H5N1 Confirmed in Student Teacher Cluster in Surabaya
Recombinomics Commentary
May 21, 2006
An 18-year-old East Java shuttlecock maker has been diagnosed with bird flu, according to local test results announced on Sunday.
The confirmation of H5N1 bird flu in the student in the teacher/student cluster in Surabaya is cause for concern. The teacher died earlier and the circumstances surrounding here hospitalization and death have not been described.
Correction:
The teacher decribed earlier appears to be another media description of the confirmed fatality (38M) and therefore there is no infected teacher and no relationship between a fatally infected teacher and the H5N1 confirmed student.
However, the confirmation of her student raises the number of confirmed cases to two, and increases the likelihood at the other three members of the cluster have been infected with H5N1.
This cluster is in East Java and distinct from the larger cluster in North Sumatra. These clusters in addition to the clusters in and around Jakarta raise additional concerns and highlight the need for the release of the human and animal sequences sequestered at the private WHO database. Most of the human Indonesian sequences have a novel cleavage site not found in the avian isolates suggesting the human cases are not linked to poultry, increasing pandemic concerns.
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