How Would You Know If You Had Avian Flu?

March 13, 2006 — -- You go to the doctor with the following symptoms: fever, cough, sore throat and muscle aches. Just typical flu symptoms, right?

Most likely, yes. But those same symptoms can indicate avian flu in humans. With fears about the H5N1 virus spreading from Asia to Europe, health officials in the United States are preparing for a worst-case scenario: a global pandemic in which the virus would mutate and spread easily from person to person.

"One challenge is that this disease [avian flu] presents initially as the ordinary yearly variety of influenza," said Dr. Pascal James Imperato, chairman of the department of preventative medicine and community health at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.

While Imperato said health care providers should become informed so they're ready to deal with avian flu, there is no need for panic.

The H5N1 virus would have to undergo a significant genetic change to become easily transmissible from human to human, said Imperato. So far, that hasn't happened.

Since 1997, there have been about 100 confirmed human cases of avian flu diagnosed worldwide, most of them in Asia and the Middle East, and nearly all those who caught the virus were infected by handling or eating infected poultry.

Jennifer Morcone, public affairs officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that, at this point, doctors could diagnose avian flu by closely watching the progression of the disease in patients. If it's seasonal influenza, symptoms would likely resolve themselves quickly and in a more predictable way; if it's avian flu -- at least as it has manifested itself so far -- they'd get more severe over time.

And if a doctor in the United States thought she saw a case of avian flu in a patient, Morcone said the doctor would need to take a thorough medical history to see if the patient had recently traveled to Asia or had any contact with sick or dead poultry.

"It would be unlikely to see clusters of the disease here before we saw it elsewhere," Morcone said.