avian flu updates page 7

[Martin]

Avian flu updates page 6 at

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?p=1465243&posted=1#post1465243





Bird flu poses risk to vaccine egg supply
By STEVE MITCHELL
WASHINGTON, July 26 (UPI) -- Some infectious disease experts fear an outbreak of bird flu could destroy the supply of chicken eggs needed to produce the nation's annual supply of millions of doses of flu vaccine, but manufacturers and federal health officials say safeguards are in place to prevent such a catastrophe.




The deadly strain of bird flu currently in southern Asia could spread to the United States or be introduced into poultry flocks here intentionally by terrorists, said Dr. Greg Poland, an infectious diseases expert at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

"There's no reason to think that terrorists couldn't use what's happening with the bird flu to their advantage," Poland told United Press International. "Imagine, infecting flocks deliberately."

He said all U.S. infected flocks would have to be destroyed -- more than 100 million birds in Asia have been destroyed or killed by the flu virus.

"Think of the chaos that would create" and the economic implications, he said.

Poland, who is a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America's pandemic influenza task force, said this situation could interfere with the supply of chicken eggs needed to make several vaccines. Tens of millions of chicken eggs are required to produce flu vaccine, so there could be no or only limited supplies of either a special vaccine being developed to prevent humans from contracting bird flu or the regular annual flu vaccine.

In a typical year, flu kills 36,000 people and hospitalizes about 200,000.

Health experts fear the strain of bird flu in Asia could adapt to humans and spread around the globe, causing a worldwide pandemic. The virus has killed at least 50 people in several Asian nations, including Vietnam and Thailand, and it may be spreading. Russian officials reported this week that flocks in the Siberian region have contracted a strain of avian flu, but officials have not been able to determine if it is the same strain that is involved in the outbreak in southern Asia.

Bruce Gellin, director of the National Vaccine Program Office in the Department of Health and Human Services, said health officials have taken precautions to protect chicken flocks that produce eggs for manufacturing vaccines.

"These flocks are well-protected," Gellin told UPI. "There are other diseases of birds, not just avian flu, and this is designed to prevent infections of flocks that provide eggs regardless of what that infection is."

In addition to keeping the chickens isolated from other flocks and wild birds, there is limited access to the farms where they reside, Gellin said, adding that the farms are subject to regular inspections to ensure all of the required biosecurity provisions are in place.

He noted that redundancy is built into the system. There are more chickens than need, so in the event a flock does become infected, there would be surplus fowl available to meet egg-production needs.

The vaccine manufacturers also are focused on preventing infections of the flocks they use to produce eggs for vaccines.

"It's a risk that we are very aware of and it's a risk that we take great precautions to protect against," said Lenn Lavenda, spokesman for Sanofi Pasteur, the only currently licensed supplier of flu vaccine in the United States.

"To date, we have never had infection of one of the flocks that produce eggs for flu vaccine production," Lavenda told UPI.

Sanofi Pasteur plans to produce 60 million flu shots for the upcoming flu season and this will require "hundreds of thousands of eggs per day," Lavenda said. Ultimately, the company will go through millions of eggs to produce the vaccine supply, he said.

In addition to the precautions cited by Gellin, manufacturers also keep the egg-producing flocks in multiple locations, Lavenda said. This helps reduce the risk of a widespread infection, "so in the event one flock did get infected, it wouldn't spread and jeopardize the entire supply," he said.

Lavenda said the spread of bird flu by agroterrorism is less of a concern than an accidental infection.

"The main risk is that it would happen unintentionally by somebody accidentally bringing a virus in or by some other means," he said.

New chickens are periodically brought in to the flocks to replace birds that are no longer producing eggs, so that could be one way the bird flu or another infection could accidentally be introduced into the flocks.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/ind...cle=UPI-1-20050726-12390000-bc-us-birdflu.xml

 

[Martin]

Mekong province reports bird flu recurrence


Animal health authorities in the Mekong Delta province of Ben Tre recently killed more than 400 fowls infected with the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus at a local farm, said an official.
Animal health officials have disinfected neighboring farms and areas where the virus was detected, said Phan Trung Nghia, an official of the Ben Tre Animal Health Department.

The province has reported two recurrences of bird flu so far, culling more than 16,700 fowls.

http://thanhniennews.com/healthy/?catid=8&newsid=8170

 

[Martin]

Bangladesh government suspends poultry imports from five more countries

Thursday • July 28, 2005

Bangladesh has banned the import of poultry products from five more Asian countries as a precaution against bird flu, officials said.

"We've banned import of chicken and all kinds of poultry meats and products from China, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and North Korea," Sajedul Qaiyum, a senior official of the Fisheries and Livestock Ministry, told AFP.

In 2004 Bangladesh banned imports of poultry products from Pakistan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

The poultry industry in Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest nations, employs over two million workers.

"Poultry farm owners in Bangladesh are very marginal farmers. So any spread of bird flu in Bangladesh would have a devastating impact," Qaiyum added.

The bans follow international alarm last week after the first human deaths from bird flu in Indonesia were confirmed.

An Indonesian and his two daughters died from the avian virus although it was not known how they caught the deadly disease.

The virus so far been mainly transmitted between animals, but it has also killed more than 50 people in Southeast Asia since 2003.

Millions of fowl have died or been killed across Asia over the past two years because of the disease. — AFP


http://www.todayonline.com/articles/63741print.asp

 

[Martin]

Breeders bemoan slump in sales as reports on bird flu surface
The Jakarta Post, Medan/Makassar/Bandung

Sales of chicken nationwide have been in the doldrums for the past few weeks with the bird flu virus making the national headlines, chicken breeders complained on Tuesday.

Hendri, from a chicken hatchery in Medan, said that before the story on the bird flu virus appeared in the media, he could sell some 1 million chicks per month.

"But now, I can only sell some 200,000 chicks a week," said Hendri, who had been sitting idle in his office chair.

His eyes gazed to the street outside the office, waiting for customers.

A similar story could be found in Bandung, West Java, with chicken breeders complaining that sales of chicken had dropped by 20 percent over the past four days.

Heri Darmawan, chairman of East Priangan Chicken Breeders Association that has some 13,000 members, called on government officials and the media to stop making comments that scared people. "The comments have scared people so now they avoid eating chicken, which of course reduces our sales," said Heri.

He was commenting on responses by government officials and the media on the bird flu issue. Some government officials in the provinces have said that bird flu has already spread into their areas and killed chickens, while the media had often reported on people allegedly infected with the bird flu virus.

According to Heri, the impact of the negative publicity has been severe for breeders, moreover most of them are small time operators with less than 2,000 chickens.

Heri assured government officials and the media that chicken breeders already knew how to avoid bird flu.

"The government conducted research recently in our area, and there was no reports of the bird flu virus spreading to our area," said Heri.

While breeders in Bandung and Medan have seen their chicken sales slump due to the bird flu virus, breeders in South Sulawesi province complained that their farms had been devastated by the virus.

Haji Made, a chicken breeder, said that 23,000 of his 60,000 chickens had mysteriously died recently, causing him to suffer large material losses. Haji Made was forced to lay off four of his 10 employees. He has also cut the salaries of other workers by 50 percent in order to survive the situation. The drastic measures had to be taken as he still had to pay back a bank loan.

"I have borrowed Rp 400 million from the bank to develop the chicken breeding business and I have to pay Rp 5 million in installments every month. As the business was down, I had to sell my cars and a plot of land to pay the installments," said Made, who has been in the chicken breeding business for 28 years.

Arsyad, another chicken breeder, shared a similar story. His 1,000 chickens, between 22 and 25 days old, suddenly died in at the end of June and he says they were killed by bird flu.


http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailnational.asp?fileid=20050727.D10&irec=9
http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailnational.asp?fileid=20050727.D10&irec=9

 

[Kim99]

They really don't know what this is. Some are speculating that it is indeed related to bird flu.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HKG37051.htm

Experts puzzled by China's swine flu outbreak
28 Jul 2005 09:56:14 GMT

Source: Reuters

By Tan Ee Lyn

HONG KONG, July 28 (Reuters) - Scientists are perplexed by the unusually high, and rising, number of deaths in southwestern China from a mysterious pig-borne disease and they are beginning to question if it is indeed swine flu.

Twenty-seven people in Sichuan province have died in recent days from the disease, which has sickened 104 others.

Chinese health authorities have identified the culprit as Streptococcus suis, a form of what is commonly known as swine flu. They say all those taken ill had slaughtered, handled or ate infected pigs, and there had not been any human-to-human transmission of the bacteria.

The authorities have dismissed speculation that the deaths were caused by bird flu, a virus that has killed over 50 people in Asia since late 2003.

Nevertheless, medical experts outside mainland China said the unusually high mortality rate of 20 percent and reports that many of the 27 victims died within a day of showing symptoms were inconsistent with what is known so far about swine flu.

Though endemic in swine, human infections are rare. And where they have occurred, mortality rates have been below 10 percent.

"It could be another disease altogther, it need not be Streptococcus suis because the presentation is so atypical," Samson Wong, a microbiology associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, told Reuters.

"In past literature, there have been one or two cases when people died within 36 hours, but those were exceptions rather than the rule. The deaths in China are very unusual," Wong said.

Wong also said many patients in Sichuan were bleeding under the skin, a symptom that has been cited in only two or three cases in medical literature on the bacteria.

The deaths have alarmed nearby Hong Kong because 15 percent of the pork it imports normally comes from Sichuan.

"You don't have to have an open wound for infection to get into the body. It's more likely that it could be under a cuticle ... some sort of break in the skin for something like that to get into the bloodstream," said Sian Griffiths, director of Hong Kong's Centre of Public Health.

China has suspended exports of chilled and frozen pork from two Sichuan villages to Hong Kong but lawmakers here lobbied the government on Thursday to ban pork imports from all of Sichuan.

MORE VIRULENT?

Although the World Health Organisation says that clinical diagnosis of the disease in Sichuan seems to be consistent with past outbreaks, it too is puzzled by the unusually high incidence.

"It's not clear to us why we're seeing such a large case number," said WHO spokesman Bob Dietz. The last outbreak of Streptococcus suis in China was in 1998, and involved 22 people.

Dietz stressed that China's diagnosis of Streptococcus suis was only a preliminary one, especially since authorities there have confirmed the presence of the bacteria in only five cases through laboratory tests. Over 70 other cases were only clinically diagnosed to be swine fever.

"We'd like to see more of that gold standard proof (laboratory tests). You also have to discount the fact that there wasn't another co-infection from something else," he added.

Streptococcus suis is also known to cause deafness in humans, but that has yet to surface in Sichuan, Dietz said.

Chinese scientists are analysing the bacteria and have so far decoded seven of its genes, which they say are no different from Streptococcus suis bacteria isolated in past outbreaks overseas. That suggests that the bug in Sichuan has not mutated.

There is a constant fear among scientists that it could mutate and be passed among humans. Compounded with its deadliness, such a bug could unleash an epidemic, killing many.

But Wong remains guarded.

"A bacteria has many many genes, not just seven. So could it be that there are other genes that are now different? Could this be a more virulent form of Streptococcus suis? It's all too early to say," he said.

 

[Kim99]

Egret deaths in China
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-07/26/content_3268072.htm

BEIJING, July 26 -- The mysterious death of at least 300 egrets in a Guangzhou forest park sparked fears that the bird flu was to blame, the South China Morning Post reported Monday.

A party secretary of the park's management firm, the Huangpi company, has dismissed the claims saying he had yet to receive any reports of deaths.

People living near the park in Baiyun District had been finding 20 to 30 dead egrets every day, according to a report by the China News Service, quoting the Guangzhou-based TVS online.

The residents, who said they had discovered the birds in the past few days, estimated the death toll had reached 300.

Some villagers blamed the heat, but others feared it was linked to the bird-flu virus and urged the government to investigate.

The report followed an outbreak of bird flu on an island sanctuary in May that killed thousands of migratory birds in Qinghai. Some 6,000 birds died in the outbreak, officials said.

"What is surprising is that there are people who have started eating egrets, with some being cooked on barbecues," China News Service said. People had also caught the sick birds to sell at markets, the report said.

A bad smell was coming from the dead birds littered across the park.

(Source: Shenzhen Daily/Agencies)

 

[Kim99]

I sure wish we'd hear something about this from our government.

Australia. Flu pandemic fears top health ministers conference agenda


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Australia's health ministers are meeting in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory today with infant health, renal disease and the prospect of a flu pandemic on the agenda.

The prospect of how state and territory health services would handle a flu pandemic appears to be the primary concern facing the meeting.

NT Health Minister Dr Peter Toyne will chair the Australian Health Ministers Conference and says the nation's readiness for a devastating flu outbreak is on the agenda.

"Nationally there's a recognition now that such a pandemic is very much on the cards in the forseeable future," he said.

Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott says it is at the front of his mind and while plans are in place he wants to be sure they will work.

"Are all the state and territory ministers confident that in the event of a mass outbreak our health systems would be able to cope," he said.

Mr Abbott says scientists are warning a flu pandemic in the next 12 months is more likely than it has been for decades.

He says the last devastating flu outbreak in 1918 killed 13,000 Australians and 500,000 Americans, most of them in their prime.

Mr Abbott says the Australian Health Ministers Conference needs to face that prospect and prepare for it.

"It is a very serious issue. I hope it never happens. But almost certainly it will happen at some point in time and the experts say that the likelihood of it happening in the next 12 months is much higher now than it's been for many, many years," he said.

"The national and the state and territory plans are all in place, but it's one thing to have the plan in place in theory and on paper, but how would it work in practice when people are starting to get very edgy about their future?"

Meanwhile, Dr Toyne is banking on the passage of two strategic plans with special relevance for the Territory.

He wants national agreement on remote renal services for Indigenous people.

He is also putting forward a plan for child health and well being in the first five years of life.

"A really major shift in the health profile of kids emerging at the age of five out of their early infancy and childhood, so that they're fully able to be educated, to be employed, to bring up their families," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200507/s1424279.htm

 

[Kim99]

Here's the link to the FluWiki again. Lots of interesting stuff.

http://www.fluwikie.com/

 

[Indiansummer]

EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Henry L. Niman about Avian Flu

Thought this might be of interest, but hesitate to do more than post a snip with the link. Don't want to be too naughty!

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread157892/pg1

Henry L Niman, Founder and President of Recombinomics, Inc.. Mr. Niman earned a PhD at the University of Southern California in 1978. His dissertation focused on feline retroviral _expression in tumors in domestic cats. He subsequently took a postdoctoral position at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation where he developed monoclonal antibody technology. He fused monoclonal antibody and synthetic peptide technologies and accepted a staff position at Scripps.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


In 1982, he developed the flu monoclonal antibody, which is widely used throughout the pharmaceutical, biotech, and research industries in epitope tagging techniques. He also produced a broad panel of monoclonal antibodies against synthetic peptides of oncogenes and growth factors. These monoclonal antibodies were distributed worldwide to researchers by the National Cancer Institute. The antibodies identified novel related proteins which correlated with clinical parameters.

This technology was used to form ProgenX, a cancer diagnostic company that became Ligand Pharmaceuticals. Dr Niman subsequently identified protein _expression patterns at the University of Pittsburgh. More recently, he became interested in infectious diseases while at Harvard Medical School. He then founded Recombinomics and discovered how viruses rapidly evolve. These latest findings are the subject of recent patent filings.

ATSNN: Will you please explain to our readers what Recombinomics is and what you are trying to achieve in your work?

Niman: Recombinomics is a vaccine development company formed to apply the lessons of recombination to vaccine development. The genetic sequences of viruses were used to understand how viruses emerge and evolve. Several types of recombination have been identified and these mechanisms are used to predict the genetic composition of viruses based on the sequence of the parental genes.

ATSNN: Given the ability of the H5N1 virus to undergo antigenic shifts, is making a vaccine a feasible endeavor, or will we always be in the position of catch up?

Niman: H5N1 follows very specific rules in its evolution. The rules are faithfully followed and they can be used to predict new sequences before they emerge in nature. Targeting these emerging sequences allows vaccine development to get ahead of the evolving viral genes. All rapidly evolving viruses appear to use these rules.

 

[Kim99]

http://www.asiaone.com.sg/./st/st_20050728_331151.html



China bug - Is it Ebola-like bird flu?
By Andy Ho
July 28, 2005
The Straits Times
CHINA's official Xinhua news agency confirmed this week earlier wire reports about the mysterious deaths of 27 farmers in several villages around the cities of Ziyang and Neijiang in Sichuan province.

Another 41 people in Sichuan have also fallen seriously ill.

All victims had been exposed to swine and developed high fever, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, and 'became comatose later with bruises under the skin', according to Xinhua. The provincial health authorities insist that 'the disease is absolutely not Sars, anthrax or bird flu'.


Instead, they ascribed the outbreak to a common swine bug called streptococcus suis. Based on information from the Chinese, the World Health Organisation (WHO) agrees that the symptoms 'seem consistent with' the diagnosis.

Could the WHO be wrong? Are the provincial authorities prevaricating?

But, first, what is this bug and why are these Sichuan cases less likely to be it? According to The Merck Veterinary Manual, this is a bacterium that lives in the noses, throats, guts and genitalia of pigs. Thus, farmers exposed to droplets of swine saliva, as well as slaughterhouse workers, butchers, and cooks who have open wounds who handle pork and pig innards could become infected.

Yet, despite its prevalence in pigs - up to 15 per cent of a herd could be carriers - human cases are rare as only one out of a total of 35 serotypes of the bacterium causes serious infections in people.

In humans, the bug invades the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord causing meningitis, with severe headaches, high fever, vomiting, confusion, stiff neck, loss of hearing and coma. There can also be bleeding from blood vessels beneath the skin, and the patient can go into toxic shock, with damage to the heart.

Sounds like the mysterious illness in Sichuan?

Note, however, that most cases have been reported in northern Europe and southern Asia, where intensive swine management practices are used, perhaps at least on the scale seen in the Pulau Bulan farm that supplies Singapore with about 6,500 pigs every week, according to the AVA. That does not sound like rural China.

Human cases have been seen in Singapore too, but they are very rare. In fact, until this Chinese claim, less than 150 human cases have been reported worldwide.

A total of 68 patients in Sichuan sounds unlikely for various other reasons too.

First, the bacterium is easily treated in pigs with penicillin. Though it can survive for long periods, it is also easily destroyed with soaps and dilute disinfectants.

Secondly, the high mortality also makes the cause somewhat less likely to be bacterial in origin, as bacterial infections are rarely as lethal.

Thirdly, the bug seems to spread between herds not only through the introduction of apparently healthy carrier pigs but also by flies, which can travel up to 2km between farms on their own. If flies got on to vehicles, they could go farther. Carcasses of dead pigs could also transport the bacteria.

But up to 75 villages are affected in Sichuan. These are clustered around 40 townships in different counties, which represent large geographical distances. This suggests the possibility of transmission by migratory birds.

Quite apart from the fear that pigs, which often carry the human flu virus, could contract bird flu and act as a 'blender' to speed up the process of its mutation, several facts suggest that the mysterious illness sounds a lot like influenza, some scientists believe.

Far-fetched?

In December 1979, the British Medical Journal published a letter from an army physician that had laid undiscovered in a trunk in Detroit for 60 years. In the 1918 letter, the doctor who was attending to soldiers in Boston during the devastating pandemic that year described in graphic detail how they were dying from the flu: 'Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from the ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored man from the white.

'It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate.' (Cyanosis is a bluish or purplish tinge to the skin.)

Note that reports described the Sichuan patients as having skin that turned very dark. Some H5N1 bird flu variants can produce bleeding under the skin. The index case in Thailand's human cases of bird flu this year was initially misdiagnosed as dengue hemorrhagic fever because of that bleeding.

What about the meningitis seen in Sichuan?

The H5N1, in fact, already has genes that can attack the brain. According to recent papers in Virology and The Journal Of Virology separately, this ability is seen in H5N1 samples isolated in 2001 and 2002 from poultry and birds in Hong Kong, and from a bird flu patient who died in the ex-colony in February 2003. Thus, it is very possible for any H5N1 circulating in mainland China to have this (neurotropic) characteristic.

Supposing it was bird flu in Sichuan, where could it have come from?

Probably from Qinghai province, just north-west of Sichuan. There, a major outbreak of bird flu occurred in April at a nature reserve, where 8,000 birds across five species - and also some mammals - died. Only in May would the Chinese authorities own up to it.

Now the weather has turned cold early at Qinghai, so birds there may have already started migrating out. Indeed, in June, China reported two outbreaks in birds at Tacheng city in Xinjiang province, which lies northwest of Qinghai. This week, there were wire reports about outbreaks in the Primorie and Chany Lake reserves in Russia, where more than 500 birds have died.

Here is the cause for concern.

When it first happened in Qinghai, an Internet daily called Boxun.com reported the outbreak, which the authorities denied. Human cases and fatalities, involving six tourists and 121 locals, were also detailed. Then, 17 of 19 Boxun reporters involved were jailed.

In May, China reported to the international authorities that there had indeed been an outbreak among birds in Qinghai but denied any human cases. Yet, it effectively hindered the WHO authorities from investigating the outbreak. Indeed, the 1.3 billion strong nation has never reported any human cases of bird flu that, since 2003, has killed at least 57 people in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and, now, Indonesia.

The Chinese have also never reported any outbreak in Sichuan - among poultry or people. But outbreaks in Shantou, Hunan and Yunnan were not reported either.

However, we know these did occur.

A paper published in July in the journal Nature detailed the genomics of H5N1 isolated in samples taken in 2005 from Qinghai and Guangdong as well as Hunan and Yunnan.

Dr Guan Yi, a University of Hong Kong scientist, told the media that, soon after the Nature paper was published, the mainland authorities accused him of stealing state secrets.

So China considers H5N1 a state secret - the Qinghai isolates have been shown to be very virulent - perhaps because people have already been infected?

If so, we have much to fear.

The city of Ziyang where patients are dying lies close to Chengdu, the provincial capital which is 250km south-east of Qinghai.

Should human cases emerge among Chengdu's 10 million people - it has an international airport - bird flu could spread even faster.

China may not be alone in under-reporting H5N1.

In India, where pigeons died en masse on one occasion in 2004, the blood of poultry workers collected in 2002 shows antibodies to H5N1. Officially, though, India has no H5N1. This month's first human cases in Indonesia, with two deaths, may be linked to trips made to India and Hong Kong.

Alas, this stonewalling can kill as the H5N1 acquires more lethal genes - like Ebola genes.

Although it has never been officially seen outside Africa, the intrepid Boxun.com reported last April an Ebola outbreak in Shenzen, next to Hong Kong, which the authorities denied. Now, Boxun sources tell them that the Sichuan outbreak is the rapidly evolving Ebola SZ-77 strain which can infect birds, so it may be tied to bird flu at Qinghai.

Incredible? Pittsburgh-based genomics expert Henry Niman told The Straits Times he has noticed a gene in H5N1 'that is an exact match for an Ebola gene. So it is possible that a dual infection in birds or people may be leading to a new H5N1 - or a new Ebola virus.'

Yes, a swap between bird flu and ebola viruses can happen. Dr Niman said: 'They just need to be in the same host cell.'

Let's hope this has not really happened yet. Otherwise, we could all be in the same boat, a rapidly leaking one at that.

 

[Martin]

Agencies deal with outbreak of avian flu -- but it's just a test




Erin Skarda
July 28, 2005

Comments (1) Print Email

Northeastern Colorado and Weld County residents don't need to worry about public agencies' preparedness in case of an outbreak of avian influenza or a bioterrorism attack in the region.

The Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment, in conjunction with several Weld agencies, simulated a full-scale exercise Wednesday morning to evaluate their readiness to respond to public health emergencies.

"It helps us better prepare if a real incident should happen," said Gaye Morrison, health department spokeswoman.

The scenario simulated a statewide outbreak of avian influenza in humans, in which medicine and medical supplies were needed from the Strategic National Stockpile.

The health department set up a regional transfer point at the Weld County Food Bank, 1108 H St., to receive and repackage the materials before dispersing them to two of nine distribution sites in the region.

Although the food bank was used for this exercise, the transfer point that would be used in a real emergency was kept confidential.

More than 200 cases of water, 60 cases of peanut butter crackers and 60 cases of applesauce were unloaded; the food represented supplies that would help 10 percent of the population around the two distribution sites, said Deb Blanden, emergency preparedness planner for the health department.

Once the supplies were unloaded, they were unwrapped, counted and rewrapped. They were then reloaded onto two trucks and transported to distribution points.

About 60 workers from the health department, Greeley, Johnstown and Milliken police departments, Weld County Sheriff's Office, Union Colony Fire/Rescue Authority, Weld County Food Bank and Wal-Mart Distribution Center assisted in the exercise, Blanden said.

"It is very organized mainly because (we're dealing with) pharmaceuticals," Morrison said.

Funding for the exercise was provided by a Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment grant and a state Homeland Security grant totaling $36,000, Blanden said.

Although there have not been many documented cases of avian influenza in humans, Blanden said it is probably the most important health threat at this time.

"An avian influenza pandemic probably will happen; it's just a matter of when," she said. "We have not had a pandemic influenza outbreak since the '50s. It's cyclic, so it will happen again."

THE TEST

An exercise to test the readiness of public agencies to public health emergencies was based on the following scenario:

A statewide outbreak of avian influenza in humans has occurred in northern Colorado.

The Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment has requested vaccine and anti-viral medication in addition to medical supplies through the Strategic National Stockpile to stop the spread of infection.

A regional transfer point must be set up to receive and process the materials, ship them to two distribution sites, one on the University of Northern Colorado campus and another at Roosevelt High School in Johnstown, and then distribute the medicines to the public.

OUR STOCKPILE

The Strategic National Stockpile has large quantities of medicine and medical supplies that are free to protect the American public if a health emergency such as terrorist attack, flu outbreak or earthquake is large enough to eradicate area resources.

Once authorities agree supplies are needed, they will be delivered to any state within 12 hours. Each state has plans to receive and distribute the supplies to communities as quickly as possible.


http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20050728/NEWS/107280067

 

[Indiansummer]

If this is a dupe please advise

If so, I will delete it.
http://www.asiaone.com.sg/./st/st_20050728_331151.html
China bug - Is it Ebola-like bird flu?
By Andy Ho
July 28, 2005
The Straits Times
CHINA's official Xinhua news agency confirmed this week earlier wire reports about the mysterious deaths of 27 farmers in several villages around the cities of Ziyang and Neijiang in Sichuan province.

Another 41 people in Sichuan have also fallen seriously ill.

All victims had been exposed to swine and developed high fever, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, and 'became comatose later with bruises under the skin', according to Xinhua. The provincial health authorities insist that 'the disease is absolutely not Sars, anthrax or bird flu'.


Instead, they ascribed the outbreak to a common swine bug called streptococcus suis. Based on information from the Chinese, the World Health Organisation (WHO) agrees that the symptoms 'seem consistent with' the diagnosis.

Could the WHO be wrong? Are the provincial authorities prevaricating?

But, first, what is this bug and why are these Sichuan cases less likely to be it? According to The Merck Veterinary Manual, this is a bacterium that lives in the noses, throats, guts and genitalia of pigs. Thus, farmers exposed to droplets of swine saliva, as well as slaughterhouse workers, butchers, and cooks who have open wounds who handle pork and pig innards could become infected.

Yet, despite its prevalence in pigs - up to 15 per cent of a herd could be carriers - human cases are rare as only one out of a total of 35 serotypes of the bacterium causes serious infections in people.

In humans, the bug invades the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord causing meningitis, with severe headaches, high fever, vomiting, confusion, stiff neck, loss of hearing and coma. There can also be bleeding from blood vessels beneath the skin, and the patient can go into toxic shock, with damage to the heart.

Sounds like the mysterious illness in Sichuan?

Note, however, that most cases have been reported in northern Europe and southern Asia, where intensive swine management practices are used, perhaps at least on the scale seen in the Pulau Bulan farm that supplies Singapore with about 6,500 pigs every week, according to the AVA. That does not sound like rural China.

Human cases have been seen in Singapore too, but they are very rare. In fact, until this Chinese claim, less than 150 human cases have been reported worldwide.

A total of 68 patients in Sichuan sounds unlikely for various other reasons too.

First, the bacterium is easily treated in pigs with penicillin. Though it can survive for long periods, it is also easily destroyed with soaps and dilute disinfectants.

Secondly, the high mortality also makes the cause somewhat less likely to be bacterial in origin, as bacterial infections are rarely as lethal.

Thirdly, the bug seems to spread between herds not only through the introduction of apparently healthy carrier pigs but also by flies, which can travel up to 2km between farms on their own. If flies got on to vehicles, they could go farther. Carcasses of dead pigs could also transport the bacteria.

But up to 75 villages are affected in Sichuan. These are clustered around 40 townships in different counties, which represent large geographical distances. This suggests the possibility of transmission by migratory birds.

Quite apart from the fear that pigs, which often carry the human flu virus, could contract bird flu and act as a 'blender' to speed up the process of its mutation, several facts suggest that the mysterious illness sounds a lot like influenza, some scientists believe.

Far-fetched?

In December 1979, the British Medical Journal published a letter from an army physician that had laid undiscovered in a trunk in Detroit for 60 years. In the 1918 letter, the doctor who was attending to soldiers in Boston during the devastating pandemic that year described in graphic detail how they were dying from the flu: 'Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from the ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the colored man from the white.

'It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate.' (Cyanosis is a bluish or purplish tinge to the skin.)

Note that reports described the Sichuan patients as having skin that turned very dark. Some H5N1 bird flu variants can produce bleeding under the skin. The index case in Thailand's human cases of bird flu this year was initially misdiagnosed as dengue hemorrhagic fever because of that bleeding.

What about the meningitis seen in Sichuan?

The H5N1, in fact, already has genes that can attack the brain. According to recent papers in Virology and The Journal Of Virology separately, this ability is seen in H5N1 samples isolated in 2001 and 2002 from poultry and birds in Hong Kong, and from a bird flu patient who died in the ex-colony in February 2003. Thus, it is very possible for any H5N1 circulating in mainland China to have this (neurotropic) characteristic.

Supposing it was bird flu in Sichuan, where could it have come from?

Probably from Qinghai province, just north-west of Sichuan. There, a major outbreak of bird flu occurred in April at a nature reserve, where 8,000 birds across five species - and also some mammals - died. Only in May would the Chinese authorities own up to it.

Now the weather has turned cold early at Qinghai, so birds there may have already started migrating out. Indeed, in June, China reported two outbreaks in birds at Tacheng city in Xinjiang province, which lies northwest of Qinghai. This week, there were wire reports about outbreaks in the Primorie and Chany Lake reserves in Russia, where more than 500 birds have died.

Here is the cause for concern.

When it first happened in Qinghai, an Internet daily called Boxun.com reported the outbreak, which the authorities denied. Human cases and fatalities, involving six tourists and 121 locals, were also detailed. Then, 17 of 19 Boxun reporters involved were jailed.

In May, China reported to the international authorities that there had indeed been an outbreak among birds in Qinghai but denied any human cases. Yet, it effectively hindered the WHO authorities from investigating the outbreak. Indeed, the 1.3 billion strong nation has never reported any human cases of bird flu that, since 2003, has killed at least 57 people in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and, now, Indonesia.

The Chinese have also never reported any outbreak in Sichuan - among poultry or people. But outbreaks in Shantou, Hunan and Yunnan were not reported either.

However, we know these did occur.

A paper published in July in the journal Nature detailed the genomics of H5N1 isolated in samples taken in 2005 from Qinghai and Guangdong as well as Hunan and Yunnan.

Dr Guan Yi, a University of Hong Kong scientist, told the media that, soon after the Nature paper was published, the mainland authorities accused him of stealing state secrets.

So China considers H5N1 a state secret - the Qinghai isolates have been shown to be very virulent - perhaps because people have already been infected?

If so, we have much to fear.

The city of Ziyang where patients are dying lies close to Chengdu, the provincial capital which is 250km south-east of Qinghai.

Should human cases emerge among Chengdu's 10 million people - it has an international airport - bird flu could spread even faster.

China may not be alone in under-reporting H5N1.

In India, where pigeons died en masse on one occasion in 2004, the blood of poultry workers collected in 2002 shows antibodies to H5N1. Officially, though, India has no H5N1. This month's first human cases in Indonesia, with two deaths, may be linked to trips made to India and Hong Kong.

Alas, this stonewalling can kill as the H5N1 acquires more lethal genes - like Ebola genes.

Although it has never been officially seen outside Africa, the intrepid Boxun.com reported last April an Ebola outbreak in Shenzen, next to Hong Kong, which the authorities denied. Now, Boxun sources tell them that the Sichuan outbreak is the rapidly evolving Ebola SZ-77 strain which can infect birds, so it may be tied to bird flu at Qinghai.

Incredible? Pittsburgh-based genomics expert Henry Niman told The Straits Times he has noticed a gene in H5N1 'that is an exact match for an Ebola gene. So it is possible that a dual infection in birds or people may be leading to a new H5N1 - or a new Ebola virus.'

Yes, a swap between bird flu and ebola viruses can happen. Dr Niman said: 'They just need to be in the same host cell.'

Let's hope this has not really happened yet. Otherwise, we could all be in the same boat, a rapidly leaking one at that.

andyho@sph.com.sg

 

[Martin]

Thai Fighting Roosters Get Passports as Nation Battles Bird Flu
July 29 (Bloomberg) -- Prathana Ngamwongwan has never held a passport. By August he will need 200 of them for his fighting roosters as Thailand's government struggles to contain a strain of bird flu that can be lethal to humans.

``If somebody had told me in the past I'd have to have passports for all of my chickens, I would have thought it was a joke,'' said Prathana, president of Thai Indigenous Chicken Conservation and Development, which has about 35,000 poultry and fighting-cock farmers as members. ``It's no joke anymore.''

A ban on cock fighting until the birds are checked and have identity cards with pictures of their heads and legs is one of a series of measures to try to stem the spread of avian flu. The Thai government has come under increasing criticism following two new outbreaks this month of the H5N1 virus that killed 12 people in the country last year.

Failure to control the disease may lead to a mutant variant that can be transmitted between humans, similar to one that killed as many as 40 million people worldwide in 1918-1919, the World Health Organization has said.

``This strain is the same one that caused the human cases last year,'' said Wantanee Kalpravidh, Bangkok-based regional coordinator for the Avian Influenza Network, part of the United Nations' Food & Agriculture Organization. ``Since it's capable of infecting people, any practices which will increase risks to humans, for example cock fighting, have to be contained.''

Since the first confirmed case in December 2003, 57 people are known to have died from catching the virus from birds in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, prompting bans of poultry exports from affected countries and the culling of millions of chickens, ducks and geese.

Vaccine Stockpile

The U.K., U.S., France, Canada and Australia have announced arrangements to stockpile vaccines that may be used against the virus in preparation for a possible global epidemic.

``The odds are pretty worrisome that'' a human transmissible variant may evolve, said William L. Aldis, the World Health Organization's chief representative in Thailand. ``If it wasn't contained at source, we would see a global spread very rapidly.''

Concern about the spread of bird flu in Thailand, formerly Asia's second-biggest poultry exporter, has caused overseas shipments of the meat to slump.

After the country began confirming bird-flu outbreaks in January 2004, the European Union, Japan and other countries banned imports of frozen poultry meat from Southeast Asia's second- biggest economy. Thai exports of the products fell 42 percent in 2004 to $562 million, according to the commerce ministry.

Charoen Pokphand Foods Pcl, Thailand's biggest publicly traded chicken exporter, last year reported a 45 percent decline in profit. GFPT Pcl, the second-largest producer, had its first loss in seven years.

Chicken Casino

``It's very frustrating,'' said Chaveevan Kampa, president of the Chicken Farmers Association, a trade group for chicken export farmers. ``Producers of chicken meat for export invested several billion baht to upgrade their farms to international standards in the hope of preventing another bird-flu outbreak and bringing back confidence in Thai chicken. Those investments appear to be worthless with the confirmation of the new cases.''

For the thousands of gamblers that used to bet nightly on cock fights in places such as the Bangkok suburb known as Bonkai, or ``chicken casino,'' there have been no legal bouts since July 12, when the government imposed a temporary ban after a bird-flu outbreak was reported in a province about 100 kilometers west of the capital. A second case was confirmed two weeks later on July 21, 360 kilometers north of Bangkok.

Prathana's home province of Chon Buri, 100 kilometers east of the capital, has one of the country's biggest cock-fighting stadiums. The arena, like others in the country, has been closed for almost a year on concern the bouts might spread the bird-flu virus.

$12,000 Champions

Issuing passports to fighting birds, worth as much as 500,000 baht ($12,000) for a champion, is part of a compromise with the government. Breeders are trying to prevent sweeping culls and restart the fights, in which birds wear gloves to prevent severe injury and victors of the five-round bouts are decided by a panel of judges.

``There have been very few cases of bird flu among fighting cocks,'' said Prathana, who feels the passports are an acceptable compromise between farmers and the government. ``Putting strict controls on fighting cocks is not fair. Farmers of fighting cocks treat their animals in the most careful way, probably better than their kids.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=71000001&refer=asia&sid=aWA.IfA0lo88

 

[Martin]

Bird Flu Quarantine in Altai Territory in Russia

Recombinomics Commentary
July 27, 2005

Russia's Altai territory imposed a quarantine after the information about the bird flu outbreak in the Novosibirsk region was confirmed.

"The information about the bird flu outbreak in the neighboring Novosibirsk region has been confirmed, so we are sending cables to mayors and district heads today," first deputy head of the regional veterinary department Anatoly Lapin told Itar-Tass.

Lapin said quarantine measures had been launched at poultry farms, but he did not rule out that they may be extended to the entire territory.

The above comments on the quarantine in Russia's Altai territory is not a surprise. The territory is in southern Siberia adjacent to Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. Thus, it has a bird outbreak to the northwest, around the Chany Lake area, and three outbreaks to the south in Xinjiang and Qinghai provinces in China. All outbreaks have been linked to migratory birds, which is consitent with sequence data from H5N1 isolates in Qinghai Lake.

The sequences in these birds have regions in common with isolates in Europe, including H5N2 from birds and various mammalian isolates. One change in particular is striking. The PB2 mutation E627K has never been detected previously in an H5N1 isolate from a bird. However, it is present in all human isolates. This strict species barrier was broken at Qinghai Lake, where all bird isolates have E627E. It has appeared previously in humans infected with bird serotypes H5N1 and H7N7 and in almost all cases the infection has been fatal.

Other regions of the Qinghai sequence match isolates from two bird reserves in southern Russia, the Chany Lake area in the Novosibursk region, and the Primorie reserve in southeastern Russia, near China, Japan, and Korea. May of the regions of the Qinghai genes also match regions in genes from isolates from Japan and Korea as well as some isolates in eastern China and southeast Asia, including Vietnam and Thailand, where the largest number of human cases have been reported.

In August and September birds will leave Russia and head for Europe, India, and eastern Asia, raising concerns that the highly lethal H5N1 will spread throughout Asia, much of Europe, and beyond.

Thus, the quarantine in Altai is warranted, and other countries worldwide should increase surveillance of migrating birds for signs of lethal bird flu.

In the past influenza infections in migratory birds were largely asymptomatic. However the die-off at Qinghai Lake was without precedent, and the subsequent outbreaks in China and Russia suggest a trail of dead birds may emerge in the next several weeks.
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/07270501/H5N1_Altai_Russia_Quarantine.html

 

[Fuzzychick]

Bird Flu Quarantine in Altai Territory in Russia

Recombinomics Commentary
July 27, 2005

Russia's Altai territory imposed a quarantine after the information about the bird flu outbreak in the Novosibirsk region was confirmed.

"The information about the bird flu outbreak in the neighboring Novosibirsk region has been confirmed, so we are sending cables to mayors and district heads today," first deputy head of the regional veterinary department Anatoly Lapin told Itar-Tass.

Lapin said quarantine measures had been launched at poultry farms, but he did not rule out that they may be extended to the entire territory.

The above comments on the quarantine in Russia's Altai territory is not a surprise. The territory is in southern Siberia adjacent to Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. Thus, it has a bird outbreak to the northwest, around the Chany Lake area, and three outbreaks to the south in Xinjiang and Qinghai provinces in China. All outbreaks have been linked to migratory birds, which is consitent with sequence data from H5N1 isolates in Qinghai Lake.

The sequences in these birds have regions in common with isolates in Europe, including H5N2 from birds and various mammalian isolates. One change in particular is striking. The PB2 mutation E627K has never been detected previously in an H5N1 isolate from a bird. However, it is present in all human isolates. This strict species barrier was broken at Qinghai Lake, where all bird isolates have E627E. It has appeared previously in humans infected with bird serotypes H5N1 and H7N7 and in almost all cases the infection has been fatal.

Other regions of the Qinghai sequence match isolates from two bird reserves in southern Russia, the Chany Lake area in the Novosibursk region, and the Primorie reserve in southeastern Russia, near China, Japan, and Korea. May of the regions of the Qinghai genes also match regions in genes from isolates from Japan and Korea as well as some isolates in eastern China and southeast Asia, including Vietnam and Thailand, where the largest number of human cases have been reported.

In August and September birds will leave Russia and head for Europe, India, and eastern Asia, raising concerns that the highly lethal H5N1 will spread throughout Asia, much of Europe, and beyond.

Thus, the quarantine in Altai is warranted, and other countries worldwide should increase surveillance of migrating birds for signs of lethal bird flu.

In the past influenza infections in migratory birds were largely asymptomatic. However the die-off at Qinghai Lake was without precedent, and the subsequent outbreaks in China and Russia suggest a trail of dead birds may emerge in the next several weeks.
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/07270501/H5N1_Altai_Russia_Quarantine.html

Perhaps too little too late...

 

[Martin]

Rapid Evolution in Qinghai Lake Migratory Bird Flu H5N1

Recombinomics Commentary
July 28, 2005

China has reported no outbreak of human cases. But Dr Chan, formerly Hong Kong's director of health, who helped contain the 1997 Avian influenza outbreak in the city state, and the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, said, "We will not give up on our efforts. We owe it to the world, because when we talk of pandemic influenza risk it is a global health security issue. To that extent, we will continue our efforts in order to help us to understand the evolution of the virus."

The situation in China, she said, "is very serious . . . and that's why we have not shied away from working very closely with the government to give us specimens."

The need for additional specimens from Qinghai Lake is clear. China only collected samples from 12 dead birds, 10 bar-headed geese, a great black headed gull, and a brown headed gull. The sequences from all 12 isolates were very similar. They all have acquired the human PB2 polymorphism E627K, which had not been seen previously in a H5N1 isolate from a bird. All prior H5N1 with that change had common form mammals, including humans. Virtually all humans infected with a virus containing E627K had died, suggesting the Qinghai isolates have the potential for being lethal in people also.

Analysis of the sequences revealed many polymorphisms normally found in European isolates, offer genetic evidence that the birds at Qinghai Lake were infected with recombinants between viruses in Europe and Asia. The recombinations happen via dual infections, and one of the 10 bar headed geese had evidence of two infections. Since the Hong Kong / Shantou group had sequenced all 10 bar-headed geese, the two geese sequences deposited by the Beijing group represented independent isolates from the same birds (the number and naming by the two groups is slightly off. China called its geese isolates black headed geese while Hong Kong / Shantou called them bar-headed geese, but there was only one species of geese tested so the Beijing isolates were from the same birds as two of the Hong Kong / Shantou isolates). However, one of the Beijing isolates, A/black headed goose/Qinghai/1/2005, had four polymorphism at the 5' end of the HA genes that were not found in the other Qinghai isolates. Instead they were in isolates from Hong Kong, A/Ck/HK/2133.1/2003, or Guangdong, A/duck/Guangdong/173/04 indicating the Qingahi isolate was a recombinant. However, the recombinant was from one of the geese that also had the common sequence, indicating dual infection was present in this bird.

More analysis will likely show that such complexity exists in more birds because many of the submitted sequences coded for non-functional proteins suggesting additional isolates coding for functional proteins were present in these birds. Thus more research was required in both the birds that died initially, as well as birds that were preparing to leave, because these birds probably contain more recombinants, which will soon arrive in areas to the east, south, and west, of the summer location.

China's refusal to collect and share samples is scandalous and jeopardizes almost all neighboring countries. Moreover, boxun reports suggest there have been associated human cases in Qinghai and possibly Xinjiang, Sichuan, and Yunnan, increasing concerns that China is covering up a raging flu pandemic.

Instead of accellerating sample collection. China shut down the Shantou lab and stone-walled requests for sequences and samples.


http://www.recombinomics.com/News/07280502/H5N1_Qinghai_Evolution.html

 

[Kim99]

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-07/29/content_3282363.htm

2 more Vietnamese die of bird flu


HANOI, July 29 (Xinhuanet) -- Specimens from two young people in Vietnam, who died this week, have been tested positive to bird fluvirus, local newspaper Youth reported on Friday.

According tests by the Pasteur Institute in southern Ho Chi Minh City, the specimens from a 26-year-old patient from the city's Binh Tan district, who died on Wednesday, were positive to the virus strain H5, while those from a 24-year-old man from Cang Long district in southern Tra Vinh province, to the virus strain H5N1. The man named Le Hoang Anh died on Monday in a provincial hospital.

Relatives of the two patients said they ate chicken before exhibiting bird flu symptoms. Anh and his relatives ate dead chickens. The 26-year-old patient bought half of a semi-processed chicken at a local market, and cooked it.

Vietnam will start vaccinating fowls against bird flu viruses, including the deadly strain of H5N1, in northern Nam Dinh provinceand southern Tien Giang province on a trial basis in early August,and then do the same in other localities with high risks of outbreaks in October.

The country has so far this year detected bird flu outbreaks in35 cities and provinces nationwide, which have killed or led to the forced culling of 1.5 million fowls, mainly ducks and chickens.

Vietnam's Preventive Medicine Department, in mid-July, confirmed that a total of 60 local people from 23 localities had been infected with bird flu since late December 2004, of whom 19 died.

 

[Kim99]

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/extract/331/7511/254

WHO increases pressure on China over bird flu
Geneva John Zarocostas


Breaking diplomatic protocol, the World Health Organization’s new trouble shooter for pandemic influenza, Margaret Chan, has publicly scolded China for stalling on vital cooperation over the outbreak of bird flu. She has urged authorities to share specimens promptly and give the green light for a WHO led team to visit the country.

The appeal comes as new reports of human strain cases in Indonesia of the deadly Avian A (H5N1) bird flu have heightened WHO’s concerns about the looming threat of a global influenza pandemic.

"We are working with the government of China to impress upon them the importance of sharing these specimens and WHO would not depart from this position," Dr Chan, director for communicable disease surveillance, told reporters.

The WHO official, who is also the WHO chief’s personal representative for pandemic influenza, argued that the organisation’s position is that it encourages member states to work . . . [Full text of this article]

 

[Kim99]

Lou Dobbs is the only one who seems to be paying attention. He's done a couple of reports that I've seen.

Bird Flu on CNN--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0507/28/ldt.01.html

DOBBS: A mysterious new disease has killed dozens of people in China. At the same time, there are rising concerns about the spread of the deadly bird flu in China and other Asian countries. Experts, health experts are now warning it could be only a matter of time before these new diseases spread to the United States.

Kitty Pilgrim has our report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): One hundred thirty people in China sick from a mysterious pig-borne disease. The World Health Organization doesn't know quite what it is, and the death toll is now at 31. BOB DIETZ, WHO SPOKESMAN: I think the first thing that pops into everyone's mind is avian influenza, and then comes SARS, and are we looking at that sort of situation. Very early in the stage to make any rash judgments, but at this point we don't see that kind of threat looming. But we are watching it very closely.

PILGRIM: The disease comes from eating or slaughtering sick pigs, which is commonly done in rural China. The problem with the new diseases suddenly affecting people around the world is that they are an airplane ride away from anywhere, as in the case of SARS, which infected thousands and killed 800 people globally.

They can turn up anywhere. For example, health officials don't know how three people in a family in Indonesia contracted avian flu and died. The CDC currently has 11 quarantine stations in U.S. airports, with seven more planned to be open this year to be able to screen people if necessary.

HENRY NIMAN, FOUNDER, RECOMBINOMICS: It actually is a flight away by a migratory bird or commercial airline. So it literally can arrive in a matter of days. So there's no really room for error that, once it starts to spread, it can move around the world quite quickly.

PILGRIM: The worry is so great in this country, Congress has had five hearings on the flu this year. Scientists think the bird flu virus could mutate, as all viruses do. And there is thought nearly enough vaccine for the current strain.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PILGRIM: Now, many experts are convinced the next global pandemic could come from avian flu. It is highly deadly. Last year, 109 human cases caused 55 deaths in Asia. And with the new sudden unexplained deaths in Indonesia, the concern is very, very high right now -- Lou.

DOBBS: Kitty, thank you very much. Kitty Pilgrim.

 

[Jim in MO]

Dangerous Bird Flu Strain Found in Russia

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/29/AR2005072900734_pf.html


washingtonpost.com
Dangerous Bird Flu Strain Found in Russia

The Associated Press
Friday, July 29, 2005; 11:41 AM



MOSCOW -- Investigators have determined that a strain of bird flu virus infecting fowl in Russia is the type that can infect humans, the Agriculture Ministry said Friday.

The virus caused the deaths of hundreds of birds in a section of Siberia this month, but no human infections have been reported.

In a brief statement, the ministry identified the virus as avian flu type A H5N1.

"That raises the need for undertaking quarantine measures of the widest scope," the statement said. Ministry officials could not immediately be reached for elaboration.

Strains of bird flu have been hitting flocks throughout Asia and some human cases have been reported there. Since 2003, bird flu has killed at least 57 people in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia, which reported its first three human deaths this month.

The outbreak in Russia's Novosibirsk region apparently started about two weeks ago when large numbers of chicken, geese, ducks and turkeys began dying. Officials say that all dead or infected birds were incinerated. But it is unclear whether that would effectively stop the virus from spreading.

Earlier this week, Russia's chief government epidemiologist, Gennady Onishchenko, said the appearance of the virus in Russia could be due to migrating birds that rest on the Siberian region's lakes.

A recent report released by the journal Science said the finding of the H5N1 infection in migrant birds at Qinghai Lake in western China "indicates that this virus has the potential to be a global threat."

The reports echo concerns voiced by the World Health Organization, which urged China to step up its testing of wild geese and gulls. A WHO official estimated that the flu had killed more than 5,000 wild birds in western China.

The outbreak was first detected about two months ago in bar-headed geese at China's remote saltwater lake, which is a key breeding location for migratory birds that overwinter in southeast Asia, Tibet and India. The virus has hit that species the hardest, but also affects brown-headed gulls and great black-headed gulls.

I hope this is not a dupe post but I didn't see it anywhere else.

jim

 

[Kim99]

I know this is the Bird Flu thread, but there are alot of people who think this is related to BF, so I'm posting this here.
And my comment is this: 50,000 "health workers" to register pigs? For a "bacteria" that's not made H2H contact? Something's not adding up,IMHO.

Last Updated Fri, 29 Jul 2005 13:06:31 EDT
CBC News
Some 50,000 health workers are being deployed in China's Sichuan province as the human death toll continues to climb from a mystery epidemic involving bacteria spread among pigs.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/natio...ess-050729.html



The health workers are going to an estimated 1.4 million farming households, trying to register every pig in the region.

China's Ministry of Health said Friday that 31 people have now died of the mysterious illness.

Twenty-seven others have been hospitalized and are in critical condition. As well, there are more than 152 less severe confirmed or suspected cases.

The disease is blamed on the bacteria Streptococcus suis, which is commonly found in pig populations. It has spread through dozens of villages in Sichuan province since June.

No person-to-person transmissions have been reported.

"The epidemic is at present under control," the official Xinhua News Agency quoted the country's health minister, Gao Qiang, as saying on Thursday.


FROM JULY 26, 2005: Deadly illness in China linked to pig bacteria

Still, the source of the outbreak has not been determined.

Symptoms include fever, bleeding under the skin, nausea, vomiting, and, in some cases, meningitis.

Medical officials are still trying to find a drug to treat the disease. For now, they are relying on heavy doses of antibiotics.



The government is warning that precautions should be taken, including a ban on the selling, transportation and killing of pigs.

In addition to registering pigs, the country has also embarked on a massive public awareness campaign.

In one city, Ziyang, officials have issued more than two million posters telling farmers not to slaughter or eat sick pigs, the China Daily News reported.

As well, all pork exports from the southwestern province of Sichuan have been suspended.

The outbreak has raised fears that China may be dealing with a disease that could cause as much havoc as SARS, the respiratory ailment that swept through parts of the country in 2003.

It also comes as the country is trying to deal with an outbreak of bird flu in its northwest.

 

[Martin]

Bird Flu:
Communicating the Risk

Health authorities want to spread the word that avian influenza has brought the world perilously close to a new flu pandemic. But raising awareness about uncertain threats can itself be perilous.




Peter M. Sandman and Jody Lanard
Perspectives in Health, a publication from the Pan American Health Organization

Used with permission of the authors.

(Vol. 10 No. 2 2005) -- Public health officials have a pandemic-size communication problem. Experts believe a deadly influenza pandemic is quite likely to be launched by the H5N1 avian virus that has killed millions of birds and dozens of people in Asia. They are more anxious than they have been in decades. But infectious diseases are unpredictable. H5N1 could disappear -- as swine flu did in 1976 -- and "The Great Pandemic of 2___" could arise from a strain that doesn't even exist yet. Even if H5N1 does cause a human pandemic, it might weaken and produce only mild disease. So it's hard for officials to know how aggressively to sound the alarm. They don't want to be accused of needlessly frightening the public. They also don't want to be accused -- later -- of leaving the public underprepared for a disaster.

Communication wouldn't be such a problem if it were possible to get ready for the next pandemic without talking to the public. It isn't. Health authorities want the public to be aware of this grave threat for three fundamental reasons: so people will prepare themselves emotionally and logistically; so people will help their schools, businesses, hospitals, and other organizations prepare; and so people will support the preparedness efforts of their governments. And there's a fourth reason: If and when a pandemic begins, people who have had time to get used to the idea are likelier to understand their risks, follow official advice, and take an active role in protecting themselves.

Health authorities know that too soft a warning just won't get heard; it's not easy to pierce people's apathy and squeeze yet another problem onto our already crowded lists of concerns. But they fear that too loud a warning could overshoot, provoking needless (or at least premature) fear and economic damage, perhaps even panic and an every-man-for-himself chaos. Authorities often miss the middle ground that can help build mutual trust: involving the public early, arousing an appropriate level of public fear, and helping people bear it.

Risk communication is a set of skills and understandings that can help health officials find and hold this middle ground. Our first paragraph above features several key risk communication approaches. It uses responsible speculation, it acknowledges uncertainty, it shares dilemmas about what to do, and it does not aim for zero fear. These and other risk communication recommendations help build mutual trust, one of the overarching goals of the World Health Organization's (WHO) newly published outbreak communication guidelines. The threat of bird flu presents a timely -- and urgent -- case for looking at how risk communication works...

Although people have always tried to figure out how to communicate about risks, the field of risk communication dates back only to the 1980s, evolving from health education, public relations, psychology, risk perception, and risk assessment. There are at least three kinds of risk communication:

• Precaution advocacy ("Watch out!"): How to alert people to serious hazards when they are unduly apathetic.

• Outrage management ("Calm down!"): How to reassure people about minor hazards when they are unduly upset.

• Crisis communication ("We'll get through it together!"): How to guide people through serious hazards when they are appropriately upset (or even in denial).
Bird flu risk communication is partly precaution advocacy and partly crisis communication. It's precaution advocacy if you're talking to Southeast Asian poultry farmers who haven't heard much yet about bird flu. It's crisis communication if you're talking to poultry farmers who are trying to figure out how to cope with this huge new threat to their flocks, their livelihoods, and potentially their lives. It will be crisis communication everywhere if and when the pandemic materializes.

Meanwhile, for most of us, it's precaution advocacy. Many infectious disease experts are as worried about H5N1 as they have ever been about any microorganism. They feel weirdly alienated when they try to explain their worry to spouses or friends -- or the general public. They have convinced a few medical journalists, who then feel weirdly alienated when they try to explain their worry to their editors. Bird flu is way over there in Asia. H5N1 is still flu, and flu is still the sort of risk people don't take all that seriously.

http://www.worldhealthnews.harvard.edu/#bird_flu

 

[libtoken]

Radio Australia stated a few moments ago that 32 people had died, 24 were in a critical condition, out of 163 cases found in 155 villages and 7 cities. Time to hunt for a written link...

 

[libtoken]

Found it...Published: Jul 30, 2005


BEIJING (AP) - A slaughterhouse worker contracted a pig-borne disease in southern China, a hospital official said Saturday. He was the first mainland case outside the Sichuan province, where 32 farmers have died since June from the illness.


Some 163 confirmed and suspected cases blamed on the bacteria streptococcus suis have been found in Sichuan in China's southwest, where farmers who handled or butchered infected pigs have been sickened in dozens of villages and towns.

The latest case is a 43-year-old man in Chaozhou, a city in Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong and is hundreds of miles southeast of Sichuan. He "recovered and was discharged," said an official from the Chaozhou Central Hospital, who would not give her name or any other details.

It wasn't clear whether Chinese health officials believed the case was linked to the Sichuan outbreak.

Phone calls to other government offices in Guangdong rang unanswered.

Guangdong officials provided information on the case to authorities in Hong Kong but didn't say whether they thought it was linked to Sichuan, said Eva Wong, a spokeswoman for the territory's Health Department.

An official of the Hong Kong Centre for Health Protection, Ching Cheuk-tuen, said initial evidence shows the Guangdong man fell ill after direct contact with pigs.

"The information given to us by Guangdong health officials shows they do not consider it to be special or unusual," Ching told reporters.

One case was reported in Hong Kong this week, but Wong said it wasn't believed to be connected to the Sichuan outbreak because the man hadn't traveled in the month before his illness.

It was Hong Kong's 10th such case since May 2004, according to the Health Department.

In Sichuan, 24 people are hospitalized in critical condition and 11 have been discharged, the Chinese Health Ministry said Saturday on its Web site. No person-to-person transmissions have been reported.

Cases have been found in five new sites in Sichuan, including the provincial capital of Chengdu, the China Daily newspaper said.

The official Xinhua News Agency said no family members of the man in Guangdong have shown symptoms, which include nausea, fever, vomiting, and bleeding under the skin.

Reports of the latest outbreak triggered fears that another epidemic was sweeping China, which has battled severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and avian influenza in the past two years.

The World Health Organization said it is the largest recent outbreak of the pig-borne disease in the region.
Xinhua on Thursday cited China's Health Minister, Gao Qiang, as saying the epidemic appeared to be under control in Sichuan but warning that the region still needs to take precautions.

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGB5YPDIRBE.html

 

[libtoken]

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A strain of bird flu harmful to humans has been found in Siberia, where thousands of birds have died in an outbreak of the disease, a Russian newspaper said on Saturday, quoting findings by official experts.

The newspaper Kommersant quoted the state veterinary service as saying laboratory experts had found the H5N1 strain in samples from the Novosibirsk region, where an outbreak of bird flu was reported last week.

Bird flu is split into strains such as H5 and H7, which in turn have nine different subtypes. H5N1 subtype is highly pathogenic and can be passed from birds to humans, although there have been no known cases of human-human transmission.

More than 50 people have died in Asia from H5N1 since late 2003, raising fears it could mutate and form the basis of a new global epidemic.

Officials were not immediately available for comment. There have been no reports about people contracting bird flu.

Russian officials initially said the outbreak -- first detected with significant mortality on July 18 -- has been caused by H5N2 strain, which does not affect humans.

Russia's top epidemiologist, Gennady Onishchenko, has said migratory birds, possibly from Southeast Asia, could have brought flu with them as they flew to Siberia for the summer.

Itar-Tass news agency said quarantine had been imposed in four districts of Novosibirsk region affected by bird flu.

 

[libtoken]

BEIJING (Reuters) - Sichuan province in southwestern China has launched a campaign to educate poor, illiterate farmers not to slaughter sick pigs or eat their meat after an outbreak of swine flu hit about 100 villages and killed at least 32 people.

Sichuan, the country's top pork-producing province, has been forced to suspend all exports of chilled and frozen pork from Ziyang city and surrounding Neijiang prefecture to Hong Kong, where there have been 10 infections since 2004.

More than 2 million notices have been issued in affected areas informing farmers of the dangers, the China Daily reported on Saturday, quoting a vice mayor of Ziyang, situated near the provincial capital, Chengdu.

About 50,000 health workers and officials have been sent to the areas to inspect and register every pig, and authorities have set up 39 temporary roadside quarantine stations to stop dead pigs from reaching markets.

"It's having a big effect ... In Sichuan, no one is buying meat or slaughtering hogs," Xie Hong of the animal feed company Southern Hope Co., part of the New Hope Group, told Reuters.

Pork is China's favorite meat and the country consumes more of it than anywhere else in the world. Of 618 million pigs slaughtered in 2004, Sichuan accounted for about 14 percent.

Authorities say victims were suffering from Streptococcus suis bacteria, or swine flu, an infection contracted from slaughtering, handling or eating infected pigs.

The disease, first reported in Neijiang, has spread to Chengdu itself and four other Sichuan cities. One case has been reported in the southern province of Guangdong near Hong Kong.

Two factories have resumed production of a vaccine used years ago to control previous outbreaks of swine flu.

Health officials in Sichuan and Beijing have been tight-lipped about the outbreak, which was discovered on June 24.STUBBORN FARMERS

Most low-income farmers insist on slaughtering sick pigs and eating the meat themselves instead of burying the carcasses with heavy disinfectant at their own expense, the China Daily said.

"If animals die from some unknown disease, most farmers deal with the carcass themselves and then eat the meat," it said. "Many farmers became sick after eating suspect pork."

An official at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention blamed the outbreak on unsanitary conditions at Sichuan's small-scale pig farms combined with a heatwave.

One victim, Li Haiqing, 55, lives in a single-storey house in Guashi village with 15 pigs, two of which have died, confined to a damp, dark and smelly sty across from his bedroom.

Wang Xingcheng, 55, a farmer in Renli village, developed a fever and lost hearing after eating infected pork. His brother who handled dead pigs had a fever for a few days while other members of the family remained healthy.

Many small-scale slaughter houses operate illegally and elude inspection checks. Such pork is sold to underground processors.

"No one likes to bother the local epidemic prevention station," one local veterinarian was quoted as saying.

Beijing has banned pig and pork imports from Sichuan and set up checkpoints on roads leading to the capital to block diseased pork and avert a health threat to its 15 million residents.

Swine flu is endemic in most pig-rearing countries but human infections are rare. Although China's state media have said no human-to-human infections had been found in Sichuan, the death toll is considered unusually high.

Swine flu is not known ever to have been passed between humans, but scientists fear it could mutate into a bug that could easily pass among people, unleashing a deadly epidemic.

 

[Kim99]

Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia, China

Four geographic areas seem to be "cause for concern" on the bird flu front, (as Henry Niman would say). They are Vietnam, Indonesia, Russia and China.


Vietnam (Thanhnien News):http://thanhniennews.com/healthy/?catid=8&newsid=8204
This is the easiest, although not necessarily the least concerning (I'm having trouble ranking different kinds of concerns, so I won't try). It's easiest because it represents "more of the same," where the "same" is not good. Two more H5N1 deaths have been reported, a 24 year old man from Tra Vinh (Mekong region, in the south) and a 26 year old woman from Ho Chi Minh City (also in the south). Both are confirmed bird flu cases, the first in the south for some time. The southern cases continue to be more serious than those from the north. Both cases were said to have eaten chicken before they became ill. So this disease, possibly in several different forms (north and south) continues to incubate and simmer in Vietnam, with endemic infection of poultry and sporadic but fairly steady human cases. Such smoldering is typical of pre-pandemic phases which then break out explosively. But of course, sometimes this doesn't happen. I'm not a betting person, so I prefer to purchase insurance for uncertain events in the form of adequate preparation. Are you listening CDC?

Indonesia:The reference laboratory in Hong Kong has confirmed what everyone knew anyway, that the index case in the family cluster of three fatal cases in a Jakarta suburb, the eight year old daughter, indeed died of H5N1. Tests results on her 1-year old sister are awaited but we know the answer already. Meanwhile, epidemiologic investigations seem to be coming up empty. How did this civil servant and his two children in a middle class suburb contract this fatal disease? We are learning some more details about the basis for the claim
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/re...40370125428963/
by the Indonesian Health Minister that they were infected by contaminated bird feces (the Chickensh%t Theory). The Minister of Agriculture reported that feces from a caged bird on the side of the road opposite the family's house were "positive for H5N1" but the bird in the cage showed no sign of the virus and other environmental sampling, including caged birds in neighbor's houses. So much for the Chickensh%t Theory.

The three family members fell ill
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2005_07_21a/en/index.html
on July 24, July 29 and July 2, so this doesn't sound like a common source outbreak but more like person to person (perhaps index case to other two family members). Indonesian authorities are following up some 300 contacts of the family, but have so far reported no additional illnesses. Forty-four referral hospitals have been alerted and prepared for possible new cases. So at the moment there is no identified source for the three fatal cases and the evidence of human to human transmission is strong.

Russia:
The bird flu outbreaks in Russia have been widely reported to be with H5N2 and therefore no risk to humans. Aside from the fact that it doesn't necessarily follow that H5N2 infections of birds are no risk to humans, the point is now moot, as fresh outbreaks are being identified as H5N1.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12255735.htm
Today the Russian Agriculture Ministry announced that the hundreds of chicken, geese, ducks and turkeys that died in Siberia last week died of H5N1 infection. This virus is on the wing, literally and figuratively, and it can't be stopped. It seems it will inevitably spread to bird populations outside of Asia, with the next stop likely the Indian sub-continent and Europe. The longer it circulates in birds and perhaps other species, the more likely it will be to adapt to humans, the most widely dispersed species on earth.

China:
Finally, the spreading outbreak in Sichuan, China
http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-07-29-voa16.cfm
The Chinese have steadfastly maintained that this is just a huge outbreak from the bacterium Streptococcus suis, Type 2, a known pig pathogen that occasionally infects humans, causing meningitis. While it is capable of causing the type of sepsis presenting in these cases, the large number and continued spread together with the hemorrhagic presentation seems quite atypical for S. suis and more like a viral etiology. There are now over 150 infections with new ones occurring daily. The death toll stands at 51 as of Thursday afternoon. While bird flu remains a possibility (we are continually reminded that a significant proportion of cases in 1918 presented like this) there is no mention of respiratory symptoms which should still predominate. This one remains a puzzle, and while the pig bacteria may turn out to be the cause, it sounds at this point like something else is going on (although my intuiution tells me it isn't bird flu, but of course I may be wrong).

But with so much else going on elsewhere, "something else going on in China" is the last thing I want to hear.

posted by Revere
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com
__________________

 

[Kim99]

This is a post from another board which sums up what a lot of people are saying about this pig disease epidemic:

it's probably H5N1

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I agree it's a virus, and I'm not an expert on viruseses, but that won't stop me from speculating. The mortality rate of this one is somewhere around 75%, based on known outcomes. Lots of viruses discussed don't fit, just because of that. The only explanations that seem even close, other than bird flu, are some new strain of ebola, or some bioengineered virus.

There's this well-known scientific principle called Occam's Razor, which says that the simplest explanation that explains the data tends to be the right one. In this case, we can either jump through hoops to explain how some new ebola or bioweapon has come from out of nowhere, or we can simply look to a known virus, H5N1, which is known to exist in many migratory birds which are probably flying over Sichuan this time of year anyway, and has even been shown to have a mutation (E627K I think) that is known to be associated with high virulence in mammals. Oh yeah, and let's not forget what all the scientists told us last year and the year before, that pigs are a perfect mixing vessel as they can catch both bird and human flu strains.

Best guess: Migratory birds are infecting pigs with H5N1, and although the strain isn't yet highly infectious to people (so as to cause very fast h2h spread), it is somewhat infectious, and once caught, tends to cause a cytokine storm which produces symptoms like what we're seeing. The one piece that SEEMS to be missing is respiratory symptoms. However there are documented cases of H5N1 with little or late respiratory symptoms, and also such symptoms may exist yet be kept out of media reports just because they would strongly indicate bird flu. (One Boxun report mentioned what was translated as "breath failure", and another mentioned the authorities withholding info on certain symptoms.)

 

[Kim99]

Anxious minister alone in facing bird flu threat Abdul Khalik, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta 7/30/05

Wearing a special white outfit complete with gloves and mask, Minister of Agriculture Anton Apriyantono was shouting stressfully to staff from the Tangerang animal husbandry office asking them if it was safe to open his mask to give an interview to the media.

Many reporters, waiting in front of the minister with no protective gloves or masks during a cull ceremony on a pig farm in Legok, Tangerang, Banten province last Sunday, were astonished to see how frightened he was.

For several minutes, no one seemed to listen to the minister's query as the ministry and regency staffers, reporters and hundreds of local people wore no protective gear -- the exceptions were Anton, the Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Alwi Shihab and two or three ministerial aides.

"Don't blame me if you get bird flu because you don't wear a mask. This is very dangerous, you know, as the virus can be transmitted through the air," he warned reporters through his mask.

Dozens of local and international journalists covered the ceremony as a total of 31 pigs and 40 ducks, which were said to be infected by bird flu, were slaughtered to show the public that efforts were being carried out to stop the spread of the virus.

Strangely, despite the minister's warning, his staff as well as those from Tangerang's animal husbandry office, provided just a few masks to the high-ranking officials on hand and some reporters, while leaving hundreds of local people, including many children, as well as most reporters unmasked during the ceremony.

They did not even have coordination and cooperation on how to safeguard the local people from such a very dangerous virus.

The Tangerang Regent Ismet Iskandar did not attend the high-profile event.

Poor Anton! It seemed that he was the only one sufficiently worried about the virus transmission in the area. The ministry's staff and Tangerang regency administration staff looked relax, even though hundreds of local people without masks stood closely watching the infected animals being slaughtered.

Looking at the half-hearted security efforts, many people attending the ceremony, questioned whether the animals were really infected bird flu, or whether it was just a public relations stunt to calm the public down.

The death of three Tangerang residents after being infected by bird flu -- Iwan Siswara Rafei, an official at the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) and his two daughters -- was clearly the main reason behind the limited cull, although it remains unclear whether Iwan and his children contracted the virus in Tangerang.

Shortly after the cull, the government declared Tangerang as a "red zone" for bird flu.

The regent later denied that there were any bird flu cases in Tangerang and asked the central government to revoke the red zone status. He insisted that the central government had no reason at all to declare his regency prone to the virus because the local animal husbandry office had not found any evidence of avian influenza there.

He also complained that the red zone status was having a negative impact on poultry breeders and market vendors, with their sales slashed by around 50 percent virtually over night.

If other local administrations like Tangerang challenge the central government, efforts to fight bird flu in the country will face huge difficulties while the spread of the virus continues.

What would happen if other local administrations in Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, etc., which have reportedly had sporadic outbreaks of the virus, simply refused to cooperate?

Since we now have regional autonomy, local regents, mayors and governors do not necessarily have to listen to the central government's orders. The government should discuss everything with local administrations before announcing a policy so the "Tangerang incident" (where local administrations ignore the central government) does not recur. The World Health Organization has warned that the bird flu virus could mutate and become a full-fledged human virus, creating a deadly, easily transferable, pandemic strain that could kill millions of people.


http://www.thejakartapost.com/misc/PrinterFriendly.asp
__________________

 

[Kim99]

This is from a different forum- advice about masks:

Here is a sight to buy some of the N95 rated masks (we use them in hog barns back home)

http://www.gemplers.com/a/shop/list.asp?UID=200507292118338285991451&SKW=2S5RESPN

My father buys them by the gross. Gemplers has good prices.
Don't get them from the big sites that cater to pharma, the mark up is more.

N95 is a NIOSH test if I remember right, it means it filters 95% of the particulate matter. Most of the masks are of the two strap kind. This type of mask will not protect against any type of toxic fumes, but will filter out dust and such very well. I grew up wearing the things.

Some basic things to remember. Do not have any facial hair while wearing them. Also, make sure to test the fit before hand. As I posted earlier, there are some faces that just don't fit any size of mask. Realize that if the flu hits the outside of the mask will be very "hot" if you are around any suspected cases. When disposing of the mask, make sure you don't touch the outside or accidentally get anything on your face. That is pretty easy to do, but it takes a few times to figure out how.

If you are buying for the whole family get a few different sizes. Unfortunately, they don't work that well for young kids (faces are to small). This type of mask is a once use type of thing. Don't try to reuse them (if at all possible), as they get harder to breath through the longer they are worn.

If you are sweating alot, the mask will get we and be harder to breath through. This will cause some people to panic and/or get dizzy.

One last thing. If you get the type with the exhale valve, check the valve before going anyplace suspect. Sometimes the little rubber flapper will get stuck open.

 

[Kim99]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16087181%5E7583,00.html


Christopher Pearson: Worth of a bird flu in hand

July 30, 2005
'THERE will be death and destruction," we are told, not if but when the Asian bird flu arrives. Klaus Stohr, the World Health Organisation's leading influenza expert, entertains no doubts on the matter. "The objective of pandemic preparedness can only be damage control."

John Horvath, the commonwealth's chief medical officer, takes a less apocalyptic tone. He says there is "a small but realistic chance", which he rates at one in 10, that the world will have to deal with a deadly new strain of bird flu during the next two years.

The most optimistic view is that bird flu may prove to be like the Y2K bug, a problem on which vast amounts of time and money were lavished and that never quite materialised.

Alternatively, some predict that a lethal virus will emerge, but more slowly than expected, after even the poorest nations have developed contingency plans and acquired stockpiles of the necessary drugs.

Fortunately, Australia is generally recognised as being better prepared to deal with a pandemic than any comparable country. Last year we cornered the world market in Oseltamivir, or Tamiflu as it's commercially known, the most effective anti-viral drug. The commonwealth has 3.9 million doses, enough to provide protection for essential services workers for about the first six weeks of an emergency and to treat the first tide of infection.









The federal Government also has pumped $5 million into CSL Limited, the former Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, to fast-track the development of a vaccine. Experts differ, but it's thought that this may well result in mass production of a vaccine in quantities sufficient to inoculate the whole population in about three months.

The underpinnings of our pandemic preparedness are the six-week window of anti-viral prophylaxis and delaying the spread of the disease through a program of border control and isolation of infectious cases.

If the bird flu were contained long enough -- say, for six to eight weeks -- a vaccine effective in about 80 per cent of cases could be developed and administered in timely fashion.

That's if everything goes according to plan. There are various grim, alternative scenarios. A single, highly infectious individual on a jumbo jet could transmit the virus to dozens or even hundreds of fellow passengers during an inbound flight. Anyone who has caught a bug in a jet's endlessly recycled air can readily imagine it. People might not start to display any symptoms until they'd dispersed all across the country and passed it on to thousands of others.

Then again, migratory geese or ducks from Southeast Asia could mock any attempt at border control, bringing a version of the virus with them. At first that would probably pose more of a risk to other birds than to humans, unless they came in contact with or ate the birds.

However, there has been a new wave of panicked reports from suburban Jakarta of human-to-human infection -- the crucial next stage in the evolution of a pandemic strain -- since July 18.

If a lethal, contagious version of avian flu were to be confirmed, everyday life would suddenly change quite dramatically. Customs officials, doctors and nurses, petrol tanker drivers, sewage and crematorium workers, supermarket staff and clergy would be given doses of Tamiflu. Everyone else, apart from the worst affected, would have to go without.

Health department officials would have emergency powers and control over civilian movement unheard of except in wartime. Schools and universities would go into recess for the duration. Public gatherings at cinemas, hotels, large sporting events and churches would be discouraged. People would be told to stay at home rather than risk exposure to infection. As in time of war, households would be urged to stock up on dry and tinned food.

Official estimates of the likely number of deaths vary. If the virus had an attack rate of 25 per cent of the population, it's thought that the toll might be between 13,000 and 44,000 fatalities. If anything were to go wrong in the production of the vaccine there could be many more.

As far as I'm aware, no one has yet attempted to calculate how much a disaster such as that might cost the national economy. It's sobering to consider how much worse off the rest of the developed world would be, apart from Finland, which also invested heavily in Tamiflu.

WHO staff have been sounding alarms since the first strains of lethal avian flu emerged in Hong Kong in 1997 and last month reiterated that "the world is in the greatest possible danger". Even the most successful terrorist coup pales by comparison with the disruption to the global economy that may await us.

For developed countries, the main problem would be one of keeping people in essential services protected from the virus and maintaining damage control systems. The imperatives associated with vaccine production are by now beginning to be well understood and it seems likely that adequate human and technical resources would be rapidly redirected where they're needed.

Perhaps even quite a large-scale human disaster wouldn't prove to be an economic catastrophe. It's conceivable that the IT economy, most home-based, self-employed workers and farm workers might tick along pretty much as usual. Perhaps it's only office and factory staff and miners who'd be in enforced idleness until the medical crisis was in hand.

A great deal would depend, in the first place, on how promptly the early signs of the human-to-human transmission stage were identified. The pandemic would probably have its most catastrophic consequences in the poorer parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Although international agencies such as the WHO have developed models for emergency planning, even some prosperous and well-governed states have negligible anti-viral stocks. Singapore, for example, could not guarantee the safety of its essential services workers if avian flu were to strike this year. As well, its position as an entrepot makes it peculiarly vulnerable to infection from people just passing through, as well as economically vulnerable.

Imagine how much more chaotic the situation would be in Papua New Guinea or East Timor. It seems unlikely that civil order would last very long and there might well not be sufficient troops to impose martial law where it was most needed. Food riots and the looting of hospital dispensaries could be expected. Among the young, the malnourished and the fast-growing group suffering from HIV-AIDS, mortality rates would be appallingly high and it's likely that in the larger towns the dead would lie unburied in the streets.

It is a tribute to the good sense of Australia's political class that it has understood the gravity of the situation and almost without exception refrained from point-scoring. In particular, Julia Gillard, Labor's health spokeswoman, has been a model of bipartisanship. However, that consensus approach may come unstuck when the main parties confront the hard political question of whether to give some of the national stockpile of Tamiflu to neighbouring countries that have none.

Protecting essential services workers in potentially failing states is plainly high on the list of foreign aid priorities. Putting Australian lives in jeopardy in the process might carry a high electoral price.

 

[Kim99]

This is a very long article so I'm not posting the whole thing. Please click on the link and read the whole thing. It's very interesting.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0530/050727_news_flu.php
NEWS

July 27 - August 2, 2005

Fatal Flu
A historic pandemic like that of 1918 is likely, perhaps as soon as this winter, and unless you're a health or government worker, no one's planning to save you.

by Roger Downey


In Seattle, the police wore masks during the great 1918–19 flu pandemic, which killed 1,600 here, 600,000–700,000 in the U.S., and 20 million worldwide.
(Time Life Pictures / Getty Images)

More on Flu:

The best resource for breaking news about the spread of avian flu is avianflu.typepad.com/avianflu.

The World Health Organization's main avian flu site is designed mostly for professionals, but there's a great deal of information there for concerned lay people as well.

For a quick overview of pandemic influenza as it affected Seattle in 1918, see HistoryLink.

A more extended treatment, with sidelights on today's threat, is to be found in William Dietrich's 2004 cover story for the Pacific Northwest magazine of The Seattle Times.




Qinghai Lake is a long way off the beaten path, but in August and September the huge salt lake in northwest China is a great place for bird-watchers, as hundreds of thousands of migratory waterfowl rise and wheel above its shallow, fish-rich waters before beginning long journeys back to their winter feeding grounds in Europe, Alaska, and Australia.

This summer, they leave behind a less edifying sight: thousands of birds, dead and rotting, washing up on the Qinghai beaches. Tests show that the birds died from infection with a virulent strain of avian influenza that goes by the designation A (H5N1). This is very bad news for breeders of domestic ducks, geese, and even chickens, because their closely confined flocks can be devastated by infections from their wild cousins from afar.

It is even worse news for humans, because this strain of "bird flu" also kills people. In 1997, half a dozen residents of Hong Kong succumbed after picking it up from infected domestic birds. After a brief reappearance in 2003 in Hong Kong, H5N1 broke out with a vengeance in early 2004 in Vietnam and Thailand, killing thousands of domestic fowl, requiring the destruction of millions more, and killing 23 people—more than half of those who became infected. Scariest of all, the Southeast Asian outbreak provided evidence for the first time that people were not just catching the flu from birds but from each other.

World health experts have been issuing ever more alarming warnings that the H5N1 flu strain, if it becomes easily transmissible between humans, could sweep the world in a matter of months, as did the last big pandemic flu outbreak in 1918–19, which killed more than 20 million people worldwide, up to 700,000 of them in the U.S. Until last year, though, health officials found it difficult to get the attention of politicians in a position to act. Even before the Qinghai outbreak, there was indirect evidence that avian flu was well established in China, but the Chinese government, following the same if-you-don't-mention-it-it-will-go-away policy that allowed the SARS virus to spread unnoticed, won't talk about it. Scientists who asked to study live Qinghai birds, to see if they were carriers of H5N1, were told to mind their own business. And, of course, the highest authorities in the U.S. have been preoccupied with more urgent issues, like Terri Schiavo, school prayer, and gay marriage.

Nonetheless, growing pressure from the scientific and health communities has slowly forced the issue on authorities. Scientist-bureaucrats ranging from Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease chief of the National Institutes of Health, to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding recently issued warnings that the threat of a pandemic outbreak is both severe and immediate. Even President Bush's choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Mike Leavitt, chosen primarily for his reputation as a ferocious welfare and health care "reformer," has begun to beat the drum to attract attention to the possibly imminent threat..........

 

[Kim99]

http://www.interfax.ru/e/B/politics/28.html?id_issue=11356463
Jul 31 2005 4:39PM
Man hospitalized with bird flu symptoms in Kazakhstan
ASTANA. July 31 (Interfax) - A 20-year-old man showing bird flu symptoms has been hospitalized in Kazakhstan's Pavlodar region, where 600 domestic geese died between July 20 and July 30 as a result of an outbreak of the disease in the area.

The patient, a poultry farm worker from the village of Golubovka, was later diagnosed with double pneumonia and taken to the intensive care unit of Pavlodar's regional infectious diseases hospital in a critical condition, sources in the region's emergency medicine center told Interfax.

"All birds that might have contracted the disease from the infected geese have already been slaughtered and the poultry farm has been disinfected. Virus samples have been sent to Kazakhstan's National Veterinary Center in Astana to establish a final diagnosis," Emergency Situations Ministry sources told Interfax.

The first deaths of birds in Golubovka were registered a week ago, Yersain Aitzhanov, chief of the Irtysh district's emergency situations department, told Interfax. A quarantine order has been imposed in the village. "All necessary measures are being taken: the territory is being ploughed, additional fences have been built around the farm and a ban has been introduced on the delivery of poultry products and eggs from the village," Aitzhanov said.

 

[Kim99]

I just want to say we're now running two threads, one on bird flu and one on "pig disease". There's still a possibility these two may be connected. Pigs can get bird flu and other viruses which could combine(pigs are known "mixing vessels")and become some sort of mutated flu. Of course there's always the possibility that China is now seeing two different epidemics that are threatening to get out of control. Either way, not exactly good news.

 

[Kim99]

http://www.northjersey.com/page.php...FeXk2NzM3NTI1JnlyaXJ5N2Y3MTdmN3ZxZWVFRXl5Mg==
Unarmed against a flu pandemic

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Sunday, July 31, 2005

By DAVID BROWN
WASHINGTON POST NEWS SERVICE



WASHINGTON - Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively and will not have them anytime soon.

Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades - the H5N1 "bird flu" in Asia - is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.

If the virus were to start spreading in the next year, the world would have only a relative handful of doses of an experimental vaccine to defend against a disease that, history indicates, could potentially kill millions. If the vaccine proved effective and every flu vaccine factory in the world started making it, the first doses would not be ready for four months. By then, the pathogen would probably be on every continent.

Theoretically, antiviral drugs could slow an outbreak and buy time. The problem is that only one licensed drug, oseltamivir, appears to work against bird flu. At the moment, not enough is stockpiled for widespread use. Nor is there a plan to deploy the small amount that exists in ways that would most effectively slow the disease.

The public, conditioned to believe in the power of modern medicine, has heard little of how poorly prepared the world is to confront a flu pandemic, which is an epidemic that strikes several continents simultaneously and infects a substantial portion of the population.

Since the current wave of avian flu began sweeping through poultry in Southeast Asia more than 18 months ago, international and U.S. health authorities have warned of the danger and tried to mobilize. Research on vaccines has accelerated, efforts to build drug supplies are under way, and discussions take place regularly on developing a coordinated global response.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will spend $419 million in pandemic planning this year. The National Institutes of Health's influenza research budget has quintupled in the past five years.

"The secretary or the chief of staff - we have a discussion about flu almost every day," said Bruce Gellin, head of Health and Human Services' National Vaccine Program Office. This week, a committee is to give health secretary Mike Leavitt an updated plan for confronting a pandemic.

Despite these efforts, the world's lack of readiness to meet the threat is vast, experts say.

"The only reason nobody's concerned the emperor has no clothes is that he hasn't shown up yet," Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, said recently of the world's efforts to prepare for pandemic flu. "When he appears, people will see he's naked."..........

This article is long, I didn't post the whole thing.

 

[Kim99]

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_3964804,00.html
A pandemic warning
July 31, 2005

For several years now, infectious-disease experts have been warning the public about the next global pandemic. Well worth reading, in our view, is a series of articles in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, which its editors have generously offered the international health community as a "call to action."

The series' focus is H5N1, the lethal avian influenza virus, which has so far killed 59 people who came into contact with infected birds. The dilemma is that scientists cannot predict with certainty whether the virus could evolve and become capable of human-to-human transmission. If it does, writes Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, "humanity could well face a pandemic unlike any ever witnessed."

"Or," she continues, "nothing at all could happen." But the worst-case scenario is well worth pondering: without an effective vaccine there would be a 20 percent mortality rate, with as many as 16 million deaths in the U.S. alone; billions lost in commerce as borders close, disrupting trade and travel; global insecurity due to the reduced strength of armed forces and police. In other words, global "viral carnage."

Many developed countries, including the U.S., are spending more money to defend against such a scenario. But there's still no anti-H5N1 vaccine. Several things make it difficult to produce, including fewer vaccine producers willing to take the financial risk and the changing and seasonal nature of viruses themselves, which undermine the time-consuming process of making effective vaccines.

Garrett notes that H5N1 has rapidly mutated, jumping recently to infect pigs. In fact, the scientific evidence points to the potential that it will soon mutate into a human-pandemic form. Which is why she concludes that, "Those responsible for foreign policy and national security, the world over, cannot afford to ignore the warning."

 

[Kim99]

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/07310501...Kazakhstan.html

Likely H5N1 Bird Flu Case in Golubovka Kazakhstan

Recombinomics Commentary

July 31, 2005

A 20-year-old man showing bird flu symptoms has been hospitalized in Kazakhstan's Pavlodar region, where 600 domestic geese died between July 20 and July 30 as a result of an outbreak of the disease in the area.

The patient, a poultry farm worker from the village of Golubovka, was later diagnosed with double pneumonia and taken to the intensive care unit of Pavlodar's regional infectious diseases hospital in a critical condition, sources in the region's emergency medicine center told Interfax.

"All birds that might have contracted the disease from the infected geese have already been slaughtered and the poultry farm has been disinfected. Virus samples have been sent to Kazakhstan's National Veterinary Center in Astana to establish a final diagnosis," Emergency Situations Ministry sources told Interfax.

The above report strongly suggest the first H5N1 reported case in Kazakhstan. Golubovka is just 120 miles southwest of Kupino, on of the locations in Novosibusrk positive for H5N1. Both locations are just southwest of Chany Lake, where H5 has been isolated previously. These earlier isolates share regions of homology with the H5N1 isolates from Qinghai Lake, and all outbreaks have involved fatal infections of geese, which usually are resistant to H5N1..

A pneumonia case in Kazakhstan supports the rumors that the pneumonia cases in Tacheng, Xinjiang province are additional human H5N1 cases in China. The isolation was said to be for patients and staff with bacterial pneumonia, which is not serious or contagious.

The likely human case in Kazakhstan also lends support for detailed reports of human cases in Qinghai Province near Qinghai Lake. The sequences of the isolates contain mammalian polymorphism and were lethal in experimental chickens and mice, again pointing toward a significant risk for serious human cases.

Boxun reports on patients in Sichuan also raise the possibility of H5N1 infections. Sichuan is adjacent to Qinghai province and media has been barred from talking to patients or residents, strongly suggesting the fatal cases involve more than bacterial infections. The viral component could be Ebola, H5N1, or both.

The possibility of a raging pandemic in China appears to be more likely than ever and the failure of China to release samples and information should be addressed by more than just WHO, who have not been given permission to visit Tacheng, which is five miles from the Kazakhstan border.

 

[libtoken]

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L01337458.htm

Russia bird flu could spread to EU - vet official
01 Aug 2005 09:22:45 GMT

Source: Reuters

By Aleksandras Budrys

MOSCOW, Aug 1 (Reuters) - A strain of bird flu dangerous to humans could spread to parts of the European Union from Siberia, a senior Russian veterinary official warned on Monday.

Chances were "very high" the strain found in the Novosibirsk region could spread to other parts of Siberia, the official from the Russian Veterinary and Phytosanitary Inspection Service told Reuters.

"There is also a possibility that bird flu could spread to the European Union as (infected) wild birds from China may have been in contact in Russia with birds that will fly on to the Netherlands, France and elsewhere," the official said.

"North America is not safe either, as some birds from Russia fly there, too," said the official who did not wish to be named.

The official said it had been confirmed on Friday that birds in the Novosibirsk region were infected with the H5N1 strain of bird flu, which is dangerous to humans, and not with H5N2, as had previously been believed.

Bird flu is split in strains such as H5 and H7, which in turn have nine different subtypes. H5N1 subtype is highly pathogenic and can be passed from birds to humans, although there have been no known cases of human to human transmission.

More than 50 people have died in Asia from H5N1 since late 2003, raising fears it could mutate and form the basis of a global epidemic.

The official said a quarantine had been imposed in the Novosibirsk region and veterinary officials were examining samples taken on farms in other Siberian regions where migrating wild birds from China may have landed.

He said neighbouring Kazakhstan, where deaths of poultry and wild birds in the northern Pavlodar region have been registered, may also have a bird flu strain similar to Russia's last month.

"We have been in contact with the Kazakhs. The probability that they have the same type of virus is very high, as some birds fly to Russia from China through Kazakhstan. But it will take some time to have it confirmed," the official said.

Russian media reported on Monday that a poultry farm worker in Kazakstan could have bird flu. But a spokesman for the Kazakh Health Ministry said the man, who was taken to hospital on Saturday, was suffering from pneumonia.

A spokesman for the Russian emergencies ministry said on Monday that so far no cases of humans being infected with bird flu had been registered.

He said over 2,000 birds died of the virus in 18 villages in Novosibirsk region. Experts were also checking cases of deaths of poultry and wild birds in the neighbouring regions of Omsk and Altai.

 

[HangingDog]

Kim99

You are awsome.

I appreciate the info you are posting.

Wayne

 

[HangingDog]

Here is an article from Apr 4 regarding UK govt view of Avian Flu

These sorts of things are pretty telling

Govt officials seem to look at this like a chess game, sometimes the outcome is certain even before the game is over

Lets hope AI goes the way of Ebola in Africa a few years ago when the Ebola mutated itself out of existence after killing about 350 people.

=============


http://www.newstarget.com/006341.html

Posted Apr 4, 2005 PT
British officials planning for 750,000 bird flu deaths, newspaper reports

The British newspaper The Independent says emergency management officials are planning for an anticipated bird flu pandemic to kill up to 750,000 people in that country. The paper says officials are, among other things, looking for morgue sites that will hold more than 1,000 bodies each. The bird flu has killed at least 50 people in Asia in recent months, and world health officials say it's likely the virus will eventually spread to other regions. Related articles on this topic are also available on the NewsTarget Network, including: Why the bird flu (see related ebook on bird flu) virus is less deadly but more dangerous.

See more articles like this one at www.BirdFluReport.org

Original news summary: (http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=624058)

Mortuaries and emergency services are to be put on alert and told to prepare for up to three-quarters of a million deaths from a bird flu pandemic, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.