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Mary Ann

Mary Ann Benitez

H5N1 facts & fears PART 3 - HUNTING FOR CURES

Guan Yi

University of Hong Kong microbiologist

Perhaps no other team in the world is as intimately familiar with H5N1 than the team of microbiologists at University of Hong Kong.

Along with his colleagues, Guan Yi  has monitored, studied and analysed bird flu viruses since H5N1 made its first known jump to humans, in 1997 in Hong Kong, where it infected 18 people, killing six of them.

Professor Guan, a gene-sequencing expert, was a PhD graduate working in the US when he was sent to Hong Kong to be part of the taskforce recruited by the World Health Organisation to investigate the 1997  outbreak.

For his first month's stay that November, Professor Guan was mainly doing preparatory work for viral studies for the WHO Collaborating Centre on the Ecology of Influenza in Tennessee, headed by fellow team member Robert Webster. By late December, Hong Kong had decided to cull all its 1.4 million poultry to stop the spread of H5N1.

'At that time, based on our testing of the wet markets, each market we tested was positive for H5N1 - it was everywhere. From 20 to 25 per cent of the birds were positive,' Professor Guan said.

'I remember we were at Cheung Sha Wan wholesale market. We went to the first cage - the birds looked sick. We checked them and took swabs. We went to the second cage and found sick birds. We went back to the first cage - the birds had died, it happened so quickly.'

The virus spread to humans through market stalls selling live chickens, ducks and geese.

'Then we said the source was very likely to be the markets. Cleaning the markets would be useless. The environment in the markets was so full of virus,' he said.

The wet markets were reopened in early February 1998 and the professor was back in Hong Kong after a short vacation with his family on the mainland. 'My job was to check if the virus was still around [in the markets],' he said.

He stayed until mid-March, when repeated tests confirmed that H5N1 was no longer present in poultry. The government also was advised to segregate chickens from ducks and geese by central slaughtering of the waterfowl.

About a year later, Professor Guan was hired by the University of Hong Kong as assistant research professor in its department of microbiology. His expertise in genetic sequencing was crucial to the department's work. Over the next two years, the HKU team continued to study H5N1, and traced its origin to a Guangdong goose flu virus.

Hong Kong was to experience three more outbreaks of H5N1 - in 2001, mid-2002 and from late 2002 until early 2003.

Each time the HKU team would investigate. Its studies helped provide evidence for the series of anti-bird-flu measures Hong Kong has since adopted.

Professor Guan was promoted to associate professor and is director of  the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases in the department.

He set up a joint influenza centre with Shantou University in Guangdong, from where he would collect bird flu viruses from the province and beyond.

In July, authorities stopped flu research at the Shantou centre, weeks after Professor Guan's team concluded in articles in Nature and Science that the H5N1 outbreak at Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve, which killed 6,000 wild birds, mostly bar-headed geese, probably came from poultry in southern China.

'This virus is difficult to get rid of. We are always a little bit behind the situation,' he said.



flu fighters