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"?

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

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".

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.

How One British City Is Preparing For The Pandemic

The city of Portsmouth has filled a local warehouse with emergency medical supplies in preparation for the bird flu pandemic. Here's what they've set aside for the local doctors and nurses who may have to deal with more than 50,000 very sick Portsmouthians :

5,000 masks...a similar amount of plastic gloves and aprons...Another 50 specialist masks – which offer greater protection – have also been bought for staff who would treat infected people.

Other emergency plans, revised after warnings from the British government's health department to pepare for "the worst case scenario", include :

Improving the staff database which will include staff who have left in the past two years but who could be called back to help out;

Stepping up links with voluntary organisations such as St John Ambulance;

Making the plan available to the public on the PCT website and informing staff through briefings and inductions;

Making health and council bosses available to talk to the media to reassure the public in the event of an outbreak.

Portsmouth GPs and medical staffs have been told the first wave of a bird flu pandemic could last as long as four months, with more to follow over a period of some two years.

Edward Borodzicz, professor of crisis and risk management at the University of Portsmouth, said nothing can prepare the city.

He said: 'We can't possibly imagine the impact of 30 per cent of the population having a flu that could kill 60 per cent of those who get it.

'Organisations are trying to make plans. It's better than having nothing, but often plans are nothing like what happens on the ground."

Government health department officials have told Portsmouth city council and the local health authority to prepare for the worst case scenario, and they changed their emergency response plans accordingly.

You can hear worldwide death toll figures of a 30 million or 100 million, and the numbers are all but incomprehensible.

But when the predicted infection and fatality rates from a bird flu pandemic are scaled to a British city the size of Portsmouth, the human toll comes into a more realistic, clearer and shocking focus.

Experts predict the flu virus would affect up to 30 per cent of the local population over the first two years – that's 57,600 people in Portsmouth...

With a nightmarishly high human fatality rate - 60% according to the World Health Organisation, almost 80% from Indonesian figures - that means a pandemic would likely kill more than 45,000 people in Portsmouth alone.

A commenter on Portsmouth Today did the math on the stockpile of masks, the 16 week length of a pandemic 'wave' and the number of GP/doctor practices in the city. Here's what they came up with :

...the stockpile is enough for 2 masks per day per practice. Who do you reckon should get the masks, the GP, the nurse, or the receptionist? And that's assuming nobody needs to change their mask half-way through the day cos somebody just coughed in your face! Good luck for staff turning up for work in a pandemic!

How local doctors, hospitals and health facilities across the world are going to ensure their staff turn up for work during a pandemic is one of the most troubling issues of all for those now planning how cities, towns and villages will deal with such lengthy outbreaks of the H5N1 virus.

Particularly when you consider that doctors, nurses and paramedics are likely to have sick relatives to look after themselves, and all those who fall ill will be quarantined inside their homes once the hospitals fill up.

Fear The Chickens In Java More Than The Turkeys In Suffolk

Mike Davis wrote a clear, precise and comprehensive book, 'The Monster At The Door : The Global Threat Of Avian Flu', that we should have reviewed here, and still might.

For now, Davis has a good piece up on the UK Guardian's 'Comment Is Free' site, about how avian influenza disappears and resurfaces, year in, year out, and why outbreaks in Indonesia are more worrying than 2600 dead turkeys in Suffolk, England.

Here's a few excerpts from his piece :

...virologists have yet to understand avian flu's enigmatic behaviour: burning like a wildfire one season, going to ground the next. However, since the original outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, one trend remains consistent: after each hibernation or disappearance, H5N1 re-emerges with its virulence intact and its geographical and species ranges extended.

The World Health Organisation....is grimly mobilising to confront imminent worst-case scenarios. The proposed response remains the same as last year: rely on local early-warning systems to quickly identify sustained human-to-human transmission and then squelch it with massive saturation of the exposed population with the antiviral Tamiflu. This strategy is based on a dubious perfect-world model of pandemic emergence and medical response, and is overwhelmingly contradicted by the WHO's own recent experiences in the field.

...Tamiflu is no longer a magic bullet: several recent deaths in Egypt have been attributed to a Tamiflu-resistant strain and this resistance is likely to spread through the larger population of H5N1 subtypes.

Second, the elaborate system of outbreak surveillance, immediate poultry slaughter, and isolation of human victims that has been painstakingly established in China, Vietnam and Thailand simply doesn't exist in many areas of recent outbreak, and will never come into being without a massive, urgent international effort.

Davis describes the possibility of greater outbreaks in shanty towns in Nigeria, and across sub-Saharan Africa as "horrifying" and "virtually apocalyptic" , but reminds that Indonesia remains the most likely start point for a global pandemic.

...years of heroic work in Vietnam to contain an explosive H5N1 outbreak that most experts feared was the likely pandemic trigger have been more or less annulled by the rampant and preventable spread of the disease across Indonesia's thousands of islands over the past 18 months.

This has been a defeat for the WHO's containment strategy. For fear of losing their base of operations in the country, the WHO and other international agencies acquiesced in the Indonesian government's negligent failure to aggressively cull infected birds or to contain the early human outbreaks.

Critics of the disastrous and failed campaign were censored and, in the case of the most senior foreign expert on the scene, even purged for leaking details of the fiasco to the international science press.

Be more worried, in other words, about the chickens in Java than the turkeys in Suffolk. While it is unnerving to have such a notorious virus unmasked in East Anglia, killer influenza is still most likely to reach London via Heathrow as a result of failed containment efforts elsewhere.

Avian flu will be the first plague in history to be preceded by a vast and lurid advertising campaign...

Read Mike Davis' Full Opinion Piece Here

United States Unveils New Category 1 To 5 Rating System For Flu Pandemics

The latest plan unveiled by the US government on how they plan to fight a full blown flu pandemic, bird flu and otherwise, reveals just how seriously the agencies concerned view the lack of concern expressed by the average American to a threat a thousand times greater than the worst terrorism scenario ever envisaged.

The Bush administration has decided to ramp up its 'marketing' campaign of raising awareness of the true threat posed by a bird flu pandemic amongst the human population through a series of new reports, and a dramatic new categorisation system, similar to that used to describe, in simple language, the danger posed by hurricanes.

In this case, the US govenrment's Centre For Disease Control and Prevention, has created a far more user-friendly (it's the right term, but it sounds so wrong) Category 1 to Category 5 system to describe the threat posed by flu pandemics.

From Y0ur New Reality :

A Category 1 or 2 hurricane is understood by virtually everyone to mean that you can still walk down the shops, but your hat might get blown away. While a Category Five hurricane announcement makes people go weak at the knees and sprint to the basement, with a child under one arm and the family pet under the other.

So along with the usual warnings about how businesses could grind to a halt, and how hospitals will become overwhelmed with the sick and the dying, if or when a flu pandemic hits (bird flu or something else altogether), we are now going to be hearing a lot more about Category One or Category pandemics.

The category 1 to 5 ratings will be based on the potential, and likely, lethality of the flu virus on the kill across the United States.

So hopefully the words "Category Five Pandemic" will never be heard. Because if you hear an official say "We've got a Category Five Pandemic breaking out," well, it's going to be like something out of Revelation. Armageddon, if you like.

It'll be interesting to see how quickly other countries already up on their bird flu pandemic preventions, like Australia and Indonesia, will adapt this categorisation system.

So here's the 'lethality' rundown.

Category 1 signifies around 90,000 Americans will die. That's only three times the number of people a normal American flu season wipes out.

But a Category 5 signifies that something beyond 1.8 million Americans will die, within months.

But here's the nightmare scenario : Spanish Flu in the US, killed about 2% of everyone it infected.

Whereas, the avian influenza virus in humans (or H5N1, or bird flu) is clocking up a death rate of more than 50% of those infected. In Indonesia, at least, that lethality rating can go as high as 70% or 80%.

So the World Health Organisation estimate of 2005 that claimed a worldwide bird flu pandemic in humans could kill 200 million might not be so far off the mark, after all.

Don't ever believe that humans rule this planet.

We don't.

Viruses do.

They always have.

And the king-killer of all viruses is the flu.

The worst virus yet seen was Spanish Flu.

But H5N1 bird flu may yet even top that decimation of humanity.

Go To 'Your New Reality' For More On This