Bird flu virus can pass mother to child: study

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The H5N1 bird flu virus can pass through a pregnant woman's placenta to infect the fetus, researchers reported on Thursday.

They also found evidence of what doctors had long suspected -- that the virus not only affects the lungs, but passes throughout the body into the gastrointestinal tract, the brain, liver and blood cells.

"The work helps us to understand H5N1's high fatality rate, as well as serving as model for global collaboration in the field of emerging infectious diseases," said Dr. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York, who directed the study.

Lipkin and a team at Peking University in Beijing studied tissue taken from two people killed by H5N1 in China -- a 24-year-old pregnant woman and a 35-year-old man.

The study is the first to come out of the Infectious Disease Center at Peking University in Beijing, established after the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS, a new virus that spread out of China in 2003, killing 800 people and infecting 8,000 before it was stopped.

The center is now looking at victims of H5N1 avian influenza. The virus mostly infects birds, but occasionally infects people and has killed 200 out of 328 infected since 2003. Because experts fear it could cause a pandemic that would kill millions, they are studying it in great detail.

Jiang Gu and colleagues at Peking University looked at tissue samples from throughout the bodies of the victims.

They found genetic material from the virus in the lungs, as expected, but also in the brain, the placenta, the intestines, and in immune system cells in the blood and the liver.