Asia, World Health Organization | featured news

More than 50 percent of patients infected with a new type of bird flu in China had no contact with poultry, the World Health Organization said on Friday, further raising questions about whether the virus was transmitted between humans.

A strain of bird flu that has been found in humans for the first time in eastern China is not a cause for panic, the World Health Organization said on Monday, as the number of people infected rose to 21, with six deaths.

Health officials in Cambodia are searching for the cause of a mystery disease that has killed more than 60 children over the past three months, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

A health official in the region said the second wave of swine flu cases has come sooner than expected. “The level [of H1N1 cases in Japan and Korea] has already passed the threshold reached at the end of November or December or close to January,” said Takeshi Kasai, regional advisor in communicable disease surveillance and response for the World Health Organization (WHO). “It already happened in August or early September.”

The increasing number of swine flu cases in Japan raises the likelihood that the World Health Organization will soon have to raise its pandemic alert level to 6.

Cases of swine flu were confirmed early today in Israel and New Zealand, the first definitive proof that the dangerous new virus has spread to the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions, but international health officials said there was little point in imposing border or travel restrictions or otherwise trying to contain the virus.