Egypt: Latest bird flu deaths not Tamiflu resistant

CAIRO (Reuters) - The two latest bird flu deaths in Egypt showed no signs of the mutant virus which is moderately resistance to the antiviral medicine Tamiflu and which killed three people in December, the health minister said on Tuesday.

Hatem el-Gabali also appealed for more international aid to help Africa deal with bird flu outbreaks, saying the continent had more difficult problems than Asia because of poverty.

Known as "294S", the mutated strain of the H5N1 virus was first detected in 2005 in a teenage girl in Vietnam who survived. The World Health Organization (WHO) said in January the virus had resurfaced in two members of one family, a factory worker and his teenage niece, in a Nile Delta village in Egypt.

Gabali said the mutated virus was also the pathogen which killed a third member of the same family in December.

"Tests ... confirmed our initial findings that in those three cases Tamiflu was not effective enough. But the case that followed and the one after showed that Tamiflu was effective," Gabali told reporters at a WHO conference on Global Pandemic Influenza Communications in Cairo.

"Therefore the United Nations until this moment has not changed its treatment strategy," he said.

Bird flu has killed 166 people worldwide, out of 272 who have contracted the disease since it reemerged in Asia in 2003, the World Health Organization says. With 12 deaths from 20 human cases, Egypt has the largest bird flu cluster outside Asia.

WHO reaffirmed in May that patients should get Tamiflu as a frontline treatment, but said that in certain cases doctors may consider coupling it with amantadine, an older class of effective flu drugs.

"The H5N1 virus continues to change. It will continue to change," Paul Gully, a senior WHO adviser, told the conference.

"Influenza A viruses replicate but they don't replicate very well. They are bad at replicating themselves so ... mutations continue to occur," he said.

Gully said the mutation of the virus in Egypt "probably occurred by chance".

Gabaly, the Egyptian minister, said the situation in his country was not critical but efforts to wipe out the virus have failed so far because raising poultry at home is a key source of income and nutrition for about five million households.

Most people infected in Egypt had been in contact with birds kept at home. Bird flu initially caused panic across the country and did extensive damage to the poultry industry.

The government said in January that poultry production had recovered to 1.8 million birds a day, just short of the two million produced before the outbreak.

Gabaly said Egypt has not received any aid from the international community to combat the disease.

"Unfortunately Africa has been forgotten. All the funding went to Asia ... nothing has come to Africa," he earlier told the conference.

"It is very important that we all work together because this is something that is going to stay here for some years to come."