Monday, March 27, 2006
Second human bird flu death in Egypt
An Egyptian woman died from the bird flu virus on Monday, an official from the United Nations health agency said, adding the woman was the second person in the country to die from the virus.
"The lady passed away today ... She was the second person out of the five who tested positive for bird flu to have died so far," said Hassan al-Bushra, World Health Organisation (WHO) regional adviser for communicable diseases surveillance. Bushra said the woman had been in a critical condition on a ventilator before her death.
Sources used in this story:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L27773319.htm
Editors note:
Many blogs and news sources were reporting that this person, possibly another, had actually died last week. Machine translated newspapers in the area reported this, however we have yet to see it in English news service. We did not report this last week because machine translations being what they are, may have been in error.
With this latest release we now know that the original machine translation from Arabic was true. This means that this is either a third human death related to the bird flu virus in Egypt and authorities are still covering up the other, or authorities timed this news release for this week instead of when the actual death occured.