17.03.2008

Indonesia

In a paper presented today at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vivi Setiawaty of Indonesia's Center for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research and Development described the case of simultaneous infection with seasonal and avian strains of influenza, of a 16-year-old girl who was tested for flu in Jakarta in April 2007 under a flu-surveillance system established in 2005 by the Indonesian Ministry of Health.
Throat and nasal-swab samples that were taken on the sixth day of her symptoms tested positive by reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for both avian influenza H5N1 and the seasonal flu strain H3N2.
This is the first case-report of a human with both influenza A/H5N1 and H3N2 co-infection (CIDRAP).