AP Features, March 5th, 2007
A woman in Laos believed to be the country's second bird flu victim died, Lao and U.N. health officials announced.
Laboratory test results had shown that the woman, from the capital province of Vientiane, tested positive for an H5-type flu virus, Dr. Bounlay Phommasack of the Lao Health Ministry said by telephone Sunday. Speaking before the woman died, he said it would take about six more days to know if she had the virulent H5N1 subtype.
Bounlay said it was almost certain the woman has H5N1, as she lives near a village where poultry were infected with the virus.
A joint press statement issued later by the Lao Health Ministry and the U.N. World Health Organization said the woman died Sunday afternoon. She was being treated at a hospital in the Lao capital, Vientiane.
It added that so far no other people known to have been in contact with the victim had shown any signs of infection.
Health officials confirmed the country's first known human case of bird flu late last month _ a 15-year-old female who fell ill on Feb. 10, just days after H5N1 was confirmed in poultry in the area. The girl was hospitalized in Vientiane and later transferred to Thailand, where she remains in a stable condition.
Both afflicted women lived in Vientiane province, though outside Vientiane municipality, the capital city.
Initial tests on the second woman were conducted by Laos' National Center for Laboratory and Epidemiology, and a clinical specimen was also sent to the World Health Organization reference laboratory for verification and confirmation, Bounlay said.
The woman was tested after she developed a fever and pneumonia in late February.
"The woman's exposure to sick poultry is unclear at this stage and investigations are ongoing," WHO said in another statement.
Most human cases of H5N1 have been linked to contact with infected birds.
Hospital staff and close family members in contact with the patient were given the medicine oseltamivir as a post-exposure measure, Bounlay said. None have shown any flu-like symptoms.
Bird flu has killed at least 167 people since the virus began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003. It remains hard for humans to catch, but experts fear the virus could mutate into a form that passes easily among people, potentially sparking a pandemic.
