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No new human cases of human influenza A(H5N1) infections have been officially reported anywhere in the world since June 2015.[Note] This is a six-month period without reports of any new human cases. Since 2003 when the World Health Organization (WHO) first began reporting human cases of H5N1, the longest interval with no reported H5N1 cases was a span of three months. Three of these 3-month periods of quiescence have occurred, one each in 2004, 2008, and 2012. Is the lack of human H5N1 cases in the last six month a sign that H5N1 is no longer a pandemic threat? Can we breathe a sigh of relief? Paradoxically, the answer is no. The lack of cases in the past six months should not lull us into a sense of complacency. Between January and June in 2015 there were a total of 143 human cases of H5N1 reported. This is the largest number of reported cases of H5N1 in any one year since the WHO started tracking human infections in 2003. The chart below shows the number of H5N1 cases reported by y...

The most recent, cumulative World Health Organization (WHO) table of human H5N1 cases was published on March 3, 2015.[1] This table notes a total of 88 human H5N1 cases in Egypt through March 3, 2015. As I noted previously [2] the tabulation of counts based on the line list of cases published in the monthly risk summaries only totals 82 cases for Egypt in 2015 based on onset dates in reports of 2015. To understand the confusion in the Egyptian case counts in the WHO table, it is necessary to consider the 2014 totals provided by WHO. The current WHO cumulative table reports 46 cases of H5N1 in 2014 with 31 cases from Egypt.[1] However, individual enumeration of WHO-confirmed H5N1 cases based on line lists in the monthly risk assessments shows a total of 52 H5N1 cases in 2014 (based on onset dates), with 37 of these reported from Egypt.[3] The table below identifies the distribution of WHO-confirmed H5N1 from Egypt by each of the monthly summaries for 2014 through the most recent asse...

In late December 2014, Egypt surpassed Indonesia in the number of reported A(H5N1) cases.[1] As of March 3, 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed a worldwide cumulative total of 784 human H5N1 cases, about 37% or 292 of these cases have been reported from Egypt (Table 1). Eighty-two of those cases from Egypt occurred in the first two months of 2015.[2] In addition, media reports suggests that another four cases have occurred since late February in Egypt and may be included in future monthly updates by WHO.[3]   The recent WHO report from 3 March 2015 notes “ The number of laboratory-confirmed human cases of avian influenza A(H5N1) virus infection in Egypt with onsets of illness in the months of December 2014, January and February 2015 are the highest numbers reported by any country in a single month.” To put these statistics in perspective, about 36% of all H5N1 cases reported from Egypt have occurred in the last 3 months. The graph below shows the distributi...

In 2014, 366 human cases of avian influenza infection from four subtypes, A(H7N9), A(H5N1), A(H5N6) and A(H10N8) were reported from 7 countries, China, Egypt, Taiwan, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The case-fatality risk ranged from possibly as low as .22 to as high as .67 among these subtypes in 2014. There is no evidence among any of these subtypes of sustained human-to-human transmission. Influenza viruses that easily circulate among human populations are referred to as seasonal influenza viruses and can cause severe illness in 3 to 5 million individuals annually.[1] Avian influenza Type A viruses that cause infection in birds are referred to as avian influenza viruses. These viruses occur naturally among wild birds worldwide and can infect domestic poultry and other bird and animal species.[2] These avian influenza viruses circulating in bird populations do not usually infect humans. However, sometimes humans can become infected with avian influenza subtypes which hav...