THE BIRD FLU BLOG

2011-11-30T01:13:00.004+11:00

Yes, They Did

If this pandemic-ready flu virus did escape.....well, let's just hope it doesn't.

From the Daily Mail :

A group of scientists is pushing to publish research about how they created a man-made flu virus that could potentially wipe out civilisation.

The deadly virus is a genetically tweaked version of the H5N1 bird flu strain, but is far more infectious and could pass easily between millions of people at a time.

Virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands lead a team of scientists who discovered that a mere five mutations to the avian virus was sufficient to make it spread far more easily.

He conducted his tests on ferrets as the animals have become a model of choice for influenza and have similar respiratory tracts to humans.

Paul Keim, chairman of NSABB, said: 'I can't think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one. I don't think anthrax is scary at all compared to this."

Nature couldn't get it right. So we had to give it a helping hand.

2011-11-30T01:12:00.001+11:00

Unfortunately, we're back.

2009-03-16T00:27:00.004+11:00

Hong Kong Preparing For Bird Flu Pandemic Outbreak?

A Rense reader notes that warnings and signs of preparations to stop the spread of bird flu are all over Hong Kong right now, including electronic billboards, disinfectant and hand cleaners for the public in hotels, elevator buttons covered in plastic and cameras that can detect human fever at seaports and airports.

Carcasses of chickens from bird flu-infected poultry farms outside Hong Kong have reportedly been showing up in the city's waters.

2008-12-06T02:48:00.004+11:00

Obviously, by the lack of updates, this blog is on a hiatus for the time being.

One of the better sites for bird flu related news is this one :

Bird Flu Breaking News

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2008-06-12T00:32:00.001+10:00

Hong Kong : All Chickens Must Die

From Bloomberg :

Hong Kong ordered the slaughter of all chickens in the city's markets and retail outlets after the H5N1 bird flu virus was detected in three more markets.
The H5N1 avian influenza virus has been found in four markets since the first outbreak last week, the government said at a press briefing today. Hong Kong banned poultry imports from mainland China and suspended exports from local farms for as long as 21 days on June 7.

Public health officials' concerns about a worldwide outbreak of lethal influenza among humans have risen as the H5N1 virus spreads among birds from Asia to Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The deadly strain may spark a global outbreak if it mutates to become as infectious to humans as seasonal flu.
The government has stepped up efforts to halt the spread of the virus after ordering the culling of 2,700 chickens from nine stalls at the Po On Road Market on June 7. The virus was detected in bird feces, and no animal or human deaths have been linked to the disease, the government said.

2008-06-05T01:48:00.002+10:00

Test On Bird Flu And Human Flu Virus Hybrids Show They're Compatible

We are told the pandemic will most likely begin when a bird flu virus, like H5N1, enters a human body and comes into contact, and shares genetic information, with a virulent strain of human flu.
New research indicates the two viruses will fit together very well, but the research also raises doubts on the likelihood of a bird flu virus ever becoming so virulent amongst humans as to cause a pandemic :

An experiment mating H5N1 avian flu viruses and a strain of human flu in a laboratory produced a surprising number of hybrid viruses that were biologically fit, a new study reveals.
And while none of the offspring viruses was as virulent as the original H5N1, about one in five were lethal to mice at low doses, showing they retained at least a portion of the power of their dangerous parent.
The work suggests that under the right circumstances - and no one is clear what all of those are - the two types of flu viruses could swap genes in a way that might allow the H5N1 virus to acquire the capacity to trigger a pandemic. That process is called reassortment.
"This study is just showing exactly that: There is a risk this virus can successfully reassort with a human virus," said Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization's collaborating centre for influenza research at St. Jude Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.
"The problem is we don't know at this stage whether there's a benefit to these H5N1 viruses in doing that."
Nor can anyone say why, if the viruses swapped genes so readily in the laboratory, that hasn't seemed to have happened in the parts of the world where H5N1 has been circulating for years.
Reassortment is one of two ways in which a pandemic virus can evolve. The other is for a bird virus to acquire a number of mutations that allow it to more easily infect people and transmit among them.
The latter, called adaptive mutation, is thought to be the way the 1918 Spanish flu virus emerged. The viruses responsible for the milder pandemics of 1957 and 1968 arose through the mixing of human and avian flu virus genes.
This work, done at the CDC, was conducted to study the reassortment potential of H5N1 and H3N2 viruses. H3N2 is one of two human influenza A viruses that cause disease during flu season.
Reassortment studies can be done one of two ways. One involves simultaneously infecting cells with the two viruses and seeing what nature produces. The other involves making viruses by piecing together combinations of synthesized human and avian genes.
"It's like Lego," Donis, head of the molecular virology and vaccines branch, says of this approach, which was the one used for this study.
But this is a game of Lego where it's not clear from looking at the pieces which will go together into a structure that will hold. "We really don't understand the rules of engagement for playing the Legos. We don't know what makes these things connect well or not connect well," he admits.

Is the general thinking wrong then on the potential likelihood of H5N1 becoming pandemic, and killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people? We are told, most often by World Health Organisation spokespeople, that a bird flu pandemic amongst humans is not a case of if, but when. But what if it's a case of "not likely"?

2008-05-06T16:43:00.002+10:00

Elderly, Sick, Demented To Be Left To Die During Pandemic

The list of people who will be denied medical care during a full blown bird flu pandemic is long, and varied. The potential of a purposeful culling by care denial of the elderly and sick by regimes around the world is huge, and troubling.

From Raw Story :

Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won't get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.

Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn't be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia.

The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals "so that everybody will be thinking in the same way" when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.

The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.

To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won't get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival. But the recommendations get much more specific, and include:

People older than 85.
Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.
Severely burned patients older than 60.
Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer's disease.
Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.

If followed to a tee, such rules could exclude care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and disability...

The list of those who would be denied medical care, due to rationing, is very similar to lists drawn up by countries like Australia, the UK and a number of South East Asian countries. The World Health Organisation is expected to endorse such a list in its pandemic preparatory literature and guidelines.

2008-04-29T04:37:00.003+10:00

Bird Flu Spread Leads To Calls To Seal India-Bangladesh Border

If such action is taken, this will be the biggest, and most costly, border closure due to the spread of the H5N1 virus so far.

As deadly as the virus has proven to be in poultry populations, dealing with outbreaks is proving to be an extremely costly business for governments. Sealing borders will only be done when the potential financial losses from likely outbreaks are shown to vastly outweigh the monstrous losses and costs that would result from closing the border between India and Bangladesh.

From NDTV :

''Unless the border is sealed, it is not possible to control the spread of the virus and it is hard to believe that there is no movement across the border. The border is too porous,'' said Mrinmoy Burman, assistant director of Animal Resource Development Department.

''The areas affected are all bordering Bangladesh. If Bangladesh doesn't take this up immediately, it will affect us very badly. There is fear psychosis now,'' said D C Das, SDM Sadar, Agartala.

2008-04-07T03:55:00.002+10:00

Bird Flu Virus Found Spreading In Dogs

Excerpts from Bloomberg story, April 2 :

A bird flu virus that killed dogs in South Korea can spread from one dog to another, showing that the disease is capable of crossing species and causing widespread sickness in mammals, a study found.
A cocker spaniel and a miniature schnauzer were among dozens of dogs in South Korea sickened by an H3N2 strain from birds, researchers said in a study published in the May issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases journal. Viruses taken from the sick canines were used in an experiment later to see if pathogens were capable of spreading from dog to dog.

The findings add to scientific understanding of how flu viruses evolve in animals and the risks they pose to humans. A separate bird flu strain called H5N1 has killed 236 people worldwide by spreading primarily from birds to humans. If a deadly H5N1 strain evolved like the strain in today's study to spread from one human to another, it could kill millions.

"Transmission of avian influenza A virus to a new mammalian species is of great concern because it potentially allows the virus to adapt to a new mammalian host, cross new species barriers, and acquire pandemic potential,'' the Korean researchers said.
Tests on specimens collected from three of the dogs showed they were infected with H3N2 viruses closely resembling those found in chickens and doves in South Korea in 2003. The pathogens may have been transmitted from birds to dogs fed raw, minced meat from infected ducks and chickens, the authors said.
Avian flu viruses are known to transmit to unrelated mammalian species only rarely, the researchers said. Bird- derived H7 and H4 flu viruses were reported in seals in the early 1980s, and the H5N1 bird-flu strain was found in a dog that fed on a duck infected with the virus in Thailand in 2004, according to the study.

Large cats, including tigers and leopards, kept in capacity and fed on infected poultry carcasses, have also been infected and developed severe disease. Almost two of every three human H5N1 cases were fatal, according to the World Health Organization.
Dogs may be more susceptible to flu strains carried by birds because both canines and birds share a type of virus- binding site in their respiratory systems that is less common in humans.

The bird-like H3N2 virus may be capable of spreading between dogs because it was excreted in nasal discharges and caused sneezing of experimentally infected beagle puppies, the study found. The virus wasn't active in their feces.

Evidence of avian flu in pet dogs "raises the concern that dogs may be become a new source of transmission of novel influenza viruses, especially where avian influenza viruses are circulating or have been detected,'' the authors said.

2008-04-06T03:14:00.000+10:00

Indonesian Health Minister Claim That US Is Developing Bird Flu As BioWeapon Dismissed

Pakistan Official Confirms First Human To Human Spread Of H5N1

Indonesia's health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has been a thorn in the side of the World Health Organisation, and the pharmaceutical behemoths, refusing to hand over samples of Indonesian bird flu because she very reasonably fears that these strains will be patented and Indonesia will be forced to pay billions to access H5N1 vaccines in the future.

Supari has published a book called 'It's Time For The World To Change - The Divine Hand Behind Avian Influenza, and kicked up a small storm of controversy over her claims that avian influenza viruses were being 'weaponised' in American bioweapons labs. The book won an endorsement from Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Excerpts from an interview with Supari on AM :

Dr Supari expresses alarm at WHO laboratories sharing bird flu virus data with the United States national laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where nuclear weapons are developed.

"Whether they use is it to make vaccine or develop chemical weapons, would depend on the need and interest of the US Government. It is indeed a very dangerous situation for the destiny of humanity", she writes and goes on to say ".. it is a matter of choice whether to use the material for vaccines or biological weapon development".

SITI FADILAH SUPARI: I didn’t know whether our virus will be develop into a vaccine or will be develop into a biological weapon. So just a question - I didn’t blame United States, I didn’t blame any country.

Supari cops plenty back from the US government and the World Health Organisation :

The United States has rejected the Indonesian Health Minister's claims that it is using bird flu samples to produce biological weapons and World Health Organisation officials have condemned allegations of conspiring to profit from bird flu vaccines.
The Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is understood to have ordered the minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, to recall copies of her book on avian influenza, which alleges the US and the WHO are conspiring against developing countries by seizing control of bird flu samples.

WHO officials said they were dismayed by some of the claims and urged Dr Supari to do more to control bird flu's spread and end her refusal to share virus samples - which is hampering attempts to find a cure.
A US State Department spokeswoman, Susan Stahl, denied Dr Supari's claim that Indonesian virus samples had been sent to a biological weapons laboratory in Los Alamos. The laboratory possessed no bird flu viruses from Indonesia or elsewhere, she said.

The facility's only involvement was hosting a database of publicly available genetic-sequencing data to help track the evolution of the virus, she said.
The WHO's assistant director-general for Health Security, David Heymann, said he was puzzled by the claims.

"I don't understand why they would take this virus to make a biological weapon; it doesn't transmit from human to human. Indonesia needs to spend more time on dealing with infections with chickens and stopping humans from being infected."

Claims that H5N1 was a bioweapon have been aired since the virus reappeared in Hong Kong in 1997, and started killing humans along with markets full of poultry.

When the avian influenza virus began ravaging poultry farms in rural Russia in the early 2000s, a US bioweapons conspiracy theory gained popularity. It went like this : the deadly virus was a US bioweapon designed to knock out local poultry farms and open up the market to cheap American poultry imports, mostly chicken wings and legs, which Russian poultry farmers called "Bush Legs."

A senior Pakistan government official has claimed the world's first human to human transmission of the H5N1 virus occurred in Pakistan in November 2007 :

A man in northern Pakistan passed the deadly bird flu virus to two of his brothers, and the virus killed one of them, in the first known human-to-human transmission in Pakistan, a health official said Friday.

'It was definitely person-to-person. That is confirmed,' said Maqbool Jan Abbasi, Ministry of Health joint secretary. He said the World Health Organization confirmed by serological testing from a family in Peshawar, northwest of the capital Islamabad, three brothers had H5N1, the strain of avian influenza that can be deadly in humans.

2008-02-21T23:23:00.003+11:00

Recent Bird Flu Deaths And Outbreaks

A short update to list the human deaths and new outbreaks missed here in the past two weeks :

Feb. 20 - Fresh Outbreak Of Avian Influenza Puts Vietnam On High Alert

Feb. 19 - China Announces 27th Victim Of H5N1

Feb. 18 - Bangladesh Culls More One Million Birds On 270 Farms In 43 Districts

Feb 17. - Indonesia Reports 105th Human Bird Flu Death

Feb. 17 - Indonesia Reports 104th Human Bird Flu Death

Feb. 15 - Bird Flu Virus Kills Third Person In Vietnam This Year

Feb. 15 - H5N1 Outbreak In Hong Kong

Feb. 13 - Most Districts In Bangladesh Fighting Bird Flu Outbreaks In Poultry

Feb. 12 - Bird Flu Returns To Laos

2008-02-21T22:36:00.003+11:00

H5N1 In Thailand Mosquitoes

This dramatic development seems to have garnered little mainstream media attention :

Blood-engorged mosquitoes were collected at poultry farms during an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza in Central Thailand during October 2005. These mosquitoes tested positive for H5N1 virus by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Results were confirmed by limited sequencing of the H5 and N1 segments.

Infection and replication of this virus in the C6/36 mosquito cell line was confirmed by quantitative real-time PCR. However, transmission by mosquitoes was not evaluated, and further research is needed. Collecting and testing mosquitoes engorged with the blood of domestic or wild animals could be a valuable tool for veterinary and public health authorities who conduct surveillance for H5N1 virus spread.

2008-02-08T19:23:00.000+11:00

Bird Flu Scares "Are A Conspiracy To Make Money"

The former chairman of the Pakistan Poultry Association, Khalil Abbasi, isn't buying any of the talk about bird flu becoming a pandemic that could devastate humanity.

He has his own theories about what is going on :

“The bird flu hype is part of the media campaign of a US-based commercial enterprise, which has former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as president. All of this is being done merely to boost the sales of its product ‘tami-flu’,” Abbasi alleged.

He said that the H5N1 (bird flu) virus was first detected in Scotland in 1960 and it still exists in Great Lakes area of the USA, but it was “overplayed” when it hit Thailand and other Asian countries. “Why are we assuming that the virus would turn ‘vicious?’ This is a fallacy because no human transmission has been reported so far in the world,” Abbasi said.

PPA chairman, Abdul Basit, said that since 2004, bird flu fears had caused losses worth billions of rupees to the poultry industry. This, he said, had resulted in the closure of 40 percent of farms. “Hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs only due to ‘sensational news’ because no human infection has been found so far in Pakistan,” Basit said.

There are around 25,000 poultry farms in the country, employing over 1.5 million people with an investment of around Rs 200 billion. Approximately Rs 45 billion to Rs 50 billion worth of agricultural products and by-products are being used in poultry feed, the PPA chairman said, adding that the poultry crisis would ultimately compound the agricultural crisis.

A vaccine is available to effectively control the virus in birds, and effective use of this vaccine in Pindi, Islamabad and Abbotabad has controlled the disease in those areas. Karachi will follow suite soon, Basit said.

Basit read out a statement issued by Bernard Vallet, director-general of the Paris-based Animal Health Organization. Vallet said that the risks of bird flu were “over-estimated and fears of an imminent pandemic were non-scientific assumptions.”

One of the speakers at the press conference blamed the media for “over-emphasizing” the fears of bird flu. This led to a heated exchange between poultry and health officials and journalists present there.

Before Donald Rumsfeld became US Secretary of Defense, he brought shares in an American pharmaceutical company that helped in the development of Tamiflu. Rumsfeld still held those shares when the US government began talking up the threat of bird flu, primarily, in 2005.

Increased sales of Tamiflu in the United States, and around the world, saw Rumsfeld's shares generate millions of dollars in returns.

2008-02-02T17:11:00.000+11:00

Headlines Round Up

A small round up of latest news :

West Bengal Hit By Bird Flu Outbreak

Bird Flu Outbreak Hits Pakistan

Bird Flu Outbreak In Thailand

150,000 Poultry Birds Culled In Saudi Arabia After Bird Flu Confirmed

India : Poultry Cullers Ordered Into Compulsory Quarantine

Fresh Outbreaks Of Bird Flu Reported In North Vietnam

Indonesia : Bird Flu Claims Fifth Human Life In Seven Days

Swans Dying From Bird Flu In UK

2008-02-02T03:52:00.000+11:00

India : Dozens Isolated With Bird Flu Symptoms, Hundreds More Being Monitored

With cullers and health care workers in India sent into numerous 'hot zones' in the past two weeks to deal with bird flu outbreaks, and with many lacking even the most basic safety equipment (face masks, gloves) it was inevitable that some would end up catching the virus.

Indian authorities may be, and hopefully are, exercising extreme caution now, but holding dozens of people under quarantine, and monitoring hundreds more, you would expect that India will be announcing a number of human bird flu deaths in the coming days.

From Reuters :

India has put 26 people in isolation with bird flu symptoms and hundreds more people are being monitored, officials said on Friday as Pakistan and Thailand reported outbreaks of bird flu in poultry.
India is battling its worst outbreak of avian influenza, which has spread to 13 of West Bengal's 19 districts. The densely populated state is adjacent to Bangladesh, itself trying to control a major outbreak of bird flu, and has millions of backyard fowl.

This photo shows the extent of the problems regarding lack of information and education. These children are standing only a few feet back from where suited up workers are dealing with possibly H5N1 infected poultry :

More from the Reuters story :

In West Bengal, veterinary staff have culled 2.6 million birds, completing what officials said was a successful operation that had brought the bird flu situation under control.

The focus now is on hundreds of medical and veterinary workers and villagers who had come into close contact with dead or sick birds. Officials said health staff returning home after the culling operation had been asked to get themselves checked.

Dozens of isolation wards had been created in hospitals in the affected districts to handle any sudden rush of suspected human cases.
Health experts also worry about the situation in Bangladesh, a crowded country of 140 million people where bird flu has spread to nearly half of the country's 64 districts.

Livestock officials said bird flu was still spreading and had resurfaced in the Feni district southeast of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. The government has ordered culling of all chickens and ducks in one kilometre radius around affected farms.

The virus is threatening the livelihoods of millions of people reliant on the country's poultry industry and driving up food prices.

"Now we are facing a critical situation, as bird flu struck at a time when commodity prices from rice, flour to milk powder and edible oil had already nearly doubled," said Shahedul Alam, a government employee.
Egg exports from the world's second largest producer have dropped about 50 percent in the past two weeks, leaving the industry with losses of around $20 million, trade officials said.

India is now ground zero for a widespread human bird flu outbreak, or pandemic. How India deals with this crisis, and winds back the spread of the virus to more than 75% of the country, and whether or not such widespread exposure to the virus will result in many human victims, will tell us a lot about how serious bird flu may become in 2008, and how effectively current control measures and guidelines are for dealing with outbreaks.

2008-01-31T10:11:00.000+11:00

India, Tibet, Indonesia Hit By Bird Flu Deaths, Virus Spread

Three people have died from the H5N1 virus in Indonesia in the past four days. In India, at least three districts are now be infected by the virus, but some experts estimate the virus may be in many more districts and already have reached Calcutta. Birds are dying in greater and greater numbers in Tibet, from the virus and from culling.

The spread of bird flu picks up speed across Asia :

The death of the 32-year-old man raised Indonesia's human toll to 101 — accounting for nearly half the worldwide total. The man died in the capital Tuesday, three days after being hospitalized.
In southwestern Tibet, a poultry farm was quarantined after an outbreak of the disease killed 1,000 birds, agriculture officials reported Wednesday. More than 13,000 other poultry were killed to prevent its spread.
In India, the virus spread in three districts of West Bengal state, where culling was under way and more than 129,000 poultry birds have died, said Animal Resource Development Minister Anisur Rahaman.
Health workers have killed nearly 2.5 million at-risk birds and were clearing areas within 3 miles of infection sites, said Rahaman. No human infections have been recorded.
Skittish officials in neighboring Bangladesh ordered the halt of all egg and poultry imports from India.
Bird flu typically flares during the winter months, and a number of Asian nations have recently reported fresh outbreaks in poultry, from India to China to Thailand. Health officials said it was essential that governments step up surveillance to prevent its spread, especially ahead of next week's Lunar New Year, when massive numbers of people and poultry will be on the move.
"The more you see it in poultry, the more chance there is that we will see human cases," said Gregory Hartl, World Health Organization spokesman in Geneva.

2008-01-30T13:22:00.000+11:00

India's Fight Against Bird Flu Likened To Going To War

The spread of bird flu through West Bengal has been fast and overwhelming. The truth about what is going on over there is murky, at best. But there are numerous incredible stories coming out of the region. Police are raiding homes to seize birds that owners refused to give up. Poultry believed to be infected with the virus has been eaten at festivals. Roadside store sales of eggs and poultry are booming. There is a general view that the bird flu virus as not as dangerous as international agencies claim it to be. India's borders are now being closed in an attempt to contain the spread. All bad news.

From AFP :

India's West Bengal state has since Monday been slaughtering chickens on a "war footing" as bird flu spread to new areas of the highly-populated province of 80 million people.

The disease has now been found in 13 of 19 districts in the eastern state, prompting fears it may reach local capital Kolkata which has a population of 13.5 million people.

The local government said it could revise the target number of birds to be culled up to three million, of some 20 million fowl counted in the state.

"We are worried the H5N1 virus was confirmed in samples from villages just 22 kilometres from Kolkata," West Bengal animal resources development minister Anisur Rahaman said.

"If it is required, culling teams will work throughout the night."
More than 1.5 million birds have been culled since the outbreak was reported a fortnight ago.

New Delhi on Monday tried to calm nerves while the price of poultry products dropped in West Bengal and in some of India's 28 other states, including New Delhi.

950 government-appointed culling teams were working round the clock in West Bengal, where a fourth of its population is in the zone of possible infection.

Two states hemming West Bengal sealed their borders with the stricken districts after TV networks in separate reports said the Marxist-ruled province bordering Bangladesh was yet to offer an adequate response to the crisis.

In New Delhi, butcheries reported a steep fall in poultry sales, with some establishments warning businesses would take a hit if the situation in West Bengal was not brought under control.

West Bengal authorities raided backyard traders at night to avoid resistance from locals who, fearing financial loss, would try to hide the birds or lock up their houses to prevent the chickens from being culled.

Poultry owners say they have been devastated by the mass cull, with the government paying only about 40 rupees (one dollar) for each dead chicken, compared with the 80 rupees they could earn on the market, excluding egg sales.

2008-01-25T04:24:00.000+11:00

Bird Flu Panic Grips Multiple Countries As Virus Spread : More Deaths, Infections, Massive Poultry Culls

A round-up of recent headlines from WDIM :

Vietnam confirms 48th fatal bird flu case

Indonesian man dies of bird flu, toll up to 98

Indonesia confirms 120th human bird flu infection

Experts probe high bird flu mortality rate in Indonesia

Bird flu outbreak threatens India

Rain forces culling halt as India battles worst bird flu outbreak

Thailand confirms new bird flu outbreak

Turkey culls poultry to stop spread of bird flu

India risks bird flu 'disaster', human cases feared as 5 quarantined with symptoms

West Bengal appeals over bird flu for help in culling up to 2 million chickens

Chicken feast in India despite bird flu disaster warning

Three Indonesian children hospitalized with bird flu symptoms

Bird flu spotted in poultry in northern Turkey

2008-01-21T13:34:00.000+11:00

West Bengal : Bird Flu Now In Six Districts, Locals Resist Poultry Culls

H5N1 Poultry Caught, Collected With Bare Hands

Government Goes Into Panic Mode As Virus Spreads Rapidly

The outbreak of H5N1 in West Bengal has shown just how quickly the virus can spread, and how unprepared some governments are to deal with such sudden outbreaks.

By all reports, the government of West Bengal is in chaos as H5N1 spreads through dozens of poultry farms and at least six districts. Poultry culls will see more than half a million birds killed within the week, and there are huge problems in getting small farmers to hand over poultry that is not yet sick, as compensation packages are not ready and are not being distributed widely enough.

Although the WB government claims there are no human infections, it would be remarkable if there were none, considering some of the emergency poultry culling is being done with bare hands due to a lack of equipment and proper preparation of workers.

Scary stuff :

....officials say time is of essence in containing the outbreak in Bengal, where the virus seems to be spreading very fast and infecting thousands of birds everyday. A trend that also puts human health at grave risk.

Agriculture and food minister Sharad Pawar said on Saturday that "preventive and prophylactic culling" would only be launched in areas which report high and unusual mortality of poultry.

"In such a situation, we won't wait for the confirmation of bird flu. Because it is spreading in near-by districts, we have taken a decision that we are not going to wait for Bhopal's report," Pawar said.

The state government aims to slaughter 4 lakh birds in a five-to-10 kilometre (three-to-six mile) radius of the affected areas and aims to complete it by Monday, after which clean up and disinfection operations will begin.

Agreeing with West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's reaction, Pawar said the situation "was indeed alarming."

Meanwhile, West Bengal's efforts to control the outbreak drew a sharp reaction from minister of state for health Panabaka Laxmi.

Reacting to an article...which revealed how compensation was not being paid to farmers whose birds were being culled, she said the Centre is unhappy over the steps taken by the state to contain the virus.

"We are not satisfied," she said.

She added "compensation to poultry losers was not being properly distributed."

From AFP :

Avian flu has been reported in three more districts in eastern India where authorities said poultry farmers have delayed a massive bird cull aimed at halting the spread of the virus.
A total of six districts in eastern West Bengal state have reported an outbreak of avian flu among poultry including a new one late Suday, the government said.
"Samples of dead chickens in Bankura district tested positive Sunday," West Bengal animal resources minister Anisur Rahaman told AFP.
The outbreak is the third in India since 2006, and the worst so far, according to the World Health Organisation, partly because it is more widespread.
The state government aims to kill about 400,000 birds in all the affected districts but culling teams have so far slaughtered just 100,000 after facing hostility from villagers.
"Police have been asked to accompany the culling teams which is bringing good results," Rahaman said.
Residents oppose the slaughter of their birds because they want immediate compensation.
Near Margram village -- the epicentre of the outbreak -- the biggest poultry farm with 30,000 birds remained untouched as the owner locked up the premises.
Many others fled their homes carrying chickens before the arrival of the culling teams, officials said. Local people attacked five members of a culling team with sticks and stones on Saturday.
West Bengal state borders Bangladesh, which is also fighting a bird flu outbreak.

From the Times Of India :

The contrast couldn't have been more stark. World Health Organisation officials were covered top to toe in what looked like space suits while a ragtag crowd of barely clothed villagers handled poultry with their bare hands, in the wake of an H5N1 avian flu virus epidemic in some districts of West Bengal.

The photographs, more eloquent than words, encapsulate the attitude: Caution and protection for officials, to hell with the rest.

Both WHO and government handouts warn of infection risk for those handling poultry without precautionary gear. Even inhaling the air or drinking water in the area contaminated with bird droppings or dust could lead to infection. Yet no efforts to protect villagers were evident though over 35,000 birds have already been culled over two days.

The slow pace of destroying birds suspected of carrying the deadly virus is also because of reluctance on the part of people to give up their birds without compensation. The delay in paying out compensation to poultry owners is an inexcusable failure of the government.

Reluctant to part with the birds without getting compensated first, many are resorting to hiding the birds in closed spaces in their homes.

When there was a suspected outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu virus in Maharashtra and Gujarat in 2006, swift action was taken. More than 5,00,000 birds were culled in a mere 24 hours under supervision of the national disaster management cell. What happened this time in West Bengal?

West Bengal Border Sealed To Stop Spread Of Bird Flu

Does India Have 700 Bird Flu Patients In Isolation?

2008-01-15T00:51:00.000+11:00

Indonesia : Family Takes Dying Bird Flu Victim Home, Dies One Hour Later

16 Year Old Girl Suffering Bird Flu In Critical Condition

What sort of madness is this? Are all the family members now under quarantine? How many people did this dying woman come into contact with on her way out of the hospital and on the way home?

A 32-year-old Indonesian woman died from bird flu at her home after being forced to check out of a hospital by her family, the Health Ministry said Monday, raising the country's death toll from the disease to 95.
Two laboratory tests confirmed she was infected with the H5N1 strain of the virus, said Joko Suyono, an official at the Bird Flu Information Center.
The woman from the western outskirts of the capital, Jakarta, came down with severe pneumonia and went to a hospital Wednesday. Her family signed a forced release form the next day and she died an hour after being checked out, Suyono said. It was unclear why her relatives did not want her to be treated at the hospital.

Are all the family members now under quarantine? How many people did this dying woman come into contact with on her way out of the hospital and on the way home?

The Jakarta Post reports the announcement of yet another teenage Indonesian bird flu victim. Her chances of survival sound slim at best :

A 16-year-old patient suffering from bird flu has been admitted to Persahabatan Hospital in Rawamangun, East Jakarta.
The head the hospital's bird flu anticipation division, Mukhtar Ikhsan, said the patient's condition was bad.
"The patient has suffered acute pneumonia," he said as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.
YF is the first patient treated for bird flu at the hospital this year. The hospital has treated as many as 14 bird flu patients with 12 deaths.

So the hospital has a bird flu victim fatality rate of 80%.

2008-01-15T00:37:00.000+11:00

Disaster Expert Says Public Won't Trust Politicians On Bird Flu Warnings Because Of "Misleading" Claims About Iraq

The coming reality of a bird flu pandemic is far too serious a threat to be left in the hands of politicians, when it comes to adequately and successfully warning the public, argues a disaster management expert :

The public would put themselves at risk because they would not trust politicians to tell the truth if the country was hit by a major outbreak of bird flu, a world expert on disaster management has claimed.

Professor David Alexander, of the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, has been appointed as an adviser to both Nato and the UK Government on the issue of pandemic flu.

Alexander says the country should be preparing itself for a serious outbreak of the potentially devastating virus, but feels that warnings from politicians would not be heeded because of the corrosive impact of bogus claims over Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.

Instead he says people would be far more likely to pay attention to experts who are independent of the political process.

The director of the Aberdeen Centre for Trauma Research, who led the psychiatric team which responded to the Piper Alpha disaster, said there was a real need to prepare for the worst.

"According to the biological scientists a pandemic is likely to strike us. There is no point pretending it won't happen because all the evidence suggests that it will.

"We need to be preparing right now. The future has arrived."

Alexander says it is critical that, in the event of a major medical incident, the public receive the right message.

He said: "You must have credible and competent figures giving out the information. Without naming names, I think it would be fair to say that many people are fairly sceptical about what certain politicians say on major issues, Iraq being one.

"We were misled on Iraq. I don't think anybody disputes that now.

"Whether the motive was malice or ignorance, I certainly think it has undermined a lot of trust in politicians. There are individuals whose credibility is so low in the public domain that if they came on TV and delivered warnings they simply would not be believed," he said.

"Unlike politicians, I believe the public do not view scientists as having any personal vested bias."

2008-01-11T03:15:00.000+11:00

The $2 Trillion Pandemic?

Economies around the world are already heading towards a recession. A global bird flu pandemic will provide the final push to trigger a new 'Great Depression'.

From Reuters :

Governments around the world need to do more to prepare for the dramatic economic impact of the next flu pandemic, the United Nations influenza coordinator said on Thursday.

David Nabarro said his team had recently collected information from nearly 150 countries to see how prepared they were for a pandemic and the picture was mixed.

"Most countries have now focused on pandemic as a potential cause of catastrophe and have done some planning. But the quality of the plans is patchy and too few of them pay attention to economic and social consequences," he told BBC radio.

"The economic consequences could be up to $2 trillion -- up to 5 percent of global GDP removed," he said, reiterating previous World Bank and UN estimates.

2008-01-01T04:20:00.000+11:00

Egypt : 3 Human Bird Flu Deaths In Seven Days

From AFP :

An Egyptian woman died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu on Monday, the health ministry said, the third such death in less than a week as officials and experts warned against the relaxation of precautions.
Fardos Mohammed Haddad, 36, from the Nile Delta province of Menufia died in hospital after being admitted on Saturday with a high fever and difficulty breathing, ministry spokesman Abdel Rahman Shahin said in a statement carried by the official MENA news agency.
Her death, the second in as many days and the third in less than a week, is the 18th death in Egypt from the disease since the virus first appeared in the country in February 2006.
"She had been exposed to poultry infected with bird flu," Shahin said. "All members of her immediate family and people she has been in contact with recently are being tested for the disease."

Go Here For The Full Story

2007-12-31T17:18:00.000+11:00

Chinese Man Survives H5N1 After 20 Days Of Treatment

A 52 year old Jiangsu man, Lu, lost his son to the bird flu virus in early November. Lu developed a fever shortly after his son died, and it was confirmed he too had become infected with H5N1.

But after 20 days of treatment, Lu recovered and was discharged from a hospital into the care of his family :

Lu's son died on Nov. 2, a couple of days after being diagnosed with "lower left lobe pneumonia" in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu. He was the 17th Chinese to die of avian flu since 2003.
He was said to have had no contact with dead poultry and the Jiangsu Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau said no bird flu epidemic had been discovered in the province.
China's health authorities previously said that no human-to-human transmission had been confirmed in the two human cases of bird flu and the means of transmission in these cases, involving the two family members in the Nanjing area, remained unknown.

As with all human bird flu cases in China, details are thin.

2007-12-29T15:24:00.001+11:00

Ten Years Later, Scientists Still Baffled By Bird Flu

Despite a decade of testing and research, the H5N1 virus remains, mostly, a complete mystery to scientists, even as it becomes part of daily life for hundreds of millions of people around the world :

Baffled scientists first watched a mysterious virus called H5N1 jump from birds to humans a decade ago in Hong Kong, killing six people and forcing the territory to slaughter its entire poultry population. It quieted for a while, but resurfaced in 2003 with even more questions.
Bird flu has since spread to more than 60 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East, killing at least 211 people along with hundreds of millions of birds. Pakistan and Myanmar reported their first human infections earlier this month. Indonesia, the world's hardest-hit country, reported its 94th death Wednesday while Vietnam and Egypt also logged a death each the same day.
In stricken places like Vietnam, people have learned to live with the disease. Children are taught about bird flu in elementary school, and the nation's poultry is vaccinated twice a year.
But much about the H5N1 virus remains unknown. Experts are still puzzled by its ability to spread and kill. They also do not understand why it infects only a few people, and fear it could morph into a new form that spreads easily among humans, potentially sparking a pandemic that kills millions and cripples national economies.
"It doesn't cease to amaze me that every week or every day we learn something new about this virus," said Juan Lubroth, an animal health expert at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "From the very beginning we've been saying that no poultry producing country is safe from this disease."
The World Health Organization is currently working to determine whether limited human-to-human transmission could have occurred in Pakistan where up to nine suspect cases were detected, including several relatives. The last infection was reported Dec. 6, and experts say there appears to be no threat of further spread.
A number of other countries have recently detected poultry outbreaks during the winter months when the virus typically flares. The reason why remains unclear, though some experts suspect a pattern that may be similar to seasonal human influenza, which surfaces every year as temperatures drop.
Another mystery is how the virus spreads internationally. How much of a role do migrating wild birds play in transmitting it compared to the trade and movement of poultry, which often crosses borders illegally?
"There are so many questions that are unanswered, and so many things have to come together to cause a pandemic, that nobody can predict it," said Dr. David Heymann, the WHO's top flu official in Geneva. "We don't know all the risk factors."
Most human cases have been linked to contact with infected birds. Scientists believe human-to-human transmission has occurred a few times, but only among relatives in close contact.
WHO is watching other strains of bird flu, including H7 and H9, that are circulating among poultry and have also infected humans.
Still, H5N1 continues to be the virus experts worry most about, because it has spread so far, so fast. More than 60 percent of people infected by it have died.
"We just don't understand it, and what you don't understand is what's dangerous," Heymann said. "So, you have to be dramatic and take the most severe precautions."

2007-12-27T08:04:00.000+11:00

Bird Flu Linked To Human Deaths In Indonesia, Egypt, Vietnam

Christmas Day saw the deaths of two young women believed to have been infected with the H5N1 virus :

In Egypt, a 25-year-old woman died Christmas day after being hospitalized on Dec. 21. The woman, from Bany Suwef Governorate, was the first case in Egypt since July, WHO officials said. The source of her exposure was being investigated.
Egypt has 39 confirmed cases of bird flu, with 16 of them fatal, since 2006.
In Indonesia, a 24-year-old woman from West Jakarta, also died Dec. 25 from bird flu. The woman developed symptoms on Dec. 14 and was hospitalized five days later. It was not immediately known how she contracted the virus.

Xinhau is reporting the death of a four year old child in the Son La province of Vietnam. The child was suffering high fever and pneumonia, two symptoms of bird flu infection :

The child ate a dead chicken before developing bird flu symptoms. Specimens from the child are being tested for bird flu virus strain H5N1, the representative told a meeting of the country's Anti-Bird Flu Steering Committee on Tuesday.
Vietnam has detected seven bird flu patients from the five northern provinces of Vinh Phuc, Thai Nguyen, Thanh Hoa, Ha Nam and Ha Tay since May 10, of whom four died, according to the ministry's Preventive Medicine Department.

2007-12-23T04:06:00.000+11:00

Confirmed : Human To Human Bird Flu Spread In Pakistan

The World Health Organisation has now officially confirmed that the H5N1 virus was passed from one person to another in Pakistan. However, they are calling this human transmission of one of the world's most deadliest viruses "limited" :

World Health Organization, WHO, officials say there has been limited human transmission of bird flu in Pakistan - with no new cases reported recently.

WHO's top bird flu official David Heymann Friday, said there appears to be no threat of the further spread of the H5N1 virus, with the last human case reported December 6.

At least eight people were infected in Pakistan's northwest in recent weeks - in the country's first human cases of bird flu.

One man who worked on poultry farm in North West Frontier Province has died. His brother also died recently, but was not tested for the virus.

Heymann says the cases appear to be part of a small chain of human-to-human transmission.

A WHO team is investigating the outbreak and results from initial laboratory tests are expected in the next few days.

2007-12-20T02:58:00.000+11:00

Indonesia : At Least Four Recent Human Bird Flu Victims Had No Contact With Infected Poultry

Depending on which media, or government reports you believe, there has been at least 20 human bird flu infections in recent months, in Pakistan, China and Indonesia, where the victim had no known contact with infected poultry, which has been the most common way humans become infected with H5N1.

Indonesia 'bird flu officials' are now investigating at least four cases of human infection, where the most likely source of infection is human transmission. The same AFP story reveals that 20 percent of human bird flu infections in 2006 were not linked to infected poultry. But in 2007, that figure has risen to 3o percent. The good news for Indonesia is that human deaths from H5N1 have dropped in 2007 :

"In the last three to four months, we have had four cases where the poultry in the victim's neighbourhoods (tested) negative for the virus," said Bayu Krisnamurthi, head of Indonesia's National Avian Influenza Committee.
"The number is significant enough for us to intensify our investigations so that we could have a more accurate explanation," he told a press briefing giving an overview of what has happened in Indonesia this year with bird flu.
Krisnamurthi nevertheless insisted that Indonesia had made progress in tackling bird flu, with the number of reported cases decreasing this year.
In 2007, 40 cases were confirmed with 35 fatalities, compared to figures of 55 and 45, respectively, in 2006.
But he also conceded that Indonesia needed more effective measures, particularly to combat bird flu in poultry.
According to Krisnamurthi, even though the agriculture ministry vaccinated 70 percent of the country's farmed poultry in 2007, "the quality of the vaccine must be improved," he said.

2007-12-19T23:13:00.000+11:00

Fallout : Christmas Turkeys In UK Cost $200!

For the Brits, an organic turkey for Christmas dinner has become the luxury food of the season. The price of Christmas birds in the UK have soared by more than 38% in a matter of weeks, following bird flu outbreaks and mass cullings on organic poultry farms.

Some 200,000 poultry birds were culled in the UK after the recent outbreak, and added costs of raising poultry have come from the huge rise in the costs of feed, after wheat prices reached record highs.

Although paying more than £100 ($205) for a single turkey may seem outrageous, organic turkey suppliers have sold out, and are still fielding calls for more orders.

And turkey prices may climb even higher, according to Poultry World.

Sales of organic turkeys will jump 46%, the British Retail Consortium predicts. That compares with a 7% increase the industry group forecasts for total turkey sales.

As the bird flu virus continues to spread, and with tens of millions of poultry birds every few months to stop outbreaks from spreading, higher organic poultry rices are expected to become the norm for near future.

2007-12-18T13:16:00.001+11:00

Bird Flu Spreading Rapidly As Winter Arrives In The Northern Hemisphere

A quick round-up of recent bird flu outbreaks :

Germany : EU Rolls Out Bird Flu Containment Measures After New Outbreak, Culling Begins

West Africa : Benin Confirms Outbreaks On Two Poultry Farms

Myanmar : First Human Case Confirmed, Victim Recovering

Saudi Arabia : New Outbreak Leads To Cull Of 13,000 Ostriches

Poland : Fresh Outbreak On Poultry Farm Reported

China : Human Infections Contained Claims Health Ministry

Pakistan : WHO Sends In Team To Investigate Human Transmission Claims

2007-12-17T04:36:00.000+11:00

Pakistan : H5N1 Virus Spreads Through Family

Pakistan Officials Waited 13 Days After Bird Flu Positive Test Results To Alert World Health Organisation
The Pakistan human transmissions reports grows only more confused and contradictory, but this story appears to lay out a few firm facts :

Authorities in Pakistan announced the country's first reported human cases of H5N1 avian flu Saturday in a cluster of family members which may have involved person-to-person transmission.

There was some confusion Saturday about how many people had tested positive for the virus, with Pakistan announcing six cases but the World Health Organization saying eight suspected cases had been identified.

The WHO said confirmatory testing must still be done. And a spokesperson for the agency said investigations are underway to try to determine how the various people became infected, but noted some human-to-human spread may have occurred.

"We can't rule it out," Gregory Hartl said from Geneva.

"There are other plausible explanations.... We don't know enough at this point. And in some of these cases, one never will know enough."

The cluster of cases involved four brothers and two cousins living in the country's North-West Frontier Province. Two of the brothers died, one without having been tested.

While the brothers who died are believed to have had at least some exposure to infected poultry, they were also known to have nursed the first case in the family, a brother who worked as a livestock official.

A doctor who treated members of the family also has tested positive for H5N1, but with a non-standard diagnostic test, Hartl said. He cautioned that further testing is needed to determine if she is indeed a case, noting she hadn't shown signs of infection.

Three people who are unrelated to the family but who were involved in culling H5N1-infected poultry in the same area have also tested positive; all are still alive. At least one of the cullers worked on the same farm as the livestock official.

The initial infection in this family dates back to late October, when the livestock official became sick. It appears that it was only after two of the man's brothers fell ill and died that testing was done looking for H5N1 infection. It is believed the first positive test was received in late November.

The WHO was officially alerted Dec. 12, Hartl said.

"We feel that the Pakistanis have done everything right in terms of their response," he said, noting the country has done a "huge" amount of work to strengthen infection control and increase surveillance.

"(But) yes, they could have alerted us earlier."

There was also a mild scare in the United States relating to the Pakistan outbreak. It's remarkable to see how fast the CDC can move when it needs to :

Meanwhile, U.S. public health authorities have confirmed they conducted H5N1 testing on a man who had recently visited Pakistan and was complaining of mild respiratory symptoms. The man, who officials will only identify as having a link to the cluster, is said to have been concerned he might have been infected.

"The individual went to his private physician after returning from Pakistan, and discussed this with his physician," said Claire Pospisil, a spokesperson for the New York State department of health.

Pospisil said the doctor contacted the local health department in Nassau County, where the man lives, and they collected samples for testing. The tests came back negative.

David Daigle, a spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, said the CDC sent its plane to Albany on Dec. 8 to collect specimens for confirmatory testing. Within hours a CDC lab verified the state lab's findings.

"He was negative. There was no doubt about it," Daigle said from Atlanta on Saturday.

And more on other recent human infections :

On Friday, the WHO announced that Myanmar had reported its first human case in a seven-year-old girl who fell ill in late November. She has since recovered.

Earlier this month, China reported infections in a son and father from Jiangsu province; the son died. And in recent weeks Indonesia, the country hardest hit by H5N1, has reported several human cases.

China and Indonesia are warning there may be more human infections in the weeks ahead.

2007-12-16T01:15:00.000+11:00

Pakistan : Two Brothers Attending H5N1 Infected Veterinarian In Hospital Caught Virus and Died

Amongst the conflicting reports coming out of Pakistan, comes this extraordinary story, which
claims that a veterinarian who fell ill with H5N1 then infected his two brothers with the virus, while in hospital, and both brothers died. The veterinarian, however, recovered.

There are many details in this story that are not reaching the wire reports from Reuters and Associated Press, including the claim that this is the first case of human transmission of the virus in Pakistan :

The deaths of two brothers of a veterinarian, who acquired the deadly H5N1 Avian Influenza virus after coming into contact with infected poultry at a farm in Abbottabad late-October, and the recent hospitalisation of a Mansehra-based poultry handler who has also tested positive for the disease, provide sufficient evidence for the government to institute concrete measures for interruption of human transmission of the disease from birds to poultry handlers and their close contacts.

Of the 40 suspected human samples collected from Peshawar and Abbottabad in the wake of the first-ever confirmed human transmission of H5N1 in Pakistan, 36 have tested negative, while four are positive, investigations conducted by ‘The News’ have revealed.

This is the first time that human cases have been reported in Pakistan, placing an onerous responsibility on the government and its partners to eradicate some of the dangerous trends in the poultry industry that could spell disaster for the country.

It is learnt that both the veterinarian, Dr. Ishtiaq Durrani, who is working as livestock production officer at the Department of Livestock and Dairy Development, NWFP, as well as the poultry handler from Mansehra, did not follow the recommended protective measures while handling infected birds. They may either have come into contact with the saliva, nasal excretions and faeces of the infected birds, or the feed and water that are given to them.

Dr. Ishtiaq was involved in culling of 3,000 birds following the October 21 outbreak of bird flu at a poultry farm in Abbottabad. The other victim from Mansehra happens to be a daily wage labourer who was commissioned for culling without being advised on how he should protect himself. The labourer’s daughter, along with another male, is also under observation at a hospital in Abbottabad.

While Dr. Ishtiaq himself is on the path to recovery, his brothers Mohammad Ilyas Durrani and Mohammad Owais Durrani — both of who were attending him at the Khyber Teaching Hospital during his illness — died on November 19 and November 29, respectively.

Ilyas has been confirmed as being the first casualty of H5N1 in Pakistan. Even though his brother’s blood sample could not be collected, health experts talking to ‘The News’ said clinical evidence suggests that he too succumbed to the deadly virus. The blood samples of two of the three brothers were received by the National Institute of Health on October 28.

This Bloomberg wire report is vastly different to the above story, claiming that no samples were collected from the two dead brothers and that the most recent outbreak of H5N1 occurred in late November, instead of October.

2007-12-16T01:07:00.000+11:00

Pakistan : H5N1 Kills One, Six Infected

Reuters is now reporting that there is only one person dead from the H5N1 virus in Islamabad, and not the two brothers as previously reported. The two brothers don't even get a mention in this report :

Pakistan has recorded its first human death from bird flu and six other people have been infected with the deadly H5N1 virus over the last two months, a senior Health Ministry official said on Saturday.

"Seven in total. One died and six other people were infected with the H5N1 virus," Federal Health Secretary Khushnood Akhtar Lashari told Reuters. "It was confirmed by blood tests."

The cases were reported in the North West Frontier Province, Lashari said.

Two people have recovered and four are in quarantine.

While Pakistan has registered cases of bird flu in poultry this is the first time it has been reported in humans, Lashari said. The first poultry case appeared in early 2006.

There is a number of confusing, conflicting reports coming out of Pakistan about how many have died, how long ago the first human death actually occurred, and how many are now in quarantine.

2007-12-15T00:01:00.000+11:00

Bird Flu Returns To Asia, Deaths In Three Countries

This report in the Jakarta Post supplies a fairly comprehensive round-up of recent events, and makes for a concerning 'big picture' view of the H5N1 spread :

Bird flu has resurfaced in parts of Asia, with human deaths reported in Indonesia and China and fresh poultry outbreaks plaguing other countries during the winter months when the virus typically flares.

Indonesia, the nation hardest hit by the H5N1 virus, announced its 93rd death on Friday after a 47-year-old man died a day earlier in a Jakarta hospital, said Health Ministry spokesman Joko Suyono. He fell ill on Dec. 2 and was admitted with flu-like symptoms, becoming Indonesia's 115th person infected with the disease.

In China, the military in eastern Nanjing banned the sale of poultry this week after a father and son were sickened by the disease earlier this month. Health officials confirmed the 24-year-old man died from the virus a day before his father, 52, became sick. It was the country's 17th bird flu death.The two were believed to have eaten a traditional dish known as "beggar's chicken," in which the bird is wrapped in lotus leaves and baked. However, the cause of infection remained unclear. The father is recovering after taking the antiviral Tamiflu, said Hans Troedsson, World Health Organization representative in China. More than 80 people who had contact with the family were being monitored for symptoms.

Local animal health officials said last week no H5N1 outbreaks had been detected among the province's poultry, but Troedsson said sick birds typically are not reported prior to human deaths in China...

That's startling news. Mass deaths of poultry birds aren't officially logged unless their human deaths?

Officials in Pakistan were investigating the country's first suspected bird flu cases Friday after two poultry farm workers died this week after being hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in Peshawar, said Khushdil Khan, medical superintendent of the Khyber Teaching Hospital.

Meanwhile, the disease has resurfaced in several provinces across Vietnam in recent months, killing or forcing the slaughter of thousands of birds. So far, 46 people have died from the virus nationwide.

Hong Kong closed its famed Mai Po bird sanctuary to the public for three weeks starting Friday after a wild gray heron discovered nearby tested positive for the virus.

Russia and Poland also have experienced recent outbreaks among poultry, but neither have detected human cases.

2007-12-14T04:25:00.000+11:00

Indonesia : Two Bird Flu Deaths In Four Days

The confirmed human death toll from H5N1 in Indonesia now stands at 93. The unofficial figure, meaning deaths that were not logged by medical authorities, are believed to be much higher.

From Reuters :

A Indonesian man from an area west of the capital Jakarta died from bird flu on Thursday, an official said...

Runizar Roesin, head of the bird flu centre in Jakarta, told Reuters the 47-year-old man from Tangerang died on Thursday evening.

The man, who had kept ducks at his home, had tested positive for bird flu and was being treated at a hospital in Jakarta, a Health Ministry official said on Wednesday.

Earlier this week, a 28-year-old woman, also from Tangerang, died of bird flu after being treated at the same hospital.

Two deaths at the same Indonesian hospital in less than one week, with both patients being treated with anti-virals after the onset of the virus.

2007-12-14T04:12:00.000+11:00

Pakistan : Claim That Two Brothers Died From Bird Flu

I'm treating this report with a bit of skepticism because I haven't found it reported elsewhere, as yet.

If it's indeed true, then these are the first two human deaths related to bird flu reported in Pakistan. The story claims the two brothers were working on a farm where bird flu has been detected :

For the first time in the history of Pakistan, Bird Flu influenza has been confirmed among human beings after two brothers died at a local hospital in Peshawar.
According to spokesman of Health Ministry, two brothers Muhammad Ilyas and Tariq working in a poultry farm in Mansera suffered flu, few days back that later turned to be critical in the form of Bird Flu influenza (H5N1).
They were admitted to a local hospital in Peshawar where on Monday they died.
After the blood samples of both the brothers were sent for formal testing in Laboratory, it was found that both brothers died due to Bird Flu virus (H5N1).
...spokesman of Health Ministry confirmed the death due to Bird Flu adding both the brothers were working in a Poultry farm in Mansera and had direct link with the chickens that resulted in the transformation of the virus (H5N1).

A report here, from November, claims Pakistan has had 76 outbreaks of the bird flu virus amongst poultry and birds in 2007.

2007-12-08T04:11:00.000+11:00

Deadly Human To Human Bird Flu Spread In China?

Man Dies Of H5N1, Father Now Infected, No Contact With Poultry Suspected

Why does this Reuters story make no mention at all of recent news that human to human transmission of the bird flu virus is now regarded as a fact by experts?

The father of a Chinese man who died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu last week has also been diagnosed with the disease, authorities said on Friday.
The National Disease Authority has confirmed that a 52-year-old man surnamed Lu from the Nanjing, capital of the eastern province Jiangsu, was feverish with the H5N1 strain on Thursday, the Ministry of Health reported on its Web site (www.moh.gov.cn).

This latest case raises troublesome questions about how the man was infected.

Humans can contract H5N1 from close contact with infected birds, but scientists fear the disease could mutate into a version that spreads from person-to-person, risking wider outbreaks or even a global pandemic.

Lu's son died on Sunday from the same disease, making the question of how these two infections occurred especially important.

The Xinhua news agency had earlier reported that the son had had no contact with dead poultry and there had been no reported poultry outbreak in the province.

China has had 27 confirmed human deaths linked to the bird flu virus.

More from the BBC :

A statement on the Chinese ministry's website said a 52-year-old man in eastern Jiangsu province identified only by his surname, Lu, has been confirmed with the virus, just days after his 24-year-old son succumbed to it on 2 December.
WHO spokesman John Rainford said: "We are concerned. The fact that we have two cases here without necessarily a clear source of animal infection and within the same family means we need to make sure we do a thorough investigation."
The father began presenting symptoms on Monday and was confirmed as having the virus on Wednesday. He is being monitored in hospital.

Human To Human Bird Flu Transmission Is A Fact

World Health Organisation Confirms Humans Can Pass H5N1 To Each Other

2007-12-06T23:46:00.000+11:00

Human To Human Bird Flu Transmission Is A Reality

Professor Paul Reynolds has told an international medical conference that "potentially lethal bird flu is being passed from person to person."

The story below was up on the Australian ABC News site on December 4, but has since been pulled. This link takes you to a Google cache version of the story :

A total of 1,600 doctors and scientists from 42 countries have attended a lung disease conference on Queensland's Gold Coast. The conference convenor, Professor Paul Reynolds, says human victims of avian flu in the past have contracted the disease from direct contact with sick birds, but that is changing.

"It's usually very close household contacts at this stage," he said. "Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to tease out if people are living together in a village whether the transmission has truly been person-to-person or the fact that the people involved have happened to come into contact with the same infected birds, but there are certainly some case reports emerging that are highly suggestive that direct person-to-person transfer is occurring."

Then there is this interesting story from 2004 where World Health Organisation officials flatly ruled out the possibility of human to human transmission, without further mutations. As we've reported here recently, those mutations have now occurred :

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has confirmed that new tests show there is no evidence that the deadly bird flu has passed from person-to-person.

It says DNA tests on a 23-year-old Vietnamese woman who died of the virus showed no evidence she caught it from her sister, who also died.

The WHO originally reported the results last week but then recalled them, saying they had in fact tested a different woman.

Health experts say the bird flu virus must mutate before it can pass from person-to-person, although people can clearly catch it from birds.

Meanwhile, the father of a six-year-old boy who was the first in Thailand to die of bird flu, is to sue the government, for covering up the presence of the disease.

Chamnan Bounmanut says he would not have lost his son if the government had told the public the truth about the epidemic.

The government has denied any cover-up, saying provincial authorities "screwed up" in not recognising the disease.

The government says it acted swiftly last month once it realised bird flu had arrived in Thailand.

2007-12-06T21:14:00.000+11:00

The $2 Trillion Pandemic

Human Death Toll For 2007 Down On 2006 Figures

The Acting Vice President of the World Bank has warned that a global bird flu pandemic could lead to more than 35% of the workforce being absent and cost some the global economy some $2 trillion.

From AFP :

The risk of a pandemic was still as great as it was two years ago despite improvements in the capacity of many countries to respond to the infection, a joint report by the United Nations and World Bank said last week.
"The global economic costs could be between 1.5 to two trillion dollars," Peter Harrold, acting Vice President of the World Bank, told an international conference on avian flu in New Delhi that wraps up Thursday.
More than 600 delegates from 105 countries are in New Delhi to discuss preparedness and challenges in fighting avian flu.
"About 20 percent of the global population will be affected during the next pandemic," Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organisation, told the gathering.
Chan said 28 million people may need medical care over a relatively short period and worker absenteeism could reach 35 percent of the work force.
Forty-eight people died of the infection in 2007, down from 71 in 2006, according to the WHO, and experts said outbreaks were also being detected more rapidly and responses have become more effective.
Twenty-six countries reported flu outbreaks in birds in 2007, of which four -- Bangladesh, Ghana, Saudi Arabia and Togo -- experienced them for the first time.

2007-12-01T01:07:00.000+11:00

Poor Nations Ask "Why Should Be Share H5N1 Samples, When Rich Nations Won't?"

Forget The People, Says US, Patents Must Be Protected

In a perfect world, world pharmaceutical giants would put aside the profit sheet in the face of a coming pandemic we've been repeatedly told could wipe out as many as a few hundred million people and work together, with the poorer nations, to create the kinds of vaccines that may help to halt the spread of a highly pathogenic H5N1 virus.

After all, who wants to loose that many potential future customers for larger profits in the interrum?

But instead we have an absurd situation where countries like Indonesia are now forced to virtually hold their H5N1 samples hostage to ensure that whatever vaccines result from such samples will be made available to its people, in the event of a pandemic, for reasonable prices.

From Xinhua :

Richer nations and drugmakers refused to share their bird flu virus samples which upset developing countries that wanted to develop cheap vaccines by the virus samples, media reported Monday.
Developing states like Indonesia -- which with 91 of the 206 human bird flu deaths since 2003 is the hardest hit country -- want guarantees from richer nations and drugmakers that they will have access to cheap vaccines if they share samples.

"We must have equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of viruses through a fair, transparent and equitable mechanism. It is the moral thing to do," said Siti Fadillah Supari, Health Minister of Indonesia.
The WHO agreed last May to revamp its 50-year-old system for sharing flu virus samples with researchers and drug firms. It had wanted its 191 member states to adopt an agreement by May but divisions remain.
John Lange, U.S. special representative for avian and pandemic influenza, ruled out any automatic reward for sharing.
Research and development of vaccines was "very risky, time-consuming and extremely expensive" and it was critical to protect patents to ensure their continued development, he said.

You would think there would be nothing more expensive in the history of mankind than a bird flu pandemic that kills more people than the 1918 'Spanish Flu' wipeout.

Indonesia is also well aware that if they hand over H5N1 samples, and a vaccine is patented from such samples, they may find they are not allowed to develop their own vaccines from the same, now patented, viral strains.

You can understand Indonesia's reluctance.

What is more important to protect? People, or patents?

2007-12-01T01:00:00.000+11:00

England : Poultry Farm H5N1 Outbreaks Now Contained

Just another bizarre bird flu virus outbreak, with no apparent source for the initial infections :

An investigation by Defra into the latest outbreaks of the highly-pathogenic strain of bird flu on the Norfolk and Suffolk border have shown that the virus has been contained, an official report has concluded today.

Defra's initial epidemiology report into the H5N1 avian influenza outbreak at Park Farm, Redgrave, concludes that the outbreak has has been contained on the first farm.

It notes that the most likely explanation for the secondary case at Hill Meadow Farm, Knettishall, was a result of transmission by vehicles, people or other things between the sites.

Defra's investigation has been unable, at this stage, to identify categorically the source of the outbreak. “No evidence has so far been found to indicate introduction via infected poultry or poultry products or vehicles/people transporting them, from countries which have undisclosed infection in their domestic turkey, geese and duck population.”

While wild birds cannot be ruled out as a source of infection, no evidence of H5N1 infection has been found in the local wild bird population.

2007-12-01T00:44:00.000+11:00

Vaccines, Anti-Virals Will Not Stop A Pandemic's Spread

Face Masks, Handwashing First Better Than Drugs Later

New research shows that it is far better to stop H5N1 getting into your body in the first place, instead of relying on pharmaceuticals to treat it once you're infected. Obviously.

But the simple, and very effective, benefits from regular, thorough handwashing would still appear to be part of the information gap in preventing the spread of bird flu amongst humans.

From the Melbourne Age :

Face masks and regular hand-washing are more likely to halt the spread of a deadly flu than all the antiviral drugs stockpiled worldwide, Australian experts say.

A global review has concluded that simple physical barriers will be more effective than drugs to prevent a pandemic of bird flu or another virulent bug.

The researchers from Australia, Italy, the US and the UK warn that combining measures like hand-washing and rigorous use of masks, gloves and gowns could be the best, and indeed only, line of treatment.

The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, are at odds with most government pandemic plans, which rely heavily on large stockpiles of antiviral drugs like Tamiflu in an outbreak.

How much did governments of the world spend stocking warehouses full of Tamiflu? Was it $10 billion? Or $15 billion? The stockpiling is still going on :

The UK government this week announced it was doubling its stockpile of antiviral medicines in preparation for any future flu pandemic.

Co-investigator Professor Chris Del Mar, from Bond University on the Gold Coast, said cheaper, simple physical measures should be given higher priority in national pandemic preparation.

"The world is increasingly concerned about global pandemic viral infections such as avian influenza and SARS," Prof Del Mar and his colleagues wrote.

"Mounting evidence suggests that the use of vaccines and antiviral drugs will be insufficient to interrupt the spread of influenza ... but there have been no comprehensive reviews of this evidence."

The team reviewed 51 published studies on the effect of simple physical means of preventing animal-to-human or human-to-human transmission of respiratory infections.

They compared interventions like isolation, quarantine, barriers, personal protection and hygiene with doing nothing. They excluded vaccines and antiviral drugs.

They found that handwashing and wearing masks, gloves and gowns were effective individually in preventing the spread of respiratory viruses, and were even more effective when combined.

"In fact, combining these measures may be more effective than prescribing antiviral drugs in the event of a pandemic," they wrote.

The team called for further large trials to evaluate the best combination of interventions.
A Canadian expert writing in the same journal, Professor Martin Dawes, said governments worldwide should have commissioned such a study many years ago, given the potentially catastrophic effects of a pandemic.

Such a study had never been commissioned before?

It should have been, but anti-viral marketeers were winning the propaganda war back then. Let's hope the shift to actual physical prevention begins before the pandemic does.

2007-11-20T00:05:00.000+11:00

Nigerian Poultry Workers Exposed To H5N1 For 14 Days, None Were Infected

The H5N1 blog has excerpts from a research report looking into a H5N1 outbreak in Nigeria in February 2006. For some 14 days, nearly 300 poultry workers and more than two dozen laboratory workers were believed to have been exposed to the H5N1 virus, but none fell ill with the virus, and none of the exposed are believed to show H5N1 immunity.

Go Here For More

Sounds like great news. At least in early 2006, the H5N1 virus was having difficulty making the jump from infected birds to humans.

Let's hope the virus continues to encounter such difficulties, crossing from species to another.

2007-11-16T04:17:00.001+11:00

As Bird Flu Returns To The British Countryside, Dark Rumours Sweep Farming Villages

'Precautionary' Culls Of Non-H5N1 Poultry Begins

The H5N1 virus is believed to have infected a second poultry farm in East Anglia. The culls are continuing, and authorities are not waiting for the virus to show itself before tens of thousands of birds are slaughtered.

According to this story in the Times Online, some 22,000 free-range turkeys were "loaded into mobile gas chambers" at four farms yesterday :

There was as yet no sign of the highly pathogenic avian influenza strain H5N1 among the flocks. Instead these birds had been condemned by the movements of a handful of workers between the farms and Redgrave Park Farm, the site of the original outbreak.
Fred Landeg, the acting chief veterinary officer, described the cull as a precautionary measure. Nevertheless, in villages on the Norfolk-Suffolk border the news provoked disquiet.
Rumours were running through the villages. The farmer said he’d heard that all the chickens born on Tuesday at a large commercial hatchery were gassed after news broke of the outbreak of H5N1. The hatchery denied this.
While officials sought the source of the outbreak, locals in the White Hart pub reached their own conclusions. “It’s all the wild birds that come here,” said David Bryan, 64, a retired builder from Redgrave.
Local ornithologists leapt to the wild birds’ defence. Paul Stancliffe, from the British Trust for Ornithology, which has its headquarters nearby in Thetford, said it could not be the wigeons because “they have been here since September”, and the swans on the lake appeared to be of British origin.

So where did the virus come from to get inside the UK?

This local news story says that the four farms where culls are taking place all shared the same workers. The H5N1 virus has been known to survive on workboots and clothing. They clearly fear that workers have carried the virus from one farm to another. That's how the story goes today anyway.

During the 'Bernard Mathews' outbreak earlier this year, turkey sales fell by one-third, with hundreds of jobs lost.

With outbreaks of blue tongue and foot and mouth, and now bird flu, many Brits will be having a vegetarian Christmas.

An Interesting 'Bird Flu In The UK' Timeline From BBC News

2007-11-14T00:14:00.000+11:00

Bird Flu Returns To Britain

Thousands Of Christmas Poultry Birds Culled

More than 6000 ducks, turkey and geese were culled yesterday in East Anglia, in an effort to halt the spread of H5 bird flu virus. Wild birds are thought to be responsible for infecting poultry birds on a free range farm.

UPDATE : It has now been confirmed that the bird flu virus found on the farm is the deadly H5N1 strain. More culls are expected.

From the Times Online :

Last night Fred Landeg, the acting Chief Veterinary Officer, ordered greater surveillance throughout Suffolk and parts of Norfolk and ordered farmers to lock up their poultry, a measure that confines hundreds of thousands of free-range birds to sheds.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has also banned all pigeon-racing and halted all bird shows throughout England.
Veterinary experts believe that wild birds are the most likely cause of the disease — especially as a consignment of birds has not been brought to the farm for four weeks, and wild birds gather at a lake near the farm.
Nevertheless, movements on and off the farm, vehicles and visitors are being checked to ensure that there is no other route for the disease which could threaten other farms.
Mark Avery, of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said it was possible that wild birds were a factor in this case.
“We don’t know of any recent outbreak of the deadly avian flu on the Continent but it is feasible that wild birds brought it. It is now just after the mass migration period but there was a cold weather snap in eastern Europe two weeks ago and though no big wild bird movements were noticed it is possible that an infected bird arrived here. But we need to know more about the epidemiology and the tracings before jumping to conclusions.”

2007-11-13T02:51:00.001+11:00

Indonesia : Bird Flu Claims Another Life - Toll At 91

From Xinhau :

An Indonesian man of 31 years old has died on avian influenza, the country's health ministry said here Saturday.
The man, from Riau province in Sumatra Island, died on Tuesday after three days treatment in a hospital. Laboratory tests indicated that he was contracted by H5N1 virus, said Djoko Suyono, official of the anti-bird flu centre of the ministry.
"He died on November 6. Two of laboratory tests showed that he is positive of bird flu," he told Xinhua.
The man died when he was shifting from a hospital in a regency to another one at the provincial capital of Pekanbaru, said Suyono.
He begun to have the symptoms of the disease three days before he went to the hospital, said Suyono.

No word yet on how the 31 year old came to be infected with H5N1.

2007-11-08T16:03:00.000+11:00

Bird Flu Still Spreading Through Asia, Africa

From VOA News :

Nations in Asia and Africa have had much success in stopping the spread of bird flu, but experts meeting in Bangkok this week say the H5N1 virus continues to spread in a number of countries.

Experts with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization say bird flu is still considered an animal disease, affecting only a small number of humans so far. But they say the threat of a human pandemic, in which millions could die, is still very real.

Dr. David Nabarro, the United Nations' senior Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, told reporters in Bangkok Wednesday that while most nations have made progress in containing the virus' spread, there remain some problem areas.

"We've seen during the last three years that countries have invested a lot of resources in vaccination of poultry, in improving veterinary services, and also in what we call bio-security, in order to try to reduce the risk of...avian influenza continuing to circulate in poultry or in wild birds," he said. "We've seen in many countries, extraordinary success in getting this under control: (but) not everywhere. There's some problems in the region."

He says the virus continues to spread in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam in Asia, and Egypt and Nigeria in Africa.

Experts say nations that have yet to develop an export-oriented poultry industry are finding it more difficult to contain the disease.

They say Thailand, as one example, has had greater success in controlling bird flu, because it already had a veterinary system in place to support its sizable poultry exports.

Another challenge that could hinder efforts to contain the spread of H5N1 is the reluctance by some countries to hand over tissue samples of bird flu cases. China is one of them. Dr. Nabarro says negotiations continue in efforts to get Beijing to disclose more data and materials that could help scientists develop a vaccine.

"There are some situations in which countries have asked for clarification on the benefits that they're likely to get as a result of sharing samples, and there is some international negotiation under way at the moment to try to establish a satisfactory basis for sample-sharing by seeing whether or not it will be possible to ensure that those who do provide samples are able to benefit from products that are produced with the help of those samples," he said.

2007-11-08T04:11:00.001+11:00

Suspected Human Bird Flu Deaths In Vietnam And Indonesia

The bird flu virus is gaining ground again in Vietnam, killing hundreds of ducks and reportedly claiming a human life as well :

A South Korean man died of pneumonia in Can Tho city Monday, local doctors, who suspect he had contracted bird flu, said.

The man was taken to the city General Hospital at 3:00AM Monday with high fever and breathing problems. He died at 2:00PM.

The doctors have sent his blood samples to Pasteur Institute in Ho Chi Minh City to test for the H5N1 strain of bird flu virus, which has caused 100 infections and 46 deaths in Vietnam in the last few years.

The Tangerang district of Indonesia has also seen another human bird flu death :

Suharda Ningrum said it was not yet clear whether the 30-year-old victim had been in contact with sick fowl, but chickens belonging to a neighbour had died suddenly. The woman lived in Tangerang, west of the capital Jakarta.

Contact with sick fowl is the most common way for humans to contract the H5N1 strain of the virus.

"Two tests were confirmed positive for bird flu. Her neighbour's chickens died suddenly but it is unclear whether she had direct contact with the dead fowl," said Ningrum, adding that the woman had died in Jakarta's Persahabatan hospital.

2007-11-08T04:06:00.000+11:00

Children Warned To Be On Lookout for 'My Sick Pelican'

The Australian Quarantine Inspection Service is undertaking an interesting educational initiative :

Australia's quarantine watchdog has turned to children's books to help stop the spread of bird flu into the country.

The Australian Quarantine Inspection Service has commissioned two Torres Strait women to write and illustrate a book called My Sick Pelican.

The book will be circulated through Torres Strait schools to help children identify sick birds.

AQIS risk monitoring manager Andrew Moss says residents are the frontline in helping to prevent the spread of avian diseases.

"To be able to deliver quarantine effectively there you need good community support," he said.

"The community is made up of children as well as adults and this is just another method among many to get quarantine measures into the community, so you've got good awareness at all levels."

The Torres Straits islands are situated at the very top of Australia, off north Queensland, and is seen as a 'gateway' for birds migrating from South East Asia into the country.

2007-11-02T02:01:00.000+11:00

Bird Flu Takes A Firm Grip Across Europe

End Timers Looking Forward To A Bird Flu Pandemic?

This story about how the H5N1 virus is rapidly establishing itself in European countries reads mostly like a fact based, genuinely informative news story about the terrible reality that is the bird flu virus in Europe today, but....we'll get to the 'but' after this excerpt :

Bird flu may become entrenched throughout parts of Europe. Two months ago, German scientists discovered the fatal H5N1 strain of the avian influenza virus in seemingly healthy ducks and geese. The fact that German waterfowl are now acting as vectors of the disease without showing symptoms presents an increased threat to human health, the Food and Agriculture Organization (fao) of the United Nations reported last Thursday.
The spread of avian influenza by birds resistant to the disease has caused it to become entrenched in Southeast Asian nations. If the birds do not show symptoms of the disease, infected birds are almost impossible to isolate or eradicate. Because of this, the fao has warned that Europe should prepare for more outbreaks.

Ukraine has about 20 million domestic ducks. Another 8 million ducks populate the Danube River delta in Romania. “These figures compare easily with chicken and waterfowl densities in Asia, where the virus continues to circulate among chickens but has found a niche in countries with tens of millions of domestic ducks and geese,” commented Jan Slingenbergh, the fao’s senior animal health officer.

“After Asia and Africa, Europe may become the third continent where the H5N1 strain could become endemic,” the fao warned.

The H5N1 strain is the most deadly form of bird flu that infects humans. It has been fatal in 204 of the 332 recorded human cases and has killed millions of birds worldwide. In addition to the destruction that an avian flu epidemic would wreak on the European poultry industry, the risk to human health cannot be ignored.
The 1918 Spanish flu that killed 40 million people was a type of avian influenza. Health experts fear that the H5N1 strain will mutate to a form that can be transmitted human to human. Lee Jong-Wook, the late director general of the World Health Organization, stated that “It is only a matter of time before an avian-flu virus—most likely H5N1—acquires the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza. We don’t know when this will happen. But we do know that it will happen.”

But the story finishes in a very 'Oh Shit!' kind of way :

This silent spread of H5N1 avian influenza may be the start of a European epidemic. Time will tell, but we can be certain that biblical prophecies of severe pandemics in the end time will be fulfilled soon.

What the...?

The deeply troubling thing about that comment is, of course, that millions of Americans are waiting for the supposed End Times to become a reality. When they get End Times, they get the second coming of their Messiah.

It's absolutely shocking to think that there are American evangelicals telling their followers that a bird flu pandemic is going to be a good thing. If bird flu is one of the End Times plagues, then why would they want to stop it? Meaning that why then would these millions of End Times devotees do anything to protect themselves and their neighbours from halting the spread of the deadly virus if it was to show up in their towns or cities?

Will we see End Times evangelicals telling their millions of followers to, for example, not bother washing their hands, or reporting a shedful of dead poultry birds?

Sorry, but this kind of talk about one of the most deadly challenges facing humanity is the stuff of nightmares.

How do you defend a country as big as the United States when millions of its own people might actually be wanting the bird flu virus to become pandemic?

When this blog's American readers hear local evangelicals talking 'rapturously' about a bird flu pandemic, double check your stockpiles. One of them might be just mad enough to want to help the virus to spread and take hold in the United States.

The above excerpted story was taken from a news site called 'The Trumpet'. Here's how they describe themselves :

The Trumpet uses a single overarching criterion that sets it apart from other news sources and keeps it focused like a laser beam on what truly is important. That criterion is prophetic significance. The Trumpet seeks to show how current events are fulfilling the biblically prophesied description of the prevailing state of affairs just before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

End Timers for the Pandemic?

2007-10-30T10:23:00.000+11:00

Pandemic UK : Project Death Toll Soars To 650,000

A confidential document from the British government's Home Office reveals plans are falling into place to deal with an estimated bird flu pandemic death more than double the previous 'official' estimates made public.

The British government now rates the likelihood of a bird flu pandemic as "very likely", killing some 650,000 people, with previous governments estimates of fatalities around 320,000.

Plans involve the digging of mass graves and using shipping containers to store stacks of corpses, waiting for burial.

From the UK Telegraph :

The alarming prediction is contained in a confidential Home Office document drawn up to help councils and other organisations deal with a catastrophic outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus.
With such a huge death toll, it says cemeteries would be under enormous pressure.
"Inflatable structures" and containerised storage "like those used at ports and freight terminals" could be used as makeshift mortuaries to store bodies before they are buried. The Department of Health advises that refrigerated vehicles and trailers should not be used – but admits that this may not be possible during a pandemic.
Large-scale "common graves" would be needed to accommodate the mountain of bodies, and ensure burials were carried out swiftly.
However the document, called "Planning for a Possible Influenza Pandemic – A Framework for Planners Preparing to Manage Deaths", says the process "would still allow for individual burial plots and marking of graves".
The wishes of families should be considered when planning the graves, the draft guidance says.
They should be "deep enough to allow for additional family burials – but not too deep or densely used to make difficult the removal and re-interment of the remains elsewhere, if this is requested at a later date".
In addition, the choice of coffins and types of funeral services will be limited in an attempt to help manufacturers meet the demand, and chapel services will be "basic and shorter".
Coffins for cremations will have to be re-used if there is a shortage.
The report is being sent out to all organisations that will be involved in preparing for a pandemic, including faith groups.
Other proposals contained in the paper include suspending exhumation powers and coroner's juries and cancelling inquests into deaths from natural causes in prisons.

With such a massive death toll, during a pandemic wave expected to last some six to ten weeks, you would presume few deaths would be investigated. Authorities would be flat out getting the bodies into graves before they started spreading diseases and making town centres unliveable.

The Home Office's report and guidelines are similar to those already distributed to local governments and councils across Australia and the United States.

Some of the most important details of these very similar reports have come from examinations of how various cities in the United States dealt with the high death toll from the last avian influenza pandemic - that of 1918, when hundreds of thousands of Americans died. There is a consensus in many of the reports and guidelines of the need to find a balance between getting the bodies into the ground as soon as possible, but allowing family members time for shortened religious ceremonies as part of those burials.

2007-10-29T23:35:00.000+11:00

Mothers Can Pass H5N1 Onto Babies In Utero

More confirmation of H5N1's remarkable ability to infect and destroy major organs, outside of the lungs and respiratory tract.

Chinese experts at Peking University have announced results of a study showing that pregnant women infected with the bird flu virus can pass it on to their unborn babies :

In a study by scientists at Peking University tissue taken from the body of a 24-year-old pregnant woman who died from bird flu, found the virus was also present in the placenta and had infected the fetus.

Gu Jiang, director of the School of Basic Medical Sciences which is affiliated to Peking University...who led the study says the virus was also found in the alimentary canal, brain, blood cells and respiratory tract of both the mother and the fetus and the unborn child's lungs and liver were also affected.

Gu says blood and feces from people infected with the virus must be handled extremely carefully to avoid further spreading of the disease.

The World Health Organization (WHO) also says example of transfer does not prove that the virus can be transmitted from one human to another, as the mother and her unborn child are considered to function as one body.

2007-10-27T02:23:00.000+10:00

Indonesia : 4 Year Old Girl Dies From H5N1, Brother Shows Symptoms

Her parents thought she just had the flu, and gave her cold medications and treated her at home for a week before they tried to have her seen doctors at two medical clinics in Tangerang. Both medical clinics refused to admit the child. In total, she ran a fever for ten days. She was finally admitted to a hospital in East Jakarta where the four year old died on Monday.

From the Jakarta Post :

The child's parents were told that Sari Asih military hospital, about 500 meters away, had better facilities and to take her there.

"I took her to Kesdam Hospital but they said they couldn't treat her because there was no doctor on duty. They told us to take her to Sari Asih Hospital," said Zainal, a factory worker.

He said a doctor who examined his daughter at Sari Asih initially said she had dengue fever but later changed his mind, noting acute respiratory problems.

"The Sari Asih doctor sent my daughter to Persahabatan Hospital but she could no longer hang on."

Hani Hariyanto said that people from the village had recently acknowledged that sudden poultry deaths had occurred in the past, long before the girl fell ill, however. He said officials had been sent to carry out health education in the village. "Too bad, the villagers did not inform us earlier."

(Her) brother has flu symptoms and has been given Tamiflu..

The Tangerang regency has recorded six human bird flu deaths since January.

2007-10-27T02:12:00.000+10:00

"Dangerous" Human Transmissible Bird Flu Found In North Vietnam

Hundreds of ducks have been found dead in Central Vietnam, as confirmation arrives of a mutated form of the bird flu virus in the north of the country.

From Than Nien Daily :

The virus is transmissible from birds to humans.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Cao Duc Phat asked relevant agencies to strictly control the trading and transportation of poultry and poultry products across borders and in local markets to prevent the spread of this dangerous strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus.

2007-10-24T03:14:00.000+10:00

World Health Organisation Confirms Bird Flu Virus Now Spreading From Human To Human

Is this how the pandemic begins? With a small story that barely grabs headlines finally confirming that the H5N1 virus has 'learned' how to spread from one human to another?

We have mentioned before that the WHO was moving towards confirmation that "clusters" of bird flu victims in Indonesia could prove human to human transmission was taking place, but this is the first story we've seen that claims it as a fact :

THE H5N1 strain of bird flu has finally managed to spread from person to person, according to officials of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Until now, it was spread from birds to humans. They warned that if the bird flu virus mutated to easily spread between humans, it could spark a global pandemic, killing millions.

According to a new study of deaths in Indonesia last year, bird flu could have spread between humans on several occasions. Person to person infection was suspected but could not be confirmed.
In the village of Sumatran, seven family members contracted the H5N1 strain of bird flu, one of the biggest clusters in the world. They died before being tested.
In Thailand, when a mother was hospitalised with avian influenza, her daughter, who lived away from bird-rearing contracted the virus when she came to visit her in hospital.
The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, US also examined a second family cluster outbreak in Turkey last year, but did not have the evidence to confirm or refute human-to-human transmission.
The researchers have for the first time proved that the virus has spread between a "cluster" of people.
Indonesia, with 84 bird flu deaths, the highest toll in the world, has tried to downplay fears of the spread.
The head of research at the Indonesian health ministry, Triono Soendono, said the findings were "just one" piece of research.
But the WHO assistant director for communicable diseases, David Heymann, said it was likely the Sumatran virus was spread by human-to-human contact.
"We believe there has likely been transmission through intimate or close contact," he said.
Dr. Sam Okware, the commissioner, community health, who is also the chairman of the National Task Force on the disease, said it was sad news.
"But we are also improving capacity and training for surveillance to handle it every day. The laboratory at the Virus Research Institute is ready," he affirmed.

Got your food and water stockpiles ready? You know, just in case.

2007-10-24T02:57:00.000+10:00

Bird Flu Pandemic : Are We Hatching Our Own Destruction?

A story from JAMA about the excellent book by Michael Greger, Bird Flu: A Virus Of Our Own Hatching, focuses on one of its more disturbing conclusions about the rapid spread of H5N1 and how our industrialized poultry farming practices are complicit in the repeated outbreaks :

Greger, Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture atthe Humane Society of the United States, discusses how humanmistreatment of animals has actually backfired, with factoryfarming making livestock more susceptible to disease. He explainshow modern livestock production facilitates the transmissionand evolution of avian influenza and argues convincingly thatthe right environment for a virus such as H5N1 to thrive nowexists.
The message is that pandemics are not born but rather are man-made—andthat there is a price to pay for the modern poultry industry,in which fowl are raised in closed, stressful, unhealthy facilities,facilitating mutation and dissemination of the bird flu virus.Greger writes that "[It] may take a pandemic with a virus likeH5N1 before the world realizes the true cost of cheap chicken."
There remains room for hope. As Greger states in the Introduction,"[if] changes in human behaviour can cause new plagues, changesin human behaviour may prevent them in the future." A radicalchange from factory farming to less intensive methods includingfree-range farming is needed, especially in the poultry industry,in which "humanity must shift toward raising poultry in smallerflocks, under less stressful, less crowded and more hygienicconditions, with outdoor access."

The JAMA story also highlights a few startling facts and estimates from US Centres For Disease Control And Prevention data :

...in a normal flu season some 200 000 individuals inthe United States are hospitalized and 38 000 die of influenza,mostly elderly persons, with annual direct medical costs andlost productivity calculated at $12 billion.

However, thesefigures pale before the catastrophe implied by a severe influenzapandemic. The CDC predicts that a medium-level epidemic wouldaffect a third of the US population, hospitalize 734 000,and kill almost 210 000.

With failure to produce an effectivevaccine and with a virus untouched by anti-influenza drugs,an epidemic of the H5N1 avian influenza via person-to-persontransmission could wreak havoc. With a probable 80 million diseaseepisodes, a 20% mortality rate would result in 16 million deaths.The human tragedy and economic upheaval would be unprecedented.

Read The Full Story Here

2007-10-22T23:12:00.000+10:00

The Final Mutation H5N1 Needs To Become Pandemic Ready

Researcher : The Public "Cannot Do Very Much" To Stop The Pandemic

Some more detail from the research released in early October that claimed to have identified the "key mutation" the H5N1 virus needs to undergo so that it could then "more easily infect and spread among humans".

The key to H5N1 turning into a pandemic ready virus is when it is able to infuse itself into cells in the upper respiratory tract, rather than in just the lungs. The closer the virus can form to the mouth, the more likely it is that it can be passed through close contact amongst people, or become airborne on droplets.

From CIDRAP :

The mutation consists of a single amino acid change...
The change promotes better viral replication at the lower temperatures found in the upper airways of mammals, the press release said. Once the H5N1 virus is established in the upper respiratory tract, infected patients can more easily spread the disease to others through coughing and sneezing, making the infection more contagious.

The authors write that the hemagglutinin protein's specificity for avian- or human-type receptors on airway cells is thought to be a major factor governing the efficient transmission of H5N1 viruses. Yet the disease still doesn't spread easily among humans, though scientists have isolated from humans some H5N1 viruses that had specificity for human receptors.

Kawaoka said in the UW-Madison press release that the H5N1 viruses circulating now are more "mammalian-like" than the ones that circulated in 1997, when the first human infections were identified.

"The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus," he said.

However, the researchers say in their report that additional genetic changes are probably needed to equip the H5N1 virus with full pandemic potential. "Indeed, multiple amino acid changes have been identified in the so-called Spanish influenza virus, which is thought to be derived from an avian antecedent," they write.

Kawaoka and his team believe it's only a matter of time before the H5N1 virus evolves into a strain that's capable of launching a pandemic, the UW-Madison release says.

"I don't like to scare the public, because they cannot do very much," Kawaoka was quoted as saying in a Reuters news report today. "But at the same time it is important to the scientific community to understand what is happening."
"The billion-dollar question is how many more changes are required and will H5N1 ever achieve this," he said. "We must plan as if it will."

2007-10-18T10:40:00.000+10:00

Tamiflu Sales Plunge 60% - Drug Company Misses Profit Projections

Governments, Corporations Stockpiles Full

Roche Holding, as the parent company of Roche Pharmaceuticals, flooded the world with billions of dollars worth of Tamiflu in 2005 and 2006.

So widespread and influential was its marketing campaign for the anti-viral Tamiflu, off the back of very real concerns of a bird flu pandemic, that "government and corporation stockpiling plans (have) largely been completed." Roche now says "no significant new orders had been received."

Sales for Tamiflu fell some 60% for the third quarter.

Sounds like Roche will now have to announce a new kind of anti-viral, or alleged preventative, for dealing with the H5N1 virus in humans.

Another incredible fact gleamed from this story - in just nine months, Roche sold almost $30 billion worth of pharmaceutical products.

2007-10-16T13:37:00.000+10:00

The Emergency Stockpile And 'Ready To Go' Kits

The Californian Department of Health Services has a 'bird flu battle plan', which you can view here. Of interest, are the preparedness steps the department is urging the public to take to deal with the outbreak of a bird flu pandemic.

We'll get to the home stockpiling in a moment, but a story on the report estimates some 35% of the US population could fall ill during a pandemic. That's more than 100 million Americans. Based on fatality rates for the infected in Indonesia, that rate of infection would result in more than 70 million dead. Even at a 50% fatality rate, some 50 million Americans would die.

If the Bush administration, and various state legislatures, really believe the pandemic is a coming reality, and it's clear that they do, it is no surprise then to see a huge state like California busily promoting the 'avoidance' measures of dealing with a pandemic. That is, stockpile food and supplies and stay in your home as much as possible until the pandemic passes.

The California Department of Health Services also pushes the prevention-as-cure angle, including :

Frequent, vigorous hand washing, an annual flu vaccine, covering your nose and mouth with coughing and sneezing and avoiding going into the public when you are sick are measures any responsible person should already take to ward off colds and the flu.

More here :

...official orders to stay at home could become a reality, even if you aren't infected. That will mean an emergency preparedness cache of supplies will be crucial.
"Social distancing measures such as wearing masks, staying home if sick, and canceling school and public events," could be necessary, says the CDHS report.
Given the unknown duration of a pandemic, you may need more than the typical three days of food and water and other supplies recommended in a basic emergency preparedness kit, as well as a host of other items.

The American Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are now publishing and promoting the stockpiling of 'ready-to-go' kits.

Choose a large camping backpack, duffel back, or even a garbage bin on wheels. Put it somewhere you can easily access it, when you have to get moving fast.

The basics of what to put inside your 'ready-to-go' stockpile kit :

One gallon of water per person per day.
A three-day supply of nonperishable, compact, lightweight foods that require no refrigeration, preparation or cooking and little or no water. Pack a can of sterno for foods you must heat. Pack high energy foods, vitamins, food for infants and some comfort and stress foods.
A first aid kit for your home and one for each car. The kit should at least include: sterile dressing, gauze, germicidal hand wipes or waterless alcohol-based hand sanitizer, medical grade non-latex gloves, adhesive tape, 2" width, anti-bacterial ointment, cold pack, scissors, tweezers, CPR breathing barrier, such as a face shield, non-prescription pain relievers, anti-diarrhea medication, antacid, Syrup of Ipecac, a laxative, activated charcoal.
Mess kits, or paper cups, plates, and plastic utensils, an emergency preparedness manual, extra batteries for battery-operated devices including a radio, flashlight and other items, cash, travelers checks, change, utility knife with can opener, fire extinguisher, tube tent, hardware tools, water proofed matches, area map, signal flare, paper, pencils, whistle, and other items recommended by FEMA and the Red Cross.
For sanitation you'll also need toilet paper, towelettes, Soap, liquid detergent, feminine supplies, plastic garbage bags and ties, a plastic bucket with tight lid, disinfectant, household bleach.
Don't forget special items. A change of clothes, sturdy shoes or work boots, rain gear, sleeping gear, hats, gloves, etc.
Personal items include baby items, prescription drugs, contact lenses or extra eye glasses, as well as games, books, small portable electronics, important family documents, records, numbers and identification, a household inventory and other items.

Clearly, the stockpile would serve equally well if you were forced to stay in your home for an extended period of time, though clearly you would need to add more water and food.

2007-10-13T17:16:00.000+10:00

Indonesia : 12 Year Old Boy Dies From H5N1

88th Official Victim Of Bird Flu In Indonesia

The death rate in Indonesia seems to climbing again :

A 12-year-old Indonesian boy died of bird flu on Saturday, raising the toll in the nation worst affected by avian flu to 88, the health ministry said.

The boy, who tested positive for the H5N1 virus, died in a hospital here at 7:30 am (0030 GMT), said Nirwan, a staffer on duty at the Health Ministry's bird flu information centre.

"Medical doctors at the hospital were meeting to discuss his case, since he showed great improvement in his health condition, with his white-blood cell count rising, but the boy suddenly died at 7:30 this morning," said Nirwan.

Results of two tests on blood and saliva samples taken from the boy on Thursday showed he was infected by the deadly H5N1 strain, making him the country's 109th confirmed human bird flu infection case, of which 88 have died.

The boy, only identified by his initials IR, first showed symptoms of bird flu on September 30 but was only admitted to hospital in Tangerang, just west of here, on October 8.

"The boy had a history of contact with a dead infected chicken near his school," Nirwan said.

2007-10-12T12:11:00.000+10:00

Banks, Financial Media Urge Public To Prepare For Pandemic Now

More than 2700 financial institutions, including banks and insurance agencies, are now deep into a three week long simulation exercise to see how well they cope in the event of a pandemic flu outbreak. The key idea being that even if there are hundreds of thousands of Americans dying from bird flu, banks and other financial institutions will have to be able to keep their businesses running.

Off the back of this exercise, influential finance website The Street has published an interesting and informative piece about how the average American can prepare for what most virologists now believe is inevitable. The advice proffered applies to people all over the world, not just in the United States :

You should spend some time considering all the things that you're going to need if a pandemic breaks out. You should stock up on things that you can buy now that will likely become more scarce if a pandemic begins -- such as surgical masks to help keep you from breathing in germs -- while there is a large supply.

You'll also want to make a list of things that you will want to stock up on right away when it appears an outbreak is taking place.

For example, ATMs may quickly run out of cash and with many workers calling in sick, may not be replenished.

Gas will also likely be hard to come by, as the people needed to refine and transport it to gas stations won't be available.

Also consider that you will need to change your habits during this time. You will not want to be in crowded places, meaning that you will want to keep shopping to a minimum.

You will need to make sure to thoroughly wash your hands several times a day -- which is a good habit to get into anyway.

If you have children, you need to come up with a plan on what to do with them. In the event of a pandemic, schools and day care centers are likely to shut down. Alternative day care will likely be difficult to find, meaning that unless you have created alternative plans ahead of time, you will likely find yourself staying home with them. You may want to set up a plan with a couple of friends, where you take turns taking care of the kids. By thinking through and creating a plan ahead of time, you will have a solution to this issue while others are scrambling.

If you have kids that get sick or you get sick yourself, it is likely that you will not be able to go into work for several weeks. You need to make sure that you have enough in your emergency fund if you are forced to stay home during this time.

More Essential Advice From The Street Can Be Read Here

2007-10-10T00:29:00.000+10:00

H5N1 Mutates To Become Easier To Spread Human-To-Human

Some more on the new research that claims to have identified a mutation of the H5N1 avian flu virus, which allows it to grow and survive in the upper respiratory tracts of humans. Basically, this is bad news if the virus mutates further and reaches pandemic strength.

The new mutation discovery appears to suggest that the virus could be passed on the breath from human to human, and through saliva droplets from sneezes and coughs.

The Japanese and Vietnamese scientists who identified the new mutation said the potential for the H5N1 virus to effectively gain the ability to transmit human-to-human "is now evident."

The scientists fear the virus is only one mutation away from being able to cause a pandemic :

The group of nine scientific researchers, led by professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Tokyo, also found that the virus can spread by coughing and sneezing, signaling a potential for human-to-human transmission.

"We believe another mutation may be necessary (for the virus) to cause a pandemic," Kawaoka said. "As more humans are infected, the greater the chance that the mutation will evolve."

The researchers compared two H5N1-type viruses extracted from the throat and lung of a patient in Vietnam in 2004. They infected a mouse with the virus, and found it tended to grow in the upper respiratory tract, including the throat and nose, where flu viruses usually enter.

Researchers also found that the temperature in these parts is about 33, lower than the average temperature of mammals, which is 37. This indicates that this particular mutation allows H5N1 to live in the human upper respiratory tracts that have cooler temperatures. Normally, bird flu does not grow well in the throat or nasal passages of humans.

Last year, Kawaoka and other scientists found another mutation, which allows the virus to infect people more easily, raising the expectation that these findings could help scientists to predict the emergence of new strains.

The world is not even close to being ready to deal with what may result from further mutations.

2007-10-08T17:11:00.000+10:00

'Fast Track Funerals' To Become Norm In UK During Bird Flu Pandemic

Scots To Use Air-Conditioned Mobile 'Inflatable Tents' Instead Of 'Plague Pits' To Store The Dead

Scottish government officials seem to know almost exactly how many people will die in the coming bird flu pandemic. They've settled on a figure : 64,000 dead humans.

The government is also buying up "hundreds of inflatable body storage tents". These are likened to inflatable jumping castles, and will be air-conditioned to slow decomposition. Each 'tent' can store around 50 bodies, and will be 'mobile', meaning that these 'tents' can be dispatched to towns and cities and quickly inflated and made ready to take the dead off the streets and out of homes.

Preparations are also underway to shorten the average funeral service, so as to stop a massive logjam of funerals from building up, and worsening the trauma of friends and relatives of the dead.

In assessing the availability of funeral and mortuary services, Scottish officials found a "shortage of body storage space". The maximum available capacity to deal with the dead today in Scotland allows for only 2513 additional corpses, a shortfall of more than 63,000 'spaces'.

These kinds of stories of localized pandemic preparations, particularly stories about dealing with all the dead, are now regularly appearing in Sunday newspapers across the UK, the EU, Australia, Canada and the United States.

From Scotland On Sunday :

E-mail exchanges and letters reveal officials and police are impressed with a mobile "body storage system" made by Airegroup, for use in disasters. It has been used by the US military and uses a generator to keep bodies at a cool temperature so that they do not decompose.

Police and local authorities across Scotland have now been told to consider purchasing the equipment or consider taking part in trials of new prototypes so that they could purchase the equipment at a cheaper rate. The units cost around £10,000 and can store up to 50 bodies.
Another Scottish Government document states that relatives may have to hold shorter funerals because of the "rapid disposal of the dead".

Fast track funerals will become the norm.

2007-10-07T02:28:00.000+10:00

Indonesia : Woman Dies Of Bird Flu

The steady tick over of human bird flu victims in Indonesia continues :

A woman thought to be suffering from bird flu died at the Arifin Achmad Regional General Hospital on Friday, an official said.

"The patient was treated in an isolation ward for bird flu patients at Arifin Achmad Regional General Hospital," Burhanudin Agung of the Riau provincial health office said.

Riau has recorded four bird flu cases since 2005, with three casualties.

The official toll of human bird flu deaths in Indonesia is now 87, though the unofficial toll is suspected to be much higher.

2007-10-07T01:53:00.000+10:00

“We’re gonna tear up all these streets one day,” Johnny said, out of the blue. “We’re gonna give the city back to the earth.”

He explained how we could reintroduce mangroves around the edges of the harbour, to draw in fish and bird life, and how four block wide corridors could one day be bulldozed right through the city, “to give the competition some room to breathe.”

Go Here For More

2007-10-05T15:10:00.000+10:00

Bird Flu 'One Mutation Away' From Becoming Ultra-Infectious To Humans

American researchers claim that the H5N1 is mutating into a far more dangerous, far more deadly virus. A crucial step in recombination remains before the bird flu virus can spread more easily amongst human populations.

From HealthDayNews :

...researchers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka have pinpointed a single change in a viral protein that helps H5N1 infect the cells of the upper respiratory system in mammals. The adaptation could enable the virus to infect a wider range of cell types and spread more easily among humans, the scientists said.
Being able to establish itself in the upper respiratory system enables easy transmission of the virus through coughing and sneezing, Kawaoka noted. However, other yet-to-be identified changes would have to occur before the H5N1 virus could potentially trigger a flu pandemic.
"The viruses that are in circulation now are much more mammalian-like than the ones circulating in 1997," Kawoka said in a prepared statement. "The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus."

2007-10-04T02:35:00.000+10:00

H5N1 Has Spread To 60 Countries, Territories In Four Years

30 Countries Reported Infections In Past Year

Since highly pathogenic H5N1 appeared in Asia in 2003, the spread of the avian influenza virus has been far-reaching, and devastating to the poultry industry :

* Since the virus re-emerged in Asia in 2003, outbreaks have been confirmed in around 60 countries and territories, according to data from the World Organisation for Animal Health.

* More than 30 countries have reported outbreaks in the past year, in most cases involving wild birds such as swans.

* The virus has killed at least 201 people since 2003, according to the WHO. Countries with confirmed human deaths are: Azerbaijan, Cambodia, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Laos, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam.

* In total, the virus is known to have infected 329 people since 2003, according to the WHO. Many of the dead are children and young adults.

* The WHO says that Vietnam and Indonesia have the highest number of cases, accounting for 132 of the total deaths.

2007-10-03T11:59:00.000+10:00

Widespread Use Of Tamiflu May Help H5N1 Become More Deadly, Infectious

The short version : Tamiflu passes through humans and into sewerage and water systems. Scientists are now concerned that Tamiflu could then leach back into areas where migrating birds sometimes gather and give the H5N1 virus more opportunity to meet its 'front line attacker' and learn how to beat it.

From news.com.au :

Tamiflu - the frontline weapon in any bird-flu pandemic - cannot be broken down by sewage systems and could help the virus mutate dangerously into a drug-resistant strain, Swedish scientists say.

Scientists led by Jerker Fick, a chemist at Umea University, tested the survivability of the Tamiflu molecule in water drawn from three phases in a typical sewage system.
The first was raw sewage water; the second was water that had been filtered and treated with chemicals; the third was water from "activated sludge," in which microbes are used to digest waste material.

Tamiflu's active ingredient survived all three processes, which means that it is released in the waste water leaving the plant.

The finding is important because of the risk that Tamiflu, if overprescribed, could end up in the wild in concentrations high enough to let H5N1 adapt to this key drug, the authors say.

Flu viruses are common among waterfowl, especially dabbling ducks such as mallards which often forage for food near sewage outlets.

"The biggest threat is that resistance will become common among low pathogenic influenza viruses carried by wild ducks," said co-author Bjoern Olsen, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Uppsala and University of Kalmar.

These avian viruses could then recombinate with ordinary human flu viruses, creating new strains that are resistant to Tamiflu, he said.

The story also includes interesting use from Japan about the long-term effects of using Tamiflu to fight the yearly round of influenza outbreaks. During the 2004-2005 influenza 'season' in Japan some 16 million fell ill. Six million were treated with Tamiflu.

The Japanese are now showing some of the highest rates of an "emerging resistance" to Tamiflu anywhere in the world.

2007-10-02T19:02:00.000+10:00

Will Pandemic H5N1 Kill Humans In This Way?

1918 : The Horrifically Gruesome Death Of 'Spanish Flu' Victims

An horrifically gruesome, descriptive passage of what happens when a human dies from bird flu, from Michael Greger's extraordinary online book about H5N1, and the likelihood of a re-occurence of the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu pandemic :

What started for millions around the globe as muscle aches and a fever ended days later with many victims bleeding from their nostrils, ears, and eye sockets. Some bled inside their eyes; some bled around them. They vomited blood and coughed it up. Purple blood blisters appeared on their skin.

The Chief of the Medical Services, Major Walter V. Brem, described the horror at the time in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He wrote that “often blood was seen to gush from a patient’s nose and mouth.” In some cases, blood reportedly spurted with such force as to squirt several feet. “When pneumonia appeared,” Major Brem recounted, “the patients often spat quantities of almost pure blood.” They were bleeding into their lungs.

As victims struggled to clear their airways of the bloody froth that poured from their lungs, their bodies started to turn blue from the lack of oxygen, a condition known as violaceous heliotrope cyanosis. “They’re as blue as huckleberries and spitting blood,” one New York City physician told a colleague. U.S. Army medics noted that this was “not the dusky pallid blueness that one is accustomed to in failing pneumonia, but rather [a] deep blueness…an indigo blue color.” The hue was so dark that one physician confessed that “it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white.” “It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes,” recalled another physician, “and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate.” They drowned in their own bloody secretions.

“It wasn’t always that quick, either,” one historian adds. “And along the way, you had symptoms like fingers and genitals turning black, and people reporting being able to literally smell the body decaying before the patient died.” “When you’re ill like that you don’t care,” recalls one flu survivor, now 100 years old. “You don’t care if you live or die.”

Major Brem described an autopsy: “Frothy, bloody serum poured from the nose and mouth when the body was moved, or the head lowered…. Pus streamed from the trachea when the lungs were removed.” Fellow autopsy surgeons discussed what they called a “pathological nightmare,” with lungs up to six times their normal weight, looking “like melted red currant jelly.” An account published by the National Academies of Science describes the lungs taken from victims as “hideously transformed” from light, buoyant, air-filled structures to dense sacks of bloody fluid.

There was one autopsy finding physicians reported having never seen before. As people choked to death, violently coughing up as much as two pints of yellow-green pus per day, their lungs would sometimes burst internally, forcing air under pressure up underneath their skin. In the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, a British physician noted “one thing that I have never seen before—namely the occurrence of subcutaneous emphysema”—pockets of air accumulating just beneath the skin—“beginning in the neck and spreading sometimes over the whole body.”

These pockets of air leaking from ruptured lungs made patients crackle when they rolled onto their sides. In an unaired interview filmed for a PBS American Experience documentary on the 1918 pandemic, one Navy nurse compared the sound to a bowl of Rice Krispies. The memory of that sound—the sound of air bubbles moving under people’s skin—remained so vivid that for the rest of her life, she couldn’t be in a room with anyone eating that popping cereal.

There seems to be limited information, online at least, about whether the hundreds of people who have already died of bird flu suffered deaths in any way similar to those detailed above.

2007-10-02T18:27:00.000+10:00

Indonesia Clocks Up 86th Human Bird Flu Death

From AFP :

A 21-year-old man from the Indonesian capital Jakarta died from bird flu last week, the health ministry said Monday, bringing the toll in the world's worst-affected nation to 86.
"This confirmed case puts the number now at 107 infected, including 86 dead," Ningrum, a doctor from Indonesia's bird flu information centre, told AFP.
The victim, identified only by the initials "AR", died on Friday at a hospital in West Jakarta, said Ningrum.
He had tested positive for the H5N1 virus in two separate tests, the requirement to be reported as a confirmed case in Indonesia.
The man first suffered flu-like symptoms 10 days earlier but was only admitted to hospital three days before he died, Ningrum said.
It was not known whether he had come into contact with infected poultry, the usual method of transmission, she added.

Has the total fatality rate for H5N1 been reduced in recent months. I thought it was up to about 92. Have to check the records.

2007-09-29T13:33:00.000+10:00

Queensland Paramedics Demanded Respirators To Deal With Bird Flu Victims

Sounds like the paramedics of Queensland, Australia, are way ahead of their international colleagues, in many respects, in their demands for proper safety equipment to deal with eventual human victims of H5N1 :

An international conference has been told Queensland paramedics have respirators to protect them against bird flu.
Darren Hall headed a pandemic planning project for the Queensland Ambulance Service.

He says masks with a variety of filters were handed out after researchers studied paramedics' attitudes towards the threat of bird flu.

"They've conducted a study into the perceptions of paramedics and paramedics have said quite clearly they wanted effective personal protective equipment, they wanted good notification, they wanted communication and those sorts of things would enable them to come to work and do those sorts of things," he said.

2007-09-29T12:49:00.000+10:00

Unborn Babies Can Catch Bird Flu From Their Mothers

Disturbing news from a study published in The Lancet. Not only does H5N1 attack the lungs, brain and other key organs, it can also infect foetuses.

InsiderMedicine has some more on this, and provides 'important points to remember for medical staff who may find themselves dealing with bird flu patients :

• Influenza A H5N1 should be considered in patients who are febrile with an URTI and a know history of exposure to sick or dead poultry, wild birds, other ill people, travel to an endemic area, or in someone whose work entails handling samples.

• Isolating all hospitalized patients who are under evaluation for influenza A, following the same precautions as those used for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. This includes a room with negative air pressure, and contacts gowning, gloving and using eye shields.

• Viral replication is long, and has been noted to continue up to 15-17 days following onset of symptoms. The virus has been detected in respiratory secretions, saliva, blood and stools.

Researchers from Beijing University studied tissue from a man, a woman, and her fetus to determine how the virus affects different organs in the body. The two adults had died as a result of the bird flu virus.

The researchers were able to detect the H5N1 virus in the lungs, throat, lymph nodes, brain cells, and in the cells of the placenta. In the fetus, both viral genetic material and antigens were found in the lungs, and immune system and liver cells.

Go Here To Read The Full Insider Medicine Story

2007-09-29T02:42:00.000+10:00

H5N1 Attacks Lungs, Womb And Brain

A story from the VoA details some of the latest discoveries about why the H5N1 virus is proving so deadly to humans. While the story says H5N1 in humans has a fatality rate of 60%, in Indonesia, Egypt and Vietnam it has proven much higher, reaching 87%.

From VoA :

...little has been known about exactly what H5N1 does to the human body, according to Ian Lipkin, professor of neurology and pathology at the Columbia University in New York.

Lipkin is senior collaborator on a paper by international researchers who studied the bodies of two individuals who had died of the avian flu. He says the avian flu affects primarily the lungs, causing a surprising amount of damage.

But in addition to the lungs, Lipkin says, investigators found H5N1 had spread to the gastrointestinal tract, and the infection was also discovered in the brain and in the reproductive tract.
Lipkin says it appears the severe and widespread damage to the body inflicted by the virus H5N1 may be caused by the body's immune system going into overdrive - a phenomenon that some call a "cytokine storm."

Go Here For The Full Story

2007-09-28T13:43:00.000+10:00

What started for millions around the globe as muscle aches and a fever ended days later with many victims bleeding from their nostrils, ears, and eye sockets. Some bled inside their eyes; some bled around them. They vomited blood and coughed it up. Purple blood blisters appeared on their skin.

The Chief of the Medical Services, Major Walter V. Brem, described the horror at the time in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He wrote that “often blood was seen to gush from a patient’s nose and mouth.” In some cases, blood reportedly spurted with such force as to squirt several feet. “When pneumonia appeared,” Major Brem recounted, “the patients often spat quantities of almost pure blood.” They were bleeding into their lungs.

As victims struggled to clear their airways of the bloody froth that poured from their lungs, their bodies started to turn blue from the lack of oxygen, a condition known as violaceous heliotrope cyanosis. “They’re as blue as huckleberries and spitting blood,” one New York City physician told a colleague. U.S. Army medics noted that this was “not the dusky pallid blueness that one is accustomed to in failing pneumonia, but rather [a] deep blueness…an indigo blue color.” The hue was so dark that one physician confessed that “it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white.” “It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes,” recalled another physician, “and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate.” They drowned in their own bloody secretions.

“It wasn’t always that quick, either,” one historian adds. “And along the way, you had symptoms like fingers and genitals turning black, and people reporting being able to literally smell the body decaying before the patient died.” “When you’re ill like that you don’t care,” recalls one flu survivor, now 100 years old. “You don’t care if you live or die.”

Major Brem described an autopsy: “Frothy, bloody serum poured from the nose and mouth when the body was moved, or the head lowered…. Pus streamed from the trachea when the lungs were removed.” Fellow autopsy surgeons discussed what they called a “pathological nightmare,” with lungs up to six times their normal weight, looking “like melted red currant jelly.” An account published by the National Academies of Science describes the lungs taken from victims as “hideously transformed” from light, buoyant, air-filled structures to dense sacks of bloody fluid.

There was one autopsy finding physicians reported having never seen before. As people choked to death, violently coughing up as much as two pints of yellow-green pus per day, their lungs would sometimes burst internally, forcing air under pressure up underneath their skin. In the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, a British physician noted “one thing that I have never seen before—namely the occurrence of subcutaneous emphysema”—pockets of air accumulating just beneath the skin—“beginning in the neck and spreading sometimes over the whole body.”

These pockets of air leaking from ruptured lungs made patients crackle when they rolled onto their sides. In an unaired interview filmed for a PBS American Experience documentary on the 1918 pandemic, one Navy nurse compared the sound to a bowl of Rice Krispies. The memory of that sound—the sound of air bubbles moving under people’s skin—remained so vivid that for the rest of her life, she couldn’t be in a room with anyone eating that popping cereal.

There seems to be limited information, online at least, about whether the hundreds of people who have already died of bird flu suffered deaths in any way similar to those detailed above.

2007-09-26T01:21:00.000+10:00

Flashback : Hong Kong, 1998 & Professor Shortridge

We're going to be writing about microbiologist Professor Kennedy Shortridge in the next week, so we thought as way of an introduction, we'd go back to the Hong Kong outbreak of H5N1, where the reality of a coming human bird flu pandemic first grabbed world headlines and brought Professor Shortridge to international prominence for his fight against the spread of the virus.

From the British Medical Journal :

The outbreak of avian flu in Hong Kong continues to ring alarmbells and dominate headlines worldwide. The H5N1 influenza Avirus has been confirmed in 16 people and is suspected in anotherfour cases. Four people have died, and three remain in a criticalcondition.
Because these are the world's first reported human cases ofa flu strain previously known to infect only birds, fears havebeen raised that the virus might spark a flu pandemic. Thereare too many unanswered questions, however, for anyone to besure. For example, researchers have yet to determine the originalsource of the virus, the mode of transmission from birds tohumans, whether human to human transmission is possible, whatthe incidence is in Hong Kong, whether fowl or animals apartfrom chickens are affected, whether anyone in mainland Chinahas been infected with the disease, and the rate at which thevirus is mutating.
The outbreak began in early May, when a 3 year old boy diedfrom respiratory failure secondary to viral pneumonia. Whenscientists at Hong Kong's Department of Health could not identifythe strain they sent specimens to centres in Britain, the UnitedStates, and the Netherlands. By August all had identified thestrain as H5N1, a typically avian virus. The second case wasnot confirmed until November. According to Professor KennedyShortridge, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong,the H5N1 strain was first isolated by the Department of Agricultureand Fisheries in Hong Kong after an outbreak in 6800 chickenson three farms between late March and early May last year. "Theoverall mortality rate exceeded 70%, and on two farms the mortalityrate came close to 100%," he said.
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong are working withthe World Health Organisation to identify the reservoir of theH5N1 virus in poultry and animals by testing domestic and wildbirds, as well as dogs, cats, rats, and any other animals thathave close contact with humans, for the presence of the H5N1virus.
Professor Shortridge said that rigorous follow up is essential,and few animals can be ruled out at this stage: "The virus hascropped up under different circumstances, and so little is knownabout it. If the virus is shed through faeces, as has been suggested,then in theory there could be a lot of virus in the environment.Humans can be infected–perhaps other animals can be infectedas well. At the moment we don't know."
Until now it had been thought that new strains of human flu(variations of H1, H2, or H3) emerge after the virus's geneshave been reassorted in pig cells with genes from strains ofhuman or avian flu, or both. Pigs are considered a mixing vesselbecause they have avian, human, and swine flu receptors. Butthe H5N1 virus, a purely avian strain, has leapt directly frombird to humans.
According to Ms Reynolds, this is significant because it isa new disease in humans, who have no resistance to the virus."If it becomes efficient in transmitting from human to humanthen the entire world is vulnerable, and there is the potentialfor a pandemic." However, she added: "There is no way to predictwhether or not this will happen. The virus could go away, itcould mutate and become more potent, or it could mutate andbecome more benign."

Some excerpts from a remarkable speech Professor Shortridge gave in December 2004 (excerpts) :

It was in microbiology classes that the germ of an idea began to smoulder.

That germ had its genesis when, as a little boy, my mother told me how, in our country town, in the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19, a man on a horse-and-cart would call from the street for the bodies of those who had died from influenza. Her story was compelling, her concern was compelling.

During this pandemic, some 20 to 40 million died worldwide. The major concern was that a virus with the same potential for human devastation could arise again.

Comprehending death rates of 1/100 to 1/50 almost beggars belief. They need to be viewed against the nutritional deficits and social dislocation of the time.

Her story and such figures had a tremendous impact upon me. While in London in the late 1960s, fortuitous findings on animals, some originally from Hong Kong, led me to suspect a possible connection between animals and influenza pandemics. The seeds were sown – leading me to The University of Hong Kong in 1972 to explore this, with the ideal of getting ahead of the next pandemic.

This led me into the field of influenza ecology. At that time, and for many years, it was regarded by many as an academic curiosity – but it was an interesting exercise worth pursuing nevertheless.

As the years rolled by, there was increasing evidence of interspecies transmission of influenza viruses noted by Hong Kong and other groups. Circumstantial evidence for the role of avian influenza viruses in the origin of human influenza pandemics was increasing.

...the world has many problems in spite of the great advances in science and technology.

We should be moving into a higher order of human development but we are not.

This does not make any sense – it is almost as if human development, rather than going forward, is in some ways, going backwards. Loneliness abounds, we could treat our fellow human beings better, we could treat our wonderful animals better, we should treat this fragile planet better.

Somewhere in this equation, this unsatisfactory situation, the world is being subjected to the added pressures of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. In the past 50 years or so, infectious, zoonotic viral diseases have left their mark on the world, for example, HIV/AIDS, haemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola, West Nile, influenza H5N1 “bird flu”, SARS. Other avian influenza viruses are waiting in the wings.

The world is under serious threat from infectious diseases. It is as if Nature holds all the aces, but really we should be in partnership with Nature.

In the current influenza situation, the potential threat to the global community is great – to humans, to poultry and to bird life. While such a situation apparently did not exist prior to 1997, a global catastrophe extending beyond humans is within the realm of the possible. All the more so, since poultry is now the major meat protein worldwide.

I am increasingly convinced that if we are ever going to deal with zoonotic diseases at source, we will need to have a better relationship with animals – all animals – an intrinsically important step in itself toward improving human development. A sobering thought here is that pandemic influenza is now regarded as a non-eradicable zoonotic disease.

A higher aspiration in human development is that we might look forward to the time when ALL disease is eliminated. This will mean upping the stakes to take in all of Nature. As I have said in one of my publications "Only when we are at peace with Nature, will disease begin to melt away".

Sure, this is a pious hope – I believe bringing infectious diseases to heel is within the realm of the possible and we must start somewhere.

2007-09-24T15:29:00.001+10:00

Life After The Bird Flu Pandemic

ED Day is a serialized novel, published online, by author Darryl Mason that follows the lives of some 300 survivors of an apocalyptic bird flu pandemic in Sydney, Australia, which killed millions.

In a city awash with the bodies of the dead, the survivors raid supermarkets for food and water, fight feral dogs in the streets, struggle to keep alive some 12 babies who survived the pandemic and take the first steps in rebuilding their society.

Chapter Seven is now online, here's an excerpt :

We had a meeting of survivors at the Town Hall today. It was our 11th meeting and it feels like we're moving on now from people telling their life stories and wailing about how sad they are to have lost their entire families. People felt better for speaking publicly about their pain, but there's only so much of that stuff you can take. Everybody lost everybody they knew and loved.
Now we're getting down to the logistics of how we are going to survive in the city once all the canned and dried food and bottled water runs out. The gas canisters will run dry in a few months, and we still haven't seriously looked into why people who leave the city are getting shot, or shot at. Like I said, those who leave, never come back, not even with bullet wounds.
There was something about the meeting, the way people were speaking. I see it in a lot of the people I talk to. Like they're half-asleep, mildly stoned. Nobody gets really passionate about what they're thinking and saying. Sometimes it was like the people speaking today would rather have been curled up in bed, putting in another twelve hour stint under the sheets.

We all seem to be sleeping a lot. I probably sleep about ten hours a day, including naps. Bookman said some days he's out for 14 hours. You hear people chatting about their sleep, and most seem astonished at how long they spend in dreamland.

Maybe it's something in the air. Too much fresh oxygen? The skies have cleared over Sydney now all the pollution from the city traffic and the industry out west is gone. Smoke from the fires in the suburbs (they flare up two or three times a week) blows into the city sometimes, but most days the air is so clean it tastes almost sweet.
The Town Hall meeting closed with everyone agreeing to "work harder" and to "get started" on a bunch of projects, including the transformation of Hyde Park into a big vegetable garden.

Go Here To Read The Rest Of Chapter Seven

Go Here To Read ED Day From The Beginning

2007-09-18T12:32:00.000+10:00

Plans For NanoTech To Replace Antibodies To Fight Bird Flu

The nanobiotechnology industry is setting it sights on H5N1 as a future market for a new generation of vaccines.

The claims made in this press release are remarkable, and sound pretty well absurd. At least, they're absurd until they've been scientifically, conclusively proven, and that's a long way off.

In short, NanoViricides Inc, according to this press release, claim have come up with something better than human-produced antibodies. That is, they are claiming the antibodies that attack and destroy foreign invaders, like flu viruses, in the human body are close to being superseded by nanotechnology.

Remember, this is a press release, aiming to sell the idea of what they're working, and to prepare the public to accept the idea that what the human body produces to protect itself is not enough when it comes to bird flu, even if it's not true.

For the biotech and nanobiotech industries, the H5N1 virus is the biggest and most profitable potential new market to come along since the HIV virus.

The press release (excerpts) :

“Just like antibodies, nanoviricides™ have ligands that attach to the virus particle. However, unlike antibodies, nanoviricides complete the task of taking the virus apart. This is clearly visible in our electron microscopy (EM) studies,” said Anil R. Diwan, Ph.D., President of the Company.

“We feel that nanoviricides are the next great advance beyond immunotherapeutics, (use of antibodies and gamma-globulins as treatments for diseases),” explained Dr. Eugene Seymour, MD, MPH, adding, “We have already shown that nanoviricides are superior to FDA approved antibodies in a rabies animal model. This has validated our approach as being the next evolutionary therapeutics platform after antibodies.”

“Nanoviricides do not suffer from the major problems of antibodies and of vaccines as antiviral strategies,” said Dr. Diwan. Antibodies are relatively specific to a particular virus strain or subtype. It is well known that HIV and influenza viruses among many others, quickly escape antibodies. Vaccines depend upon the development of antibodies by the host, and thus, cannot protect efficiently against such changed viruses, as evidenced for influenzas.

FluCide™-I is a broad-spectrum nanoviricide drug candidate based on a well-known ligand to which influenza viruses of all types must bind and cannot escape. Many other viruses and virus families also bind to this ligand and FluCide-I is expected to work against such viruses as well.

FluCide-HP is a broad-spectrum nanoviricide drug candidate based on well known “signature regions” called “polybasic sites” on all HPAI influenzas including H5N1 and H7N3. If the virus mutates in this region to escape FluCide-HP, its pathogenicity will decrease and it will no longer be a dangerous epidemic threat. FluCide-HP has also shown very high efficacy against the unrelated rabies virus, which possesses similar signature regions.

“Our next step will be to perform animal studies against H5N1 to further validate our results,” said Dr. Seymour, adding, “There have been delays in the commissioning of the BSL3+ animal facility in Vietnam. We are currently exploring other options that would permit the studies to be done in the US with the latest available H5N1 strain.”

You will probably see a targeted marketing push in the next few months focused around the idea that nanobiotech, or nanoviricides in particular, can do things that our evolved-through-
millions-of-years antibodies can't.

For now, I remain vastly skeptical.

2007-09-18T01:06:00.000+10:00

10,000 Ducks Die In H5N1 Outbreak In China

The bird flu virus has returned to China, if it was ever eradicated to begin with.

More than 10,000 ducks are reported to have died from the virus on five farms, in the south of the country, since September 5 :

...tests on tissue samples at a provincial government lab show the presence of the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus.
As of September 14, almost 33,000 ducks had been slaughtered in an attempt to contain the outbreak.

China has reported 25 human cases of bird flu since 2003, 16 of them fatal.

2007-09-15T00:34:00.000+10:00

Malaysia : We're Bird Flu Free

Three months ago, Malaysia was hit by an outbreak of H5N1 that resulted in the slaughter of thousands of ducks and chickens. Today, Malaysia's agriculture minister has announced that they've eliminated the virus from poultry farms :

Agriculture Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said surveillance and laboratory tests since June have fulfilled conditions set by the World Organization for Animal Health, or OIE, to declare the country free of the virulent H5N1 bird flu virus.

"The prompt action by the Veterinary Services Department to stamp out the bird flu outbreak according to the protocol had been effective," the national news agency Bernama quoted Muhyiddin as saying. "We had conveyed the matter to the OIE, which gave the green light for Malaysia to be declared free from the disease."

Muhyiddin's aide, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make public statements, confirmed the comments.

Malaysia on June 5 confirmed its first bird flu outbreak in more than a year after tests on some 60 birds that died in Sungai Buloh, near the country's commercial capital, Kuala Lumpur, showed they had the H5N1 virus.

Several villagers with flu-like symptoms were hospitalized, but they tested negative for bird flu.

Before the last incident, Malaysia had reported an outbreak of the H5N1 strain in March 2006 in chickens in a northern village. The government had previously declared the country free of bird flu in June 2006.

2007-09-14T23:14:00.001+10:00

Bird Flu Pandemic? Fear Pandemic More Like...

Michael Fumento, of the American Spectator, takes a myth-busting look at the likelihood of the H5N1 virus poultry epidemics turning into the kind of pandemic that we've been repeatedly warned could kill between 20 million up to 1 billion humans across the planet :

New scientific discoveries keep eating away at the prophecy that "bird flu," avian influenza type H5N1, will become readily transmissible from human to human and unleash a disastrous pandemic.

Fumento starts off by citing the apocalyptic pandemic warnings that we've discussed on the site over the past two years :

* "Flu Pandemic Could Kill 150 Million, U.N. Warns." (Actually, a single UN official offered a range of "5 million to 150 million," but the media aren't too keen on ranges.)

* Laurie Garrett, former Newsday reporter, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Paul Ehrlich of pandemics...speaks of H5N1 as a "tidal wave over humanity."

* University of Minnesota School of Public Health professor Michael Osterholm estimated 180-360 million deaths worldwide simply by extrapolating the estimated death toll from the Spanish flu of 1918-19 to today's world population.

* But the winner is Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, who claimed on ABC News's Primetime, "We could have a billion people dying worldwide."

Those were the kinds of mega-death predictions and fear campaigning that led to governments across the world committing tens of billions of dollars to stock-piling relatively unproven 'antidotes' to bird flu infection, like Tamiflu.

While Fumento claims that "lefty" blogs amplified those dire predictions, and increased The Fear, he fails to mention that it was the massive corporate media entities like CNN, the New York Times and Fox News that really pumped up The Fear.

Fumento also fails to mention that few have personally profited more from global Tamiflu sales than former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who pocketed more than $5 million in cash from selling the stock he had snapped up in an American research company a few years before 'Bird Flu Pandemic Will Kill Millions And Millions' headlines started filling newspapers in 2004 and 2005. President Bush was also a key player in promoting the 'reality' of a coming bird flu pandemic in the last quarter of 2005.

Anyway, back to Fumento's comprehensive, clarifying story :

...Evidence continually mounts that while there may well be another flu pandemic of some sort, there's virtually no chance it will be H5N1. Recently reported research from David Finkelstein and his colleagues at St. Jude Hartwell Center in Memphis, Tennessee, is just the latest nail in the chicken coop.

The researchers analyzed almost 10,000 avian H5N1 sequences and almost 14,000 human sequences, including those of seven dead Indonesians who apparently caught the virus from another human. They looked for specific amino acids either more likely to appear in human flu virus proteins or in avian virus proteins. Reporting their results in the journal Virology, they found no sequence that even approached the mutations in the flu viruses that caused the three pandemics of the 20th century, including Spanish Flu.

In all, they identified 32 clear-cut changes in influenza viruses that differentiated a human H5N1 strain from that in birds, yet none of the viral samples from humans had more than two of those changes. "We think they need to get to 13 [mutations] to be truly dangerous," Finkelstein told Reuters. He characterized his finding as "reassuring."

Fumento then reminds readers of "one of the least known facts about H5N1, even though it's documented by the World Health Organization (WHO)" :

The viral strain's discovery in poultry dates back not to 1997, as we're constantly told, but rather to 1959, when it was identified in Scottish chickens.

....humans have been exposed to this thing for half a century with no evidence it's become the least bit more contagious to them. Small increases in the counted numbers of human cases over the last four years are probably nothing more than an artifact of better reporting. Better disease reporting, by the way, is generally regarded as good news.

One of the reasons why we started this blog two years ago was to report on the science and research that disputes the claims of a "not if but when" global bird flu pandemic. It took the Fumento piece to remind us just how few of those stories and reports there has actually been in the media over the past 24 months (outside of subscription only medical publications).

It is a strange depiction of the mainstream media then to highlight the fact that news stories reporting that a bird flu pandemic may be wholly unlikely are actually quite hard to find, online at least.

Whereas, reports from any scientist who wants to ramp up the projected death toll from a bird flu pandemic (any takers for more than one billion?) gets onto the wire services and into hundreds of newspapers around the world within hours.

Maybe the old newspaper catch-cry of "If It Bleeds, It Leads" should now be "If It Sneezes, It Leads".

2007-09-05T02:40:00.000+10:00

Russia : H5N1 Found At Poultry Farm, 22,000 Birds To Be Culled

The bird flu virus has returned to Russia :

About 500 chickens in the south Russia’s Krasnodar Territory have died of bird flu, a local official said Tuesday.

The outbreak was detected at a poultry farm in the town of Razdolny Sunday. A spokesman for the territorial veterinary service said a regional laboratory has identified the lethal H5N1 virus in the dead birds, and that measures are being taken to contain the spread.
“The decision has been made to destroy 22,000 birds at a farm where chickens died over the weekend,” he said. He did not say how many birds were on the farm in total. Tests are ongoing, and may take up to seven days to produce conclusive results. A local prosecutor said criminal charges might be pressed against the farm’s managers.
The Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations warned last month of a danger of bird flu outbreaks in the Chelyabinsk Region, in the south Urals.

2007-09-05T02:07:00.001+10:00

Indonesia Rejects US Study That Claimed Human To Human Spread Of Bird Flu

Indonesia has labelled "misleading" a US study that claims the H5N1 virus spread amongst members of the same North Sumatran family, killing seven, in April 2006 :

Indonesia's Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari said the research findings had "misled the public".

"It's pure logic... If there had been human-to-human transmission, it would have already swept the country and killed thousands," Supari told a news conference.

"Our scientists have already determined that the 2006 outbreak on North Sumatra was not a case of human-to-human transmission."
Bird flu is endemic in bird populations in most parts of Indonesia, where millions of backyard chickens live in close proximity to people.

While it is largely an animal disease, experts fear the virus could mutate and spread from human to human, turning into pandemic that could kill millions.

Contact with sick fowl is the most common way for humans to contract the disease.
Supari said tests done in WHO laboratories in Atlanta on virus samples from Bali showed the virus had jumped from animal to humans.

"There is nothing to worry about, so far Atlanta has not issued any alarm," she said after the news conference.

The US study's claims should be questioned, examined and debated, but I'm not too sure if Supari's "pure logic" argument is altogether correct.

While contact with infected poultry would appear to be the most likely way for a human to become infected by H5N1, there have been other instances where bird to human, and then human to human spread is the most likely scenario for how others have become infected.

In the case of the North Sumatra outbreak, in April, 2006, some 80% of family members who showed symptoms of infection are believed to have died from the virus, and only one member of the family traveled outside of the fairly isolated village where the deaths occurred.

Also, Indonesian and WHO medical specialists were on the ground within days of the scale of the outbreak becoming known, and most of the villagers were put onto anti-virals, and quarantined.

The North Sumatran H5N1 deaths may well have been the result of human to human spread of the virus, but as the local population was small, isolated and fairly quickly locked down, there would appear to be little opportunity for the virus to continue to spread and infect, and kill.

Clearly, Supari would be right if the bird flu virus had mutated into a far more easily communicable and deadlier strain. But from the WHO statements I recall reading at the time, they reported no significant mutation in the virus samples they collected from the dead and samples from those who became infected but survived.

See This Story For More On The Controversial US Study That Claimed Human To Human Transmission In Indonesia

2007-09-03T00:38:00.000+10:00

Online Novel : What Happens When A Bird Flu Pandemic Hits Sydney

So what happens to a city when an extremely deadly bird flu pandemic hits Sydney, Australia?

This is a subject I'm now exploring in an online serialized novel called 'ED Day'.

The story is told in the form of a near daily journal by one of a few hundred survivorsl, and details how these survivors find themselves 'trapped' in the centre of Sydney, after the pandemic wipes out millions of people.

It's a massive exaggeration of even the very worst case scenarios for death tolls from a bird flu pandemic, but it's fiction, and to tell the story I want to tell I needed to wipe out most of Sydney's human population. Unfortunately.

I started writing this novel in late 2006 and posted a few chapters onto a forum at MySpace, inviting readers to criticize and discuss what they were reading. The reaction was mostly positive, but as a writer I found the experience unique and remarkable.

Work got in the way of doing more with the novel, but I've decided to impose a running deadline on getting the novel written by publishing three or four chapters a week, basically as they're written, first draft, no rewrites. There's no full outline of the novel, and I have at best a vague idea of where I want this story to go. But it's already taking on a life of its own.

On Tuesday, the novel will go into the history of how the bird flu virus began to spread human to human, how it reached Sydney, and what happened during the three 'waves' of the pandemic.

I hope all my regular readers here will come and have a look at the novel and follow it as its published online.

I would also hope that you feel free to comment on what you read, and don't hold back pointing out factual errors about H5N1 or discussing the way the pandemic unfolds in the novel.

Obviously, as the novel is fiction, not everything will be based on known scientific fact, but I'm planning to explore how World Health Organisation and UN guidelines for dealing with a pandemic outbreak play out for the people of Sydney.

Okay, that's my pitch.

The main site is here :

ED Day

But you can go here to read the first chapter :

Chapter One : The Silence In The City

Regular postings of news to the Bird Flu Blog will continue at their usual rate of frequent to infrequent.

2007-09-02T03:08:00.000+10:00

Bird Flu Pandemic : How Close Did We Come?

Another story covering the US research that claims human to human transmission of the bird flu virus did occur in Indonesia in 2006, when eight members of the same family caught the virus, killing seven.

From ABC News Australia :

It is the nightmare possibility that health authorities have been fearing ever since the disease first appeared.

It happened in Indonesia last year and reveals the world only narrowly avoided a global bird flu pandemic.

Researchers from the University of Washington have studied the case of a woman on the Indonesian island of Sumatra who caught the H5N1 bird flu virus from poultry in May last year.

Professor Ira Longini, who led the research, says they have confirmed that not only did she pass the virus on to her 10-year-old nephew, it was then transmitted to other relatives.

Seven of eight family members who caught the disease were soon dead.

"This proves there is person-to-person transmission in this case, in that setting, in Indonesia, northern Sumatra," he said.

Professor Longini says this shows there is a serious threat of a bird flu pandemic.

"It could happen and will happen eventually, and this simply confirms this particular H5N1 virus is capable of person-to-person transmission," he said.

"The other thing it says is that we need to be very vigilant to find these clusters, to assess whether there's transmission and to stop transmission as quickly as we can each time they arise.

"We're going to see strains of influenza that are capable of causing pandemics arising, probably avian strains, and that will happen for sure, there's no doubt about it."
Professor Longini says in this case, a pandemic may have been averted because of the quick action of health authorities or, statistically at least, it could have been luck.

He said because the sample group was so small, it was impossible to say how fast the disease could have spread in the workplace or the street.

But he says that in the home, it was a fast mover.

"It had about a one-third chance of transmitting from person to person due to close contact in that household setting," he said.

Other scientists say the research confirms their suspicions about the disease.

Dr Alan Hampson is a member of the World Health Organisation's (WHO) Pandemic Taskforce and an adviser to the Australian Government on influenza.

"This study has looked at the dynamics of the spread of the virus in the family environment in Sumatra and has come down with the conclusion that it clearly does show person-to-person transmission," he said.

"We had already believed that that was probably the case and we haven't had confirmation through analysis of the viruses.

"The information relating to those viruses is information that's held in Indonesia, so we haven't seen that, but what we do believe, from people who have seen the information, is that that too indicated that it was person-to-person spread and that the virus was changing as it spread from one person to another, as we would expect it to do."

Dr Hampson says the Sumatra case could have become a pandemic.
"If it had gone further, we do know that the virus is very good at adapting, so while on the one hand it may have to go through a number of steps, if its passage is from one person to another, then that chance is there," he said

2007-09-01T04:36:00.000+10:00

Britain Prepares For Pandemic Toll Of 650,000

You can prepare for a worst case scenario, but the UK sounds like it is preparing for an absolute slaughter :

Up to 650,000 people could die in England and Wales if there were a flu pandemic, according to a Home Office document that outlines plans for dealing with an outbreak, including measures for mass burials and refrigerated storage of bodies.
Ways of dealing with mass casualties are likely to be overwhelmed at the height of a pandemic, with up to 22% extra deaths at its height, the report warns.
The officials say that even under prudent projections there could be 320,000 deaths.
"Cemetery managers are likely to want to move to provision of common graves, which would allow interments to be undertaken more quickly." Coffin makers might have to limit the types and sizes of coffins to meet the demand.

The scale of the death toll from a flu pandemic never fails to stun.

2007-09-01T00:34:00.000+10:00

The Truth About Bird Flu In Bali

Taboo-Breaking Revelations About H5N1 Crossing Over Into Dogs, Pigs, Cats

In Bali, you don't talk about bird flu. And if you do talk about it, you say it's no big deal, poses no threat and nobody should be too worried about it.

Outbreaks of bird flu, particularly human deaths (of which there has been two, possibly three, in August) related to H5N1 infection, have a nasty habit of impacting on the tourist trade. And tourism is the lifeblood of Bali today.

As the Jakarta Post points out, in this revelatory article, "it is very rare to hear someone talk frankly about the threat of bird flu on the island".

The person doing the talking, below, is Denpasar virologist Udayana University Ngurah Mahardika, who was the first to speak out about the possibility of human bird flu deaths in Bali, two years ago, long before they became a nerve-fraying reality :

In his research he came across the daunting discovery that the virus in Bali had crossed over to mammals, such as pigs, dogs and cats.
He became somewhat unpopular on the island, which at the time had just begun to recover from the aftermath of the terrorist bombings of 2002 and 2005.
Bali's government officials and politicians not only dismissed Mahardika's findings, but also criticized the validity of his research.
Despite his skeptics' doubts, and claims that his lab did not comply with bio-security standards, Mahardika was confident with his findings.
Some six months after issuing his warning, a bird flu outbreak in poultry spread across the island -- from Bali's southern Jembrana regency, to west Klungkung regency and the capital city, Denpasar.
Bali's first human victim of the bird flu virus died on Aug. 12, with a second death on Aug. 21, increasing the nation's death toll to 83 out of 105 cases -- the highest fatality rate from H5N1 in humans in the world.
"There was political apathy," he said. "This is the social cost of our ignorance".
He said as a Balinese-Hindu, he believes there is "Atma" (an essential divinity) within all humans. "In my study of molecular biology, I have often asked myself if god put Atma in DNA."
He became aware of the avian influenza virus in 2003 -- when the virus was first detected in Bali and had taken Indonesia's first H5N1 victim in Tangerang, Banten.
"I started to follow the development of the virus and had the chance to do extensive research in 2005," he said.
The island of Bali -- an area of only 5,000 square kilometers and inhabited by 3.2 million humans, who live alongside approximately 12 million fowl and 900,000 pigs -- is a potential breeding ground for the virus.
"It might seem an exhausted thing to say, but public participation is the only way we can fight this virus," he said.
With NGO experience under his belt, Mahardika set up a model program for bird flu awareness.
"My students and I held an educational campaign in Sedang village, in Denpasar. For a period of three months, we conducted campaigns aimed at educating elementary school children and villagers on the bird flu virus. It worked. When there was a bird flu outbreak in the village, they managed to contain it to only nine households," he said.
"There should be an ongoing campaign to combat this virus. Poultry should not be allowed to roam freely in neighborhood areas anymore. All chickens should be fenced in and separated from pigs. The public markets (where they are sold) should be reorganized ... live fowl should no longer be sold there."
Mahardika said the possibility of a pandemic was no longer a question of if, but when.
"Now is the only time humans have the chance to prevent a pandemic," he said.
"We didn't have a chance with AIDS because it spread quietly and unseen, but bird flu is different -- we have the chance to contain it.
"It is in our hands -- we can either do something about it or remain in denial."

2007-08-29T14:13:00.000+10:00

Indonesia : Researchers Confirm Bird Flu Virus Passed From Human To Human During April 2006 "Cluster" Outbreak

World Health Organisation Failed To Raise Alert Level When Eight Members Of Same Family Died From H5N1

"We Dodged A Bullet"

How close did we come to a pandemic outbreak of the bird flu virus amongst humans in 2006?

American researchers now claim we "dodged a bullet", because the H5N1 virus did pass from family member to family member during a surge of deaths in Indonesia in April, 2006 :

Ira Longini and colleagues at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle looked at two clusters - one in which eight family members died in Sumatra in 2006, and another in Turkey in which eight people were infected and four died.

Experts were almost certain the Sumatra case was human-to-human transmission, but were eager to see more proof.

"We find statistical evidence of human-to-human transmission in Sumatra, but not in Turkey," they wrote in a report published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

"This does not mean that no low-level human-to-human spread occurred in this outbreak, only that we lack statistical evidence of such spread."

In Sumatra, one of Indonesia's islands, a 37-year-old woman appears to have infected her 10-year-old nephew, who infected his father. DNA tests confirmed that the strain the father died of was very similar to the virus found in the boy's body.

"It went two generations and then just stopped, but it could have gotten out of control," Mr Longini said.

"The world really may have dodged a bullet with that one, and the next time, we might not be so lucky."

The researchers estimated the secondary-attack rate, which is the risk that one person will infect another, was 20 per cent. This is similar to what is seen for regular, seasonal influenza A in the United States.

The Indonesian government admitted there was probably human to human spread in the April-May, 2006, "cluster" of deaths. Here's a report on that.

Back in June, 2006, a spokesman for the World Health Organisaion referred to the Indonesian outbreak, where ultimately eight members of the same family died, as "the mother of all (bird flu) clusters".

There was a very real sense of panic, particularly in the Indonesian government and the World Health Organisation, that this was it, the beginning of a worldwide pandemic. But little of that terror filtered through to the media.

The WHO admitted, back then, it was possible that human to human transmission had occurred, but denied the virus had mutated into one that could pass more easily amongst humans, the event that all concerned fear the most.

If human to human transmission did occur during the Sumatra "cluster" of deaths, it is interesting to look back now on a decision by the World Health Organisation mid last year to not raise the pandemic 'Alert' level they use, and of which we have heard nothing about since June 2006 :

WHO won't yet raise the Global Pandemic Alert level from Phase 3 to Phase 4..
Phase 3 translates as Human Infection : Rare Human To Human Transmission
Phase 4 translates as Human Infections : Small Clusters With Limited Human To Human Transmission, but during which the spread is highly localised.
There is good reason for the World Health Organisation to be reluctant to go with Phase 4.
When they officially confirmed that seven members of the same family had died of the bird flu virus, the Indonesian currency plummeted and stocks in airliners and travel companies plunged on fears of a pandemic cutting into airline industry profits, and of a general weakening of the Indonesian tourism industry due to decreased tourists, scared off by fears of the virus.

It's an incredibly fine balancing act that the World Health Organisation must conduct in raising its bird flu-related alert and warning levels.

Ramping up from Phase Three to Phase Four can slash billions from a nation's economy virtually overnight, as stocks tumble and tourists cancel trips.

But delaying the increased level of threat and warning over human deaths could also see the virus spreading much farther than it might have if the warnings were raised earlier. The further the virus spreads through a country or region, and the more people it kills, the greater the economic damage.

It's clear now that the World Health Organisation probably should have moved the Alert level from Phase Three to Phase Four, because there were clear signs of "clusters" and limited spread of the virus from human to human.

They didn't do this, but the bird flu deaths in humans slowed. In the end the WHO made the right decision and probably saved the Indonesian economy from suffering more damage than it did.

The bullet was dodged.

There were nine officially recognised bird flu-related deaths in Indonesia in only ten days through late March and early April this year, and at least 12 in a 30 day period.

April 7 : A 29 year man who died on Thursday in Central Java was confirmed Saturday as being H5N1 positive.

April 6 : 16 year old girl dies in Jakarta, believed to have had contact with sick chicekns.

April 5 : 29 year man in Central Java dies.

April 4 : 23 year old woman dies.

March 29 : 14 year old boy in West Sumatra dies - 28 year old woman in Jakarta dies.

March 28 : 39 year old man dies in Surabaya.

March 27 : 15 year old boy in West Java dies - 22 year old woman in Sumatra dies.

March 20 : 21 year woman in East Java dies.

March 16 : 32 year old man dies in Jakarta.

March 12 : 20 year old woman dies in East Java.

May, 2006 : Five Members Of Indonesian Family Die From Bird Flu In One Week

June, 2006 : The Bird Flu "Storm" In Indonesia

June, 2006 : Bird Flu Is Now "Probably" Spreading Human To Human In Indonesia

"The Mother Of All Bird Flu Clusters"

2007-08-23T04:05:00.000+10:00

Charting The Spread Of H5N1 Around The World

The BBC News site has published a series of thorough maps showing the state of the world as far as outbreaks and spread of the H5N1 virus goes. It's a couple of weeks out of date, but it's the most detailed we've come across so far.

The text which goes with these maps and chart from BBC News :

Much of the globe has now been hit by the lethal strain of bird flu that is fast becoming a major avian killer around the world.
Millions of birds have died or been destroyed as a result of outbreaks in dozens of countries since the H5N1 strain emerged in South-East Asia in 2003, before spreading to Europe and Africa.
The number of cases among humans is also rising - by the end of 2006 the number of human deaths from the disease had more than doubled in a year, with a noticeably higher mortality rate of almost 60%.
And by the following spring, the 300th human case was confirmed.
The first human deaths from H5N1 outside Asia, in January 2006, heightened concern about the spread of the disease, but the World Health Organization pointed out that the deaths, in Turkey, were among people who had been in close contact with infected birds, and were not passed from human to human.
And although a cluster of deaths in Indonesia in May sparked renewed fears about transmission between humans, the WHO maintains there is no evidence of sustained spread from person to person, and scientists do not believe it is mutating into a version that spreads more easily among humans.
In June 2007 Indonesia became the first country to have 100 confirmed cases of H5N1 among humans.
The main concern is that each new human case increases the chances of the feared "human" mutation.

The first outbreaks in the European Union were recorded in January 2006 when cases were confirmed in wild swans in Italy, Greece, Germany and Austria.

Within weeks, cases were confirmed in Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, and France, where mass vaccination of ducks and geese on farms was carried out.
At the end of February, the first case involving a cat in Europe was discovered on the German island where a number of wild birds died from the disease earlier in the month.
And in mid-March, human deaths were confirmed in Azerbaijan, where what is believed to be the first canine case was also diagnosed, in a stray dog.

The first case in the UK was confirmed on 6 April, 2006, in a swan found dead on the eastern coast of Scotland.

2007-08-23T03:34:00.000+10:00

Pakistan : 14,000 Chickens Die From H5N1, Massive Cull Follows

More than 14,000 chickens have died from a bird flu outbreak in a town 90km from Pakistan's capital Islamabad. 35,000 chickens have been culled.

The H5N1 virus first appeared in Pakistan in early 2006.

2007-08-21T15:03:00.000+10:00

Bali : 2nd Victim Dies As Virus Claims 28 Year Old Woman

Indonesia : Another Bird Flu Death Where Victim Had No Direct Contact With Infected Poultry

A string of bird flu deaths and infections in Indonesia, and its province of Bali.

Particularly troubling is the growing number of victims who have had no contact with infected poultry before they died, or direct contact with an already infected family member. Contact with infected poultry or an infected family member is the consistent cause of infection for those who have died from the H5N1 virus across the world, but particularly in Indonesia :

A woman who suspectedly died of bird flu in Bali on Tuesday has tested positive for bird flu, bringing the death toll on the resort island to two and in Indonesia to 84, the Health Ministry said Wednesday.

The 28-year-old woman - who worked for a chicken trader - died Tuesday after being hospitalized for four days, said spokesman Joko Suyono."Tests in two local laboratories came back positive" for the H5N1 strain of the disease, he said. However, he could not say whether samples will be sent to a WHO-collaborating laboratory for confirmation.

From the Jakarta Post :

The Health Ministry's laboratory has confirmed a Tangerang domestic helper died from the bird flu virus Friday...

The victim died at Tangerang's Sari Asih Hospital on Tuesday after two days of treatment for a high fever and acute pneumonia...

The maid's employers, Wahyu Proyato and Winda Amalia, who are residents of Perumnas II in Tangerang regency, said they had no idea how their maid contracted the virus because there were no fowl at their home or in the neighborhood.

Wahyu said his family and the housemaid did not have direct contact with live poultry and birds near the house.

This death follows the reported death of a 17 year old girl in Tangerang on August 14 from the bird flu virus. The 17 year old girl was also reported to have had no contact with infected poultry.

Are these non-poultry contact human deaths the reason why Indonesia has now relented and decided to share H5N1 virus samples with the World Health Organisation?

More people infected by possible bird flu in Bali.

A two year old has also been hospitalised in Indonesia, showing signs of bird flu infection.

Bali has now banned poultry imports from Java, and are beginning culls of an estimated 5400 poultry birds.

2007-08-19T03:01:00.000+10:00

West Africa : The Fight To Contain Bird Flu

World Bank Claims Bird Flu Epidemic In Humans Would Cost "Trillions Of Dollars"

A comprehensive report from VOA on the massive scale of operations now under way to stop the spread of the bird flu through West Africa. The World Bank says an international donors conference to raise money to help poor and developing nations to fight bird flu raised less than a billion dollars, with billions more needed, and soon. The United States, the EU and Japan were the biggest donors.

West Africa has seen outbreaks in 2007 in Niger, Togo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Nigeria.

As Vietnam knows all too well, once the H5N1 virus makes its appearance in a region, it has a nasty habit of returning, months, or a year later.

More from the Voice Of America report :

The West African country of Togo recently announced more bird flu infections outside its capital, making it the seventh West African country to report finding the deadly H5N1 virus in its poultry. Bird flu experts say sub-Saharan Africa still has a long way to go in its battle against the virus, and any other animal diseases that may develop. Phuong Tran has more from VOA's West Africa Bureau in Dakar.

The H5N1 virus re-emerged in poultry in Asia four years ago, and has since been reported to 60 countries around the world, killing more than 200 million poultry and more than half of the some 300 people infected.

Experts praised Togo's fast detection of the virus, but Togolese officials say getting people to listen has been hard.

Alex Thiermann, a director at the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health, says people who raise animals in sub-Saharan Africa tend to be among the poorest, which makes it hard to convince them to kill their livelihood.

"It is very difficult to explain to them that we need to destroy birds because we worry about a potential pandemic," he said. "They do not have time to worry about the potential. They have so many problems to fight on a daily basis so unless there is a good incentive program where there is an assurance they will not lose anything by reporting, then it is hard to guarantee full participation."

Donors have promoted paying farmers as one way to encourage fast reporting. But there have been problems paying farmers for their lost poultry because it is not easy to prove ownership.

Olga Jonas, the World Bank's economic advisor for influenza programs who coordinates bird flu donor giving, says local officials need to identify poultry farmers and inventory their stock to prevent corruption.

"When there is an outbreak, you do not get into a lot of discussion about whether somebody did or did not have the poultry they are now claiming compensation for," she said.

But she admits it is hard to track small producers who live in remote areas. Noncommercial family-owned poultry farming is common in West Africa, where people often live in close contact with their birds
"We are certain we are going to have a pandemic in the near future, but we do not know yet where it will begin and what that agent will be....We put so much emphasis on not only fighting the immediate problem, but also in building the infrastructure to allow these countries to early report and take rapid action, otherwise the entire world is going to be in danger."
At a bird flu donor meeting this past September, the World Bank asked countries to raise an additional $1.5 billion.

The response was one-third that amount, and most of the money pledged was from the United States, Japan and European Union.

World Bank economic advisor Jonas is preparing another appeal for the next bird flu donor conference this December.

"The cost of a human epidemic would just be absolutely staggering, trillions of dollars," she noted. "So relative to the cost that we are trying to avoid by these preventative programs and control programs at the source, the two-point-three billion that has been committed so far is just a very small fraction."

Read The Full Story Here

2007-08-17T04:53:00.000+10:00

Indonesia : 17 Year Old Dies Of Bird Flu

Victim Had 'No Contact With Infected Chickens'

According this story, a 17 year old Indonesian girl who died from the bird flu virus had no contact with chickens, or H5N1 infected poultry :

The 17-year-old maid from Tangerang west of Jakarta died on Tuesday after falling ill with a high fever last week, Joko Suyono of the ministry's bird flu centre said by telephone.

The most common way for humans to become infected with the H5N1 virus is through contact with sick fowl, but officials were still investigating how she contracted the disease.

"There were no fowl in the neighbourhood. The family doesn't keep any and she had no direct contact with chickens..."

Indonesia has had 104 confirmed human cases from bird flu out of which 83 had been fatal, the highest death toll for any country in the world.

Experts fear if the virus develops the ability to pass easily between humans, millions might die in a pandemic

The World Health Organisation, and the majority of media reports covering the 200 odd official deaths attributed to the bird flu virus usually cite contact with H5N1 infected poultry as the main source for contracting the virus.

At the moment, it's a mystery how the teenager became infected.

The 17 year old's death is the third human death in Indonesia attributed to the bird flu virus in the past eight days. On the weekend, news broke that a mother and daughter, in Bali, both died from the virus.

You can read a report on the Bali deaths here.

2007-08-15T14:43:00.000+10:00

"One Day There Will Be A Bird Flu Pandemic" Says Australian Health Minister

Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott has refused to release the national stockpile of the anti-viral Tamiflu to deal with an epidemic of Influenza which has killed more than 160 people in the past two months alone, including six children.

From news.com.au :

"One day there will be a flu pandemic – that is almost certain," (Mr Abbott) said to ABC Radio today.

"But we don't know when, we don't know where and we don't know if the current strain of bird flu is going to be the foundation for the next pandemic."

But Mr Abbott said despite the bird flu deaths of two Indonesians on Bali this week, the deadly virus remained difficult for humans to contract.

"There is no evidence as yet of efficient human to human transmission, so what we have at the moment is a disease of birds," he said.
Stockpiles of the flu treatment Tamiflu should not be released unless there was a national emergency, Mr Abbott said.

"The Tamiflu stockpile is out first line of defence against a possible bird flu pandemic and serious though this flu season is, it would be a mere blip if we actually had a bird flu pandemic."

Mr Abbott claimed that there had been only "one or two" deaths related to human to human transmission of the H5N1 virus. However, at least five members of the same family died from the virus, including a four year old boy, in Indonesia in 2006.

2007-08-13T15:34:00.000+10:00

Bali : First Test Confirms Mother And Daughter Died Of Bird Flu, Two Year Old Girl Hospitalised

Deadly Flu Epidemic Fills Australian Hospitals

UPDATE : Latest reports claim that a mother and child from a small Balinese village have died from bird flu. A two year old child, from the same village, has also been hospitalised with bird flu symptoms :

Health officials in Bali have confirmed that a woman and her daughter died there from the deadly H5N1 strain of influenza.

The deaths of the 29-year-old woman and her five-year-old daughter were the first from bird flu in Bali and took the nation's toll to 83, a health official said.

The woman, Ni Luh Putu Sri Windani, lived in the northwest of the island, far from the major tourist centres.

She died yesterday, while her daughter died on August 3, said Bayu Krisnamurti, head of Indonesia's national bird flu commission.

"Both people are positive, from (tests at) the Eikman Institute and the health ministry's lab," he said.

In Indonesia two tests must be returned positive before a human infection is confirmed.

Chickens in Ms Windani's neighbourhood were positively infected, said Joko Suyono of the Bird Flu Information Centre in Jakarta.

Ms Windani, from a village in the district of Jembrana, was suffering from a high fever before dying of multiple organ failure, said Ken Wirasandi, a doctor at Sanglah Hospital in Denpasar.

Mr Suyono said there had been sick chickens around the woman's house and many had died suddenly in recent weeks.

"The villagers didn't burn the carcasses. Instead they buried them or fed them to pigs," he said.

Go To 'The Osrtrahyun' Blog For More

Previously....

Reuters is reporting that a 29 year old Indonesian woman who died over the weekend was infected with the bird flu virus. In Australia a 'killer flu' is now raging, filling emergency wards of city hospitals. More than 150 people in Sydney have died from influenza in the past six weeks.

In the past few days, the Australian influenza epidemic has killed infants and people under the age of 40.

The meeting of virulent influenza and H5N1 is the nightmare scenario long feared by the World Health Organisation :

Samples from an Indonesian woman who died on Sunday on the resort island of Bali have tested positive for bird flu after an initial test, officials said on Monday.
A second laboratory test, which is now being conducted, is necessary to confirm the initial findings, Joko Suyono of the health ministry's bird flu centre said.

The woman's five-year-old daughter also died recently after playing with chickens but it was unclear if the girl died of bird flu.

The woman, 29, from a village in the district of Jembrana in western Bali, was suffering from a high fever before dying of multiple organ failure, said Ken Wirasandi, a doctor at the Sanglah hospital in the Balinese capital Denpasar.
The woman had started showing symptoms more than a week ago, but was only admitted to hospital six days later.

Considering that hundreds of Australian tourists arrived back from Bali over the weekend, and there is a particularly virulent, and deadly, strain of Influenza A now killing infants and people under 40 years of age, the news that bird flu may have killed one or more people in Bali is remarkably close to the kinds of 'worst case scenarios' feared by Australian medical specialists and virologists and the World Health Organisation.

Bird flu pandemic-related exercises held earlier this year in Australia workshopped a scenario where virulent influenza was active in Australia, while the bird flu virus was claiming lives in Bali. The nightmare scenario workshopped was that Australia tourists, already sickened by influenza would come into contact with H5N1 and the combined viruses would mutate inside their hosts to create an easily transmissible form of H5N1.

With immune systems already weakened by Influenza A, the mutated H5N1 virus would then spread easily, and fast.

MORE TO COME....

2007-08-10T00:42:00.000+10:00

US Government Allows Americans To Eat Bird Flu-Infected Poultry

Fears Over Bird Flu Lead To International Bans On Poultry From Nebraska

So far Russia, Japan, the Philippines and Turkey have banned poultry originating in Nebraska. The ban is described as "short-term". A flock of turkeys from Nebraska tested positive to a mild strain of bird flu. Of course, if more flocks are found to be infected, the import ban will continue in those countries, and more countries are then likely to also ban the poultry.

From the IHT :

Deputy (Nebraska) state veterinarian Del Wilmot said Wednesday that the flock shows no sign of illness and was being prepared for slaughter and entry into the food supply.
...officials in the four countries are taking no chances. Wilmot said those countries have barred all poultry and related products, such as eggs, coming from Nebraska.
"This ban and other emergency measures were necessary to protect human health and the poultry industry in the Philippines," Arthur Yap, agriculture secretary for the Southeast Asian country, said in a news release issued Tuesday.

The Philippines is among three countries in Asia — the area with the greatest number human cases — to remain free of bird flu since 2003.

Karen Eggert, with the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said the department has no qualms about sending the Seward County turkeys into the U.S. food supply.

To recap, Russia, Japan, the Philippines and Turkey have decided to ban Nebraskan poultry infected with a "mild" strain of bird flu.

But the American government doesn't believe bird flu can be caught from eating infected poultry meat or eggs and therefore has decided to allow infected poultry meat to enter the American food supply.

It's surprising the World Health Organisation has said nothing about this, so far.

2007-08-09T14:33:00.000+10:00

WHO Says Indonesia's Refusal To Share Live H5N1 Samples Puts World "At Risk"

The World Health Organisation is still demanding Indonesia hand over recent samples of the live H5N1 virus collected during operations to control bird flu outbreaks. By not doing so, the WHO says, the "entire planet" is being put at risk.

But Jakarta says it is still not happy with agreements that Indonesia will get equal and inexpensive access to any vaccines created from its samples :

Indonesia has yet to resume sharing samples from human bird flu victims with the World Health Organization, jeopardizing not only the Asian nation but the entire planet, the UN health agency said Monday.
David Heymann, the assistant director-general for communicable diseases at WHO, said the agency had received three specimens from Jakarta in May, but none contained any live virus.
"What's important is that all countries share viruses that they isolate from humans," Heymann said.
"By not sharing the viruses, Indonesia is ... putting in danger its own populations, because if those viruses are not freely shared with industry, vaccines will not contain the elements of the Indonesia infections. The second thing that Indonesia is doing is therefore putting the whole world at risk."
Indonesia—the nation hit hardest by the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu—stopped sharing its samples with international scientists searching for mutations early this year because Jakarta wanted assurances that any vaccines developed would not be too expensive for developing nations.
It ended its boycott in May, however, after receiving assurances from WHO that the virus samples would be used for risk assessment and not passed on to private pharmaceutical companies without Jakarta's permission.
China—which had not shared H5N1 specimens with WHO for almost a year—sent bird flu samples in June. Vietnam has sent samples but has encountered shipping road blocks, Heymann said.

Jakarta Says It Will Not Share New Virus Samples Until A New Agreement Is In Place

Jakarta Warns Of 'Silent' Outbreaks Of Bird Flu In Poultry Stocks - Some Mass Poultry Deaths Believed To Go Unreported - 500,000 Poultry Killed By Bird Flu This Year

2007-08-09T14:00:00.000+10:00

Vietnam : Officials Announce 2nd Death In Two Weeks

A 15 year old boy has become Vietnam's latest victim of the resurgent spread of the H5N1 virus. His death follows the demise of a woman, seven months, pregnant, only two weeks ago.

The 15 year old, the seventh human victim in Vietnam this year, is believed to have contracted H5N1 after coming into contact with ducklings, less than 150km from the capital Hanoi.

Meanwhile the bird flu virus continues to spread through poultry, defying the Vietnamese govenrment's once victorious attempts to keep it contained.

From the IHT :

The H5N1 virus continues to spread among poultry in Vietnam, killing or forcing the slaughter of more than 200,000 birds this year.

The country had been hailed as a bright spot in Asia for beating back bird flu after a nationwide poultry vaccination campaign was started. No human cases were reported in the country in 2006, but the virus flared again in poultry early this year.

A total of 46 people have died in Vietnam since the virus began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003. At least 192 people have died worldwide from the disease during that time, according to the World Health Organization.

2007-08-04T11:53:00.000+10:00

India : Four Quarantined Children Cleared For H5N1 Infection

But 51 People Still Remain Under Quarantine

First the good news :

On Friday, authorities cleared four boys who had been suffering from fever after handling dead or sick poultry in Manipur.

Now the not so good news :

India has quarantined 51 people in Manipur following an outbreak of the H5N1 strain of influenza in chickens last month, a senior official said on Friday.
"Since all these people had worked in culling or sanitising operations or monitoring people's health around the affected poultry farm they have to be quarantined and monitored," said Vineet Chawdhry, joint secretary in the health ministry.

Most had complained of being "unwell", he added, but did not say whether any had flu-like symptoms.

All 51 were on Tamiflu, the popular drug to prevent and treat bird flu, as a precaution, the health ministry said.

Hundreds of cullers were involved in killing nearly 300,000 fowl over the past week in Manipur, a state bordering Myanmar that saw two outbreaks of bird flu in chickens in July alone.

The culling, which took place within a 5-km radius around the affected poultry farm near Imphal, ended on Thursday.

Health officials have completed checks of around 235,000 people in the area, but said they would closely monitor the situation.

Remarkable work by the health officials there. Two hundred thousand plus people checked in a handful of days. That's how you rein in the spread of bird flu : fast, efficient health checks and quarantines.

2007-08-03T15:30:00.000+10:00

Times Of India Asks : Is Bird Flu Now Spreading Between Humans?

Four Children From Same Family Sick, Under Observation

Like most countries that suffer poultry outbreaks of H5N1, medical authorities in India are extremely nervous about the possibility of the virus infecting and then spreading between humans. Internationally, the World Health Organisation is terrified. The crowded cities and numerous slums of India provide the perfect environment for a widespread, or pandemic, outbreak of human bird flu.

Four young children from the same family are now sick, on Tamiflu and under observation. Confirmation that all four children have the bird flu virus is pending.

So it is not surprising then that the Times Of India asks today - Is Bird Flu Infecting Humans?

Four children, all under 14 years, from a farm in Chingmeirong village in Manipur have been quarantined and administered Tamiflu, the most affective antibiotic against bird flu, after investigations revealed that they had handled dead poultry in their farm, soon after the disease was detected in dead chickens from a nearby farm.

All of them, part of the same household, were found suffering from fever and throat infection by health officials carrying out door-to-door surveillance on humans, within the 5-km radius of this year's bird flu outbreak site. The throat swabs of the four children have been sent to National Institute of Communicable Diseases in Delhi and National Institute of Virology, Pune, for testing.

Till now, all those who have been infected in bird-flu outbreaks across the globe have actually been poultry workers who came in contact with infected birds.

The WHO says, globally at least 192 people have died due to bird flu out of 319 cases since 2003. The next 24 hours will be a nervous wait for the government and India's health experts as results of these tests are expected on Friday morning.

India has not reported a single human infection with the H5N1 virus till now. What's worrying the health ministry officials most is the fact that they don't know whether the chicken that died in the farm of these four teenagers had been infected with H5N1 or not.

This is because soon after the government announced the outbreak, the four sold off their stock of 120 birds to a nearby hotel owner. So, the scientists failed to collect samples of these birds.

Interestingly, the teenagers also confessed to health officials of having eaten some of the dead chickens. Chicken cooked at over 70 degrees Celsius is safe as the virus gets killed.

On July 25, India's department of animal husbandry announced that the deadly virus had returned to haunt India for the second year in a row, with this year's outbreak being reported from a small poultry farm in Chingmeirong village of East Imphal district in Manipur.

The Times of India makes a basic, and remarkable, mistake in its reporting :

Till now, all those who have been infected in bird-flu outbreaks across the globe have actually been poultry workers who came in contact with infected birds.

This simply isn't true. The virus has been caught by humans from infected birds sitting on windowsills (Indonesia), from eating infected chicken meat (Vietnam) and from infected birds in crowded public markets (Egypt).

Was this "only poultry workers" mistake by the journalist just bad research, or were they told this as a fact by the Indian authorities?

For the authorities in India, and for the H5N1 specialists in the World Health Organisation, the next day or two of waiting to find out if the four children have H5N1 are going to be long and nerve-wracking.

2007-08-02T11:50:00.000+10:00

India : Outbreak Leads To "Bird Flu Raids" On Tens Of Thousands Of Homes

4 Children Monitored For Signs Of Infection

Four children in Manipur state came into contact with sick, or dead, poultry. They fell ill with fever and are now being monitored. India has been fighting H5N1 outbreaks in poultry in Manipur for weeks.

From Reuters :

The children have been restricted to their homes and are being visited twice a day by medical professionals, said Vineet Chawdhry, joint secretary in the ministry of health.

"We are being extra careful," Chawdhry said, adding that throat swabs and blood samples taken from the children had been sent to a federal laboratory, where tests for the H5N1 strain of bird flu will be carried out.

The children live within a 5-km (3-mile) radius of a small poultry farm where more than 130 chickens died last month from the H5N1 virus.

Health officials have checked more than 235,000 people around the affected farm since the weekend for flu symptoms, while veterinary workers have culled a similar number of birds in the remote northeastern state.

India had two major flare-ups of bird flu in its western region last year.

Manipur neighbors Myanmar, which has battled several outbreaks of bird flu in chickens this year, including one reported last week.

From Daily India :

Over 45,000 homes in Manipur's East Imphal District have been searched for signs of bird flu, and according to the Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries, 163 persons are suffering from respiratory-related symptoms, but not from bird flu.

The Department said that a Central Rapid Response Team is countering the outbreak of avian influenza in Chingmeirong Village, and as of now, 171 cullers are under the cover of Tamiflu. Their health status is being monitored.

The medical teams consisting of 680 health personnel in total have conducted house-to-house active surveillances in Luwangsangbam, Koirengei, Lamlongei, Ahalup, Matai, Kontha area, Achanbigei, Heingang, Laipham Siphai, Paomei Colony, Sangakpam, Khurai area and Kairang area.

Out of the 45,032 houses surveyed, 935 were having backyard poultry. A total of 2,35,161 persons were covered.

Illegal bird smuggling from Myanmar is being blamed for the H5N1 virus entering India.