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Bird Flu makes a Return

According to this Times of India report, Avian or Bird Flu, the H5N1 virus has raised its hoary head once again, months after the country had been declared bird flu free. This will compound the worries of the health authorities already struggling to contain the H1N1 Swine flu pandemic that currently has infected over 28 thousand people and has claimed 1,113 lives so far as per latest reports.

According to the report, dead birds found in West Bengal’s Murshidabad area were found to have been infected with the bird flu virus. once again bird culling is being done in the area and a team from the health ministry has also been deployed to the area where house to house surveillance will be carried out with tests being carried out on those that show flu like symptoms such as cough, cold and respiratory illnesses. Isolation wards have also been set up to contain the virus.

While the virus strains are of course different, the other chief differences between avain and swine flu are:

The dangers posed by bird flu are actually far higher. As many as 60% of infected individuals have died so far whereas the mortality among those infected with swine flu is far lower, the same as common or seasonal flu.
Bird flu spreads from handling or being in contact with infected animals whereas the swine flu virus does not spread easily from animal to humans.
On the other hand the swine flu virus is highly contagious and spreads easily from human to human. Sneezing and shaking hands is also likely to spread the virus.
Swine flu is a pandemic and has infected far more people the world over than the bird flu. As many as 5 million Americans were infected with the H1N1 swine flu from the time the disease first emerged in mid-April until mid-December, and about 11,200 people died, according to official figures. An estimated 246,000 hospitalisations took place in the US due to this.

There is now an apprehension of what will happen if the two viruses intermingle; if such a resultant virus will be both highly contagious as well as deadly. The reason that this fear has surfaced is due to the fact that the swine flu virus is already prevalent in the area that the examples of bird flu have been seen. Fortunately it is only this geographical area that is seeing instances of avian flu among birds, nowhere else in the country has this been noted.