Egypt -further bird flu death

The bird flu death toll in Egypt has reached 22 after an Egyptian woman died of bird flu in a Cairo hospital and a boy aged 5, became the 22nd Egyptian to test positive for the deadly disease, health officials said yesterday.
A World Health Organisation expert said a delay in reporting symptoms was largely behind the most recent deaths in Egypt. A mutated strain that killed three people in December is not suspected to have recurred, officials say.
37-year-old Nadia Abdel Hafez was at first reported to be stable and improving after being transferred to a hospital in Cairo, but her condition deteriorated.
5-year-old Mohamed Ahmed Suleiman of Sharqiya province, was in a stable condition and is being treated with Tamiflu. He tested positive for bird flu after developing a high fever on Wednesday.

Egypt has the highest known cluster of human bird flu cases outside Asia.
Thirteen have died.

Most people infected in Egypt had been in contact with poultry kept at home. Bird flu initially caused panic and did extensive damage to the poultry industry, although the sector has largely recovered.
John Jabbour, a WHO official in Cairo, said a delay in reporting symptoms was making bird flu more deadly in Egypt, where many people keep birds at home but are often reluctant to disclose that to health officials for fear of sanctions.

The fatality rate from bird flu this winter is significantly higher than it was in the same period of 2006, before the country witnessed a 5-month warm-weather lull in human cases. Then just six of 14 people .
Eight Egyptians have contracted bird flu since the disease reappeared in humans in Egypt in October and seven have died - an extrememly high mortality rate which emphasises the improtance of prompt treatment of human case of bird flu.