu virus. Samples from other family members, who had shown flu-like symptoms, had been sent to the laboratory Namru III in Cairo, the Egyptian capital. The patient comes from a small village, about 30km south of Djiboutiville, the capital. She is receiving treatment at Bouffard, a French military hospital. Rumours of an outbreak of fever had been circulating in Djiboutiville since the beginning of April, according to an official from Djibouti’s health ministry. It was originally believed to be dengue fever or chikungunya, a mosquito-borne fever that has been reported recently in Mauritius and Reunion. The government, with the help of United States and French troops, and in collaboration with the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO), took several blood samples for testing. A sample taken from the child, who showed symptoms of fever, tested positive for H5N1 on 27 April. Three chickens were found to be infected with the virus as well. The confirmation of a human case is alarming, because Djibouti imports chickens from abroad and has no poultry farms. "We are shortly going to ban the import of live poultry. I urge people to cook chicken well before eating it," Miguil said. "We will soon review our mechanisms of disease control. But I ask parents to watch their children and prevent them from playing with birds and from going near dead birds." People in the capital have panicked since the announcement and stopped eating chicken. Said Ali, the owner of an open-air restaurant, regretted that the announcement was made in the early evening, when the food was already cooked. "If the minister had made his announcement in the morning, we could have made arrangements, but now it’s too late to throw it all away." "Bird flu will be our only topic of conversation among friends," said Osman Ali, an 18-year-old student. Confirmation of H5N1 in chickens puts Djibouti in phase III of the global pandemic, according to the WHO definition. Egypt is the only other country in Africa to have reported human infection of the disease.