Iran reports H5N1 bird flu outbreak in northern part of country

Indian doctors defend 500kg Egyptian’s weight loss amid row

PARIS, April 25, (Agencies): Iran has reported an outbreak of the highly contagious H5N1 bird flu virus in backyard ducks in the northern part of the country, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said on Monday, citing a report from the Iranian agriculture ministry.

The outbreaks killed 10 birds out of a total of nearly 230 in a house in Mahmoodabad on the coast of the Caspian Sea, the OIE said in a report posted on its website. All other animals were destroyed.

Last year Iran had reported outbreaks of another highly contagious bird flu virus, the H5N8.

Indian doctors on Tuesday angrily rejected claims that they had lied about the amount of weight an Egyptian once believed to be the world’s heaviest woman had lost following surgery.

The sister of Eman Ahmed Abd El Aty alleged that her sibling, who previously weighed 500 kilogrammes (1,100 pounds), had not shed half her weight as specialists at a Mumbai hospital had claimed.

“Today Eman weighs 171 kilos,” Muffazal Lakdawala, the doctor leading Abd El Aty’s treatment, told AFP, adding that the claim made by her sister Shaimaa Selim in a social media video post was “complete hogwash”.

In videos provided last week by Saifee Hospital, where the 37-year-old had bariatric surgery last month, a visibly slimmer Abd El Aty could be seen sitting up and smiling while listening to music.

In an accompanying statement doctors said the woman, who had not left her home in Egypt’s Mediterranean port city of Alexandria for two decades until she arrived in India’s commercial capital in February, had lost 250 kilos.

But in a video posted on Facebook and reported widely by Indian media on Tuesday, Selim accuses the hospital of lying, saying her sister had not lost as much weight as doctors had claimed.

“The pictures don’t lie, the pictures can’t lie,” Lakdawala said, suggesting that Selim had only raised complaints after doctors suggested that Abd El Aty could soon leave India, where she has been receiving treatment free of charge, to return to Egypt.

Abd El Aty’s family say that as a child she was diagnosed with elephantiasis, a condition that causes the limbs and other body parts to swell, leaving her almost immobile.

The Egyptian has suffered several strokes and faced a series of other serious ailments owing to her weight including diabetes, high blood pressure, hypertension and sleep deprivation.

She is unable to speak properly and is partially paralysed.

Abd El Aty arrived in Mumbai on Feb 11 on a specially modified plane.

Doctors put her on a special liquid diet to get her weight down to a low enough level for doctors to perform bariatric surgery, essentially a stomach-shrinking bypass procedure carried out on those wanting to lose excessive weight.

Lakdawala said that Abd El Aty was due to have a CT scan on Tuesday to determine the cause of her right-sided paralysis and regular convulsions.

He added that there was not much more he could do for her in terms of further weight loss and she would need to see a specialist neurologist to help with her other ailments.

India’s top tuberculosis fighter said the government will expand access to Johnson & Johnson’s breakthrough TB drug this year, but health experts warn much more needs to be done to eliminate the superbug by 2025.

India will make bedaquiline, one of just two new TB drugs marketed over the last 50 years, available at 140 government-run TB treatment centres by November, said Sunil Kharpade, head of India’s Central TB Division. The drug is currently available at only six centres.

“We’ve conducted training in several states in the last few months, and we’re prepared to start giving it to patients across 140 centres,” Kharpade told Reuters.

Health experts and activists welcomed the move, but said the government must do even more against TB, which claims the lives of thousands of Indians each year.

“India’s TB program has made a lot of progress in the last few years,” said Jennifer Furin, an infectious diseases expert at Harvard Medical School.

“But compared to what they need to do if they are serious about eliminating TB in eight short years, they have barely scratched the surface.”

India has nearly a quarter of the world’s TB cases, and poor infection control practices and a stressed public healthcare system make it a hotbed for spreading the drug-resistant bacteria.

India has provided bedaquiline to only 300 patients, with another 300 courses available. There are plans to get treatment for 1,000 more patients in the next year, said Kharpade.

But that is way short of India’s requirements with nearly 2.8 million new TB cases a year, and 80,000 patients with multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB. About a third of those with MDR TB are eligible to use bedaquiline, according to the World Health Organization, leaving thousands of Indians without access.

“What that means is those people continue to transmit the bacteria to the community and it makes elimination impossible,” Furin said.

Kharpade says the country has been cautious in rolling out the drug to ensure people don’t develop resistance to it. But some health experts believe the response has been too slow.

Groups like Lawyers Collective and Medecins Sans Frontieres have called for expanded access to bedaquiline as well as delamanid, another drug for late-stage TB patients marketed by Japan’s Otsuka Holdings Co Ltd.

“We got these drugs after half a century of stagnant research,” said Mario Raviglione, head of the WHO’s TB-control programme.