Canine Link to Suspect Fatal H5N1 Cluster in Bandung Indonesia
Recombinomics Commentary
September 25, 2006
Zakaria Divine Guidance, 20, suspect bird flu that was treated in RS Handsome Sadikin (RSHS) Bandung since Sunday afternoon (24/9), till Monday (25/9) still was critical. On the same day, casualties's older brother, Indra Jayakusuma, 23, died after experiencing the hot sign high and breathless
they the dog breeder that gave ate his kept animal with the chicken died that was bought from the market. The "condition for Divine Guidance very critical, in fact increasingly critical compared to when entering isolation space. His leucocytes descended, now pneumonia on the lungs increasingly spread, so as he suffered breathless difficult and must make use of respiratory aids,
The above translation provides additional detail on the suspect H5N1 bird flu cluster in Bandung. The older brother (23M) has already died, and the condition of the younger brother (20M) is critical. Their status is very similar to an earlier set of siblings who died in Bandung. However, the feeding of dead chickens to dogs is similar to the first cases reported in the Garut cluster. The sequence from H5N1 from one of the fatal cases in the Garut cluster is similar to the H5N1 found in almost all human isolates from Java, but has not been found in poultry on Java.
The failure to match the human sequences with the poultry sequences suggests an alternate reservoir is circulating H5N1. The only other matching sequence on Java was from cat in Jakarta, raising the possibility of a mammalian pet reservoir. H5N1 has been isolated from cats in several countries, including Thailand, Germany, Egypt, and Austria as well as from dogs in Thailand and Azerbaijan. In Thailand, the dog, domestic cat, and several wild cat H5N1 isolates have PB2 E627K, which is also in most human isolates from Vietnam and Thailand, but is not found in the Clade 1 H5N1 bird isolates. Moreover, cats and dogs in Thailand have H5N1 antibodies, signaling non-fatal infections.
Antibody levels and H5N1 sequences from dogs and cats in Indonesia would be useful.
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