In an article in the Guardian, a flu expert warns that the ability to understand and treat bird flu is being hampered because of a failure to conduct postmortem examinations on most victims.
The news comes as fears of the first human death from the disease on Europe’s doorstep were allayed. A 14-year-old Turkish boy who died on Sunday of pneumonia tested negative for the virus, along with three members of his family.
“The big problem, of course, is that the number of people on whom real extensive pathology has been carried out is limited,” said Albert Osterhaus, head of the national influenza centre at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Of 74 people who have died in the Asian outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, only four or five full post-mortems have been carried out – all of them in Thailand.
“Autopsies are not regularly done,” he said. “That’s really an enormous problem.” The main barriers in the countries that have confirmed human cases – Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China and Indonesia – are cultural and religious. Islam, for example, prohibits postmortem examinations under most circumstances.
Dr Osterhaus fears that the lack of post-mortem information will slow the search for a vaccine. Such data can help scientists choose the best animal species on which to test potential vaccines, for instance.
