LONDON - Britain confirmed its first case of bird flu

Tefila ↓

Mon, Oct 24 2005, 11:07 am

LONDON - Britain confirmed its first case of bird flu since 1992, saying the virus that killed a parrot in quarantine is the same deadly strain that has plagued Asia and recently spread to Europe.

Scientists determined the parrot, imported from South America, died of the H5N1 strain that has devastated poultry stocks and killed 61 people in Asia over the past two years, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said on Sunday.

The virus is being spread by migrating wild birds and has recently been found in birds in Russia, Turkey and Romania, spurring efforts around the globe to contain it.

While H5N1 is easily transmitted between birds, it is hard for humans to contract. But experts fear it could mutate into a form of flu that is easily transmitted between humans and cause a pandemic that could kill millions.

Debby Reynolds, DEFRA’s chief veterinarian, said the parrot was likely infected with the virus while it was in quarantine with birds from Taiwan. Tests conducted on the Taiwanese birds that had died were inconclusive, the department said.

DEFRA said the virus most closely matched a strain found in ducks in China earlier this year but was not very similar to strains discovered in Romania and Turkey. The genetic makeup of the virus changes slightly as it spreads, and scientists use such tests to track its migration across the world.

On Monday, Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry confirmed bird flu in another central region.

Seventy birds in the village of Yuzhny in the Tambov region, about 250 miles southeast of Moscow, have fallen ill with the disease, ministry spokeswoman Veronika Smolskaya said. Eight of the birds died and 48 were slaughtered over the past day, the Interfax news agency reported.

Poultry bans
Bird flu devastated flocks in several regions in Siberia and the Urals during the summer, and last week it hit a village about 200 miles south of Moscow. Preliminary tests confirmed the poultry there had been infected with the H5N1 strain, and authorities culled all 3,000 birds in the village.

On Sunday, the Croatian government promised to compensate villagers and farmers whose birds were slaughtered to prevent the spread of bird flu. About 10,000 domestic birds have been killed in an area near a national park where six swans were found to have been infected with the virus.

The European Commission on Friday said it was preparing a ban on all poultry imports from the country, while some individual European nations have already done so.

In related developments:

Indonesia’s agriculture minister said Monday the country will revise laws that have been used to prevent health authorities from investigating suspected bird flu outbreaks in commercial poultry farms. When the deadly H5N1 strain first appeared in Indonesia two years ago, the country’s 11 biggest poultry producers blocked access to their farms, hampering efforts to fight the virus. Bird flu has killed three people in Indonesia.
Sweden said one of four ducks found dead in an area west of Stockholm Friday was infected with bird flu, but not the deadly H5N1 strain.
The European Union said its bird flu experts will discuss a possible ban on imports of wild birds into the 25-nation bloc on Tuesday. The EU has so far resisted calls to ban all pet bird imports, fearing it could create a black market that could increase the threat of infected birds being smuggled in.
Indian drug maker Cipla Ltd. said Monday that it could produce 50,000 doses of the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu a month starting early next year, as it pressed Roche of Switzerland for a license to manufacture a generic version of the drug.

Roche has been under growing pressure from governments and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to license generic versions of Tamiflu, which is used in treating humans who have bird flu.

↑ Tefila

Thu, Nov 10 2005, 8:26 pm

Bird flu could have the ferocity of a global war
World Health Organization leaders meet to discuss prevention
World Health Organization (WHO)Director-General Lee Jong-wook at the opening of a global bird flu conference at the WHO headquarters in Geneva on Monday.

By Robert Bazell
Correspondent
NBC News
Updated: 1:26 p.m. ET Nov. 9, 2005

GENEVA - An outbreak of avian flu could attack societies with the ferocity of a global war, bringing widespread deaths and illness, and severe disruptions of the economy and social networks.

That is the fear expressed by many of the leaders at a meeting of more than 100 countries here at World Health Organization Headquarters in Geneva.

And just as they would respond to the threat of war, the leaders say individual nations and international agencies should take every action to try to prevent the disaster and hope it does not happen, but must prepare as best as possible in case it does.

Why the fear?
The current outbreak of the H5N1 virus in birds, now in its second year, is unprecedented. Hundreds of millions of birds have either been killed directly by the virus or been culled in efforts to contain the outbreaks. That alone has economically devastated farmers and those who depend on them in many Asian nations.

The existence of the virus in migrating birds indicates it will persist for the foreseeable future, as it spreads throughout Asia, recently to Europe and soon to the Middle East and Africa.

But of course it is the occasional human case that is causing the great concern. Among the approximately 120 people infected so far, the death rate has been 50 percent.

No one knows what the death rate would be if the virus mutates so it can pass easily from person to person – or whether such a mutation will ever take place. But it is worth noting that the death rate in the 1918 pandemic that killed 20-50 million people in the world was three percent.

And H5N1 is so different from any influenza virus that has previously infected humans that no one would have natural immunity if the virus were able to easily infect people.

Need for more vaccines
Vaccines to prevent an infection will not be an option for this year in the United States and Europe and for many more years, if ever, in the rest of the world.

The entire world capacity for producing influenza vaccine is now 300 million doses a year, just enough for the U.S. alone. And it takes at least six months from the identification of a virus until the appropriate vaccine is produced.

There is much talk of expanding vaccine manufacturing but it will not happen quickly. The anti-viral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza are getting a lot of attention.

Many European nations have purchased enough to treat 20 percent or more of their populations. Japan has enough to treat almost all its citizens. The U.S. has far less, as do most countries.

The World Health Organization announced today that Roche, the pharmaceutical company which makes Tamiflu, will be able to produce 115 million additional doses next year and 300 million in 2007. But many experts caution that the evidence that the drugs could contain or mitigate a pandemic outbreak is weak.

What can be done now?
The consensus that has emerged at the WHO meeting here in Geneva is that the best hope lies with earliest identification of bird and human cases and attempts to contain them whenever they break out.

To make that a possibility richer nations need to support efforts in poor countries. For example a chicken farmer must be adequately compensated for any animals that are killed so he will not hide cases. Every nation needs to have the laboratory facility to make at least a preliminary identification of H5N1.

But the challenge is enormous. If a large bird flu outbreak were confirmed in humans, panic would ensue. Everyone with a respiratory infection would be a suspected case.

Nations would almost certainly slam their borders shut. But the experts say the only hope of mitigating this potential catastrophe is to plan for it now.

IndyMom ↓

Thu, Nov 10 2005, 10:07 pm

Here's the deal with the bird flu. It's either gonna kill a ton of people like the 1918 spanish flu taht killed 20 million people worldwide - and there is nothing we can do about it, or it will mimic 1967's pandemic that only killed 35,000 people world wide. WE have no way of knowing it's ferocity. The pathogenicity of the virus is hard to predict becasue it keeps mutating, and when it finally finds a way to bind to alpha 2,6 linked sialic acid in our lungs and become highty contagious we will then be able to study the pathogenicity of that specific strain becuase we will be able to look at the cleavage site of thehemaglutinin protien and see if it contains many polybasic groups. Of course, by the time scientists see the amino acid sequence millions of people might die. Anyway -I have looked into this and there is nothing we can do about it, so why worry. let's just daven that the strain mutates into a nonpathogenic virus.

Do I sound like I know what I am talking about? I just gave a lecture on this for my biochemistry class and I am still waiting to find out my grade. Smile