Tracking the next pandemic: Avian Flu Talk |
.K.s Bird Flu Risk May Increase From Next Month |
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Posted: July 07 2006 at 4:11pm |
U.K.'s Bird Flu Risk May Increase From Next Month (Update2)
July 7 (Bloomberg) -- The risk of bird flu re-entering the U.K. will be higher between August and November, when wild fowl typically fly through the country during winter migration, a government report said. Outbreaks of the lethal H5N1 avian influenza strain in countries along flyways that overlap the U.K. would also increase the probability of infection, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, known as Defra, said yesterday. Governments and international health authorities are monitoring for H5N1, which has the potential to mutate into a pandemic form that may kill millions of people. Poultry deaths in Romania, scheduled to join the European Union in 2007, are raising concern that the virus is lingering in domestic and wild bird populations, Defra said on its Web site. ``The virus may continue to be introduced in some parts of the EU and eventually arrive in the U.K. because of the potential for limited mixing at some contact points between the existing wild water-bird populations from Eastern Europe with the populations in the EU,'' Defra said. A flu outbreak killing 70 million people worldwide may cause global economic losses of as much as $2 trillion, the World Bank said last week. Since late 2003, H5N1 is known to have infected at least 229 people, mainly in Asia, killing 131 of them, the Geneva-based World Health Organization said on July 4. Seasonal Pattern Reports of human cases have tended to be highest during the cooler periods in the Northern Hemisphere, the WHO said in its June 30 issue of the Weekly Epidemiological Record. If this pattern continues, an increase in cases could be anticipated starting in late 2006 or early 2007, the report said. ``We have to get used to a seasonal pattern of avian influenza in the coming months and years,'' said Zsuzsanna Jakab, director of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, at a press conference in Brussels today. ``As long as the virus is endemic in Asia and parts of Africa, it's quite likely it will reappear in Europe.'' In Egypt, a seventh person died of H5N1, Cairo's Al-Wafd newspaper reported on its Web site yesterday. An 18-year-old woman died at the general hospital of Qena, in southern Egypt, several days after her hospitalization, the newspaper said, citing Ahmed Farrag, a regional legal official who authorized the woman's burial. The report didn't say when the woman died. Indonesia Indonesia may have recorded its 41st H5N1 fatality after a 3-year-old girl who died yesterday tested positive for the virus at a local laboratory, I Nyoman Kandun, director general of disease control and environment at the Ministry of Health, said in a phone interview today. More birds are dying from avian flu in Indonesia because of poor vaccination particularly in the small-scale and backyard farms, the country's Agriculture Ministry said in a statement, citing Mathur Riady, director-general of livestock production. One million fowl, half them of quail, died of bird flu in the first three months of this year, compared with a total of 1.2 million in 2005. Cases in fowl may have been under-reported last year, the ministry said. The virus is endemic in about 80 percent of 33 provinces in the Southeast Asian nation. Denmark said yesterday that a low-pathogenic strain of an H5 avian flu subtype infected fowl on a farm with 25,000 mallards, pheasants, ducks, geese and ornamental birds at Loevel in Viborg county. The outbreak began on July 5, almost a month after a low- pathogenic form of the virus was reported on June 2, Denmark's Chief Veterinary Officer Preben Willeberg said in a report to the World Organization for Animal Health. Winter The U.K. and Denmark are among 37 countries reporting initial outbreaks this year, according to the Paris-based organization. More than 209 million poultry have died or been culled worldwide since January 2004 because of H5N1, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said June 19. A severe winter in Russia and the Caucasus area at the end of 2005 pushed migratory birds south and westward, the FAO said. That may happen again this year, Defra said. ``Tools are currently being developed, based on known information of bird migration routes and abundance, to estimate this likelihood more accurately, and to assess changes in likelihood to the U.K. in the event of new outbreaks elsewhere,'' Defra said in its working paper, written by Mirzet Sabirovic, Simon Hall, John Wilesmith, Nick Coulson and Fred Landeg. Since January, at least 55 people have died from H5N1 strain in Azerbaijan, Cambodia, China, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq and Turkey, the WHO said. That compares with 19 fatalities in Vietnam and Cambodia in the first six months of 2005. Turkey's government agreed to publicly release genetic sequence information from H5N1 viruses isolated from four Turkish patients. The data has been submitted to the Influenza Sequence Database at Los Alamos, New Mexico. ``This represents a long-awaited resource to public health institutes and research institutes around the world,'' the WHO's European Regional Office said today on its Web site. To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Gale in Singapore at j.gale@bloomberg.net |
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The title should say UK. |
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``We have to get used to a seasonal pattern of avian influenza in the coming months and years,'' said Zsuzsanna Jakab, director of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, at a press conference in Brussels today. ``As long as the virus is endemic in Asia and parts of Africa, it's quite likely it will reappear in Europe.''
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This sprinkling of deaths could happen in various countries for 5, 10, 15 yrs? Until it is spread by sneezing. They may find something by then.
Nanotechnology... is working on HIV/Aids now. Hello Gates Foundation.
This is not new news but interesting. Science gone wild.
"Osterhaus argues. "If, on the other hand, it failed to transform H5N1 into a highly contagious human virus, we could relax."
Duhhh
I feel like this....
Wendy Barclay-
"If you get a negative, how can you be sure that you have tested every option?" she says.
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Superflu is being brewed in the lab17:42 26 February 2004 After the worldwide alarm triggered by 2003's SARS outbreak, it might seem reckless to set about creating a potentially far more devastating virus in the lab. But that is what is being attempted by some researchers, who argue that the dangers of doing nothing are even greater. We already know that the H5N1 bird flu virus ravaging poultry farms in Asia can be lethal on the rare occasions when it infects people. Now a team is tinkering with its genes to see if it can turn into a strain capable of spreading from human to human. If they manage this, they will have created a virus that could kill tens of millions if it got out of the lab. Many researchers say experiments like this are needed to answer crucial questions. Why can a few animal flu viruses infect humans? What makes the viruses deadly? And what changes, if any, would enable them to spread from person to person and cause pandemics that might prove far worse than that of 1918? Once we know this, they argue, we will be better prepared for whatever nature throws at us. Others disagree. It is not clear how much we can learn from such work, they argue. And they point out that it is already possible to create a vaccine by other means. The work is simply too dangerous, they say. "I'm getting bombarded from both sides," says Ronald Atlas, head of the Center for Deterrence of Biowarfare and Bioterrorism at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "Some say that this sort of research is dangerous because of the risk of the virus escaping or being using in bioterrorism, and others that it's good science." Rodents and monkeysSome researchers refuse to discuss their plans. But Jacqueline Katz at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, told New Scientist her team is already tweaking the genes of the H5N1 bird flu virus that killed several people in Hong Kong in 1997, and those of the human flu virus H3N2. She is testing the ability of the new viruses to spread by air and cause disease in ferrets, whose susceptibility to flu appears to be remarkably similar to ours. Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus University in Rotterdam in the Netherlands plans to test altered viruses on rodents and macaque monkeys. Other groups are also considering similar experiments, he says. If such work were to show that H5N1 could cause a human pandemic, everything that is happening in Asia would be even more alarming, Osterhaus argues. If, on the other hand, it failed to transform H5N1 into a highly contagious human virus, we could relax. "It becomes a veterinary health problem, not a public health problem. That would be an enormous relief." Cell culturesBut Wendy Barclay of the University of Reading in the UK, who "thought long and hard" about trying to create a pandemic flu virus before abandoning the idea, disagrees. "If you get a negative, how can you be sure that you have tested every option?" she says. Health authorities would still have to take the precaution of creating H5N1 vaccines. Barclay concedes, however, that creating a virus that spreads in people might tell us how real the threat is. For instance, do you need one mutation for H5N1 to adapt to humans, or dozens? Osterhaus is more optimistic. "Within the next decade, the whole thing will be solved," he says. "We will know the rules." In other words, once experts understand what the genetic sequence of any flu virus means, they could predict which animals it can infect, how severe it will be, and how easily it will spread. Yet any new viruses could only be tested in human cell cultures or in animals, not on people. None of these methods exactly reflects how flu behaves in humans. This has led some flu experts to argue that attempts to create a pandemic virus should be put on hold until there is agreement on the best way of testing it. Mix flu genesAnd there is an even more fundamental objection to such experiments: the processes used to create the viruses may be too artificial. Researchers who want to see if H5N1 can be pandemic can take two approaches. One is to tinker with the genome of the bird flu virus to mimic mutations that might occur naturally. This can be done precisely using a technique called reverse genetics. The other approach is to mix bird flu genes with those of human flu viruses, either using reverse genetics or through random re-assortment in cells infected with both types. Although re-assortment sounds more natural, there is a problem. "Re-assortments can be made very easily in the lab using cells or animals," says flu expert Graeme Laver, formerly at the Australian National University in Canberra. "But one of the big mysteries is that [human] viruses that appear by reassortment are extremely rare in nature. There is something else involved that we don't understand." Then there is the question of safety. The worst-case scenario is that researchers might end up engineering extremely dangerous viruses that would never have evolved naturally. Masks or hoodsIn 2001, for instance, Australian researchers created a mousepox virus far more virulent than any wild strains. This scenario is unlikely, but not impossible, says virologist Earl Brown of the University of Ottawa, Canada. "You could create something that is right out of whack, but I'd be surprised." For those reasons, several prominent flu researchers told New Scientist that the H5N1 experiments must be done at the highest level of containment: Biosafety Level 4, or BSL-4. But the CDC work is being done at BSL-3Ag, an intermediate level between BSL-3 and BSL-4. Workers wear half-suits with masks or hoods to prevent infection, for instance, rather than full-body suits as in BSL-4. "US Department of Agriculture guidelines specify that work with highly pathogenic avian strains be done in BSL-3+ (also known as BSL-3Ag) laboratories," a CDC spokeswomen says. One of the reasons is that the H5N1 virus is regarded as a non-contagious, treatable disease in humans. But this is not necessarily true of all of the genetically engineered strains that might be created. And drug supplies would quickly run out if an escaped virus triggered a major epidemic. New variantsA recent report by the US National Academy of Sciences recommends a series of checks be put in place to control such research. It says a panel of leading scientists and security experts should be set up to regulate it. "Some public representation is another option," says Atlas, who helped draw up the report. At the moment, however, such experiments can be carried out without any special consultation. Methods like reverse genetics might also be used to create new variants of other diseases. "You can make some pretty unusual things new viruses that would never have existed in nature," says Barclay. "It's not just an issue for flu." With additional reporting by Michael Le Page |
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How do they know? |
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liltravers
Valued Member Joined: June 25 2006 Status: Offline Points: 1 |
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Has anyone heard of the Nanomask produced by Emergency Filtration Products and has been proven to be the only masks to stop and kill the bird flu virus.
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Jhetta
Valued Member Joined: March 28 2006 Status: Offline Points: 1272 |
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Note Jhetta: If you were looking for a way to make a vaccine that would protect us in the event it jumps... this would be a good start. H3N2 is one of the worlds most prevalent circulating strains. If you were going to look for a strain with the highest likely hood of combining with H5N1... H3N2 would be it! Ferrets have receptors that are similar to ours.
H5N1 experiments must be done at the highest level of containment: Biosafety Level 4, or BSL-4. CDC work is being done at BSL-3Ag, an intermediate level between BSL-3 and BSL-4. Workers wear half-suits with masks or hoods to prevent infection, for instance, rather than full-body suits as in BSL-4.
US Department of Agriculture guidelines specify that work with highly pathogenic avian strains be done in BSL-3+ (also known as BSL-3Ag) laboratories," Note: End Jhetta Influenza A (H3N2) viruses circulated worldwide http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5436a3.htm "United StatesIn the United States, CDC uses seven systems for national influenza surveillance, including the following four that operate year-round: 1) collaborating laboratories of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System (NREVSS) report the number, types, and subtypes of influenza viruses detected; 2) approximately 2,250 sentinel health-care providers report patient visits for influenza-like illness (ILI), and approximately 500 of these providers continue regular reporting throughout the summer; 3) 122 U.S. cities report mortality attributed to influenza and pneumonia on a weekly basis; and 4) a national surveillance system records pediatric deaths associated with laboratory-confirmed influenza (1). During May 22--September 3,§ WHO and NREVSS collaborating laboratories tested 14,016 respiratory specimens; 120 (0.9%) were positive for influenza. Of the positive results, 66 (55%) were influenza B viruses, 33 (28%) were influenza A (H3N2) viruses, one (0.8%) was an influenza A (H1) virus, and 20 (17%) were influenza A viruses that were not subtyped. The majority (78%) of these isolates were tested from mid-May through late June, during which time 1.3% of specimens tested were positive for influenza. Since July, 0.4% of specimens tested were positive for influenza. During May 22--September 3, the weekly percentage of patient visits to sentinel providers for ILI remained below the national baseline of 2.5%¶ and ranged from 0.7% to 1.3%. The percentage of deaths attributable to pneumonia and influenza (P&I) as reported by the 122 Cities Mortality Reporting System remained below the epidemic threshold,** and no influenza-related pediatric deaths were reported as occurring during this period. WorldwideDuring May 22--September 3, influenza A (H3N2) viruses predominated in Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Thailand). Influenza A (H3N2) viruses were also identified in Oman and Singapore. Influenza A (H1) viruses were reported in China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia. Influenza B viruses were reported in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Nepal, Philippines, and Thailand. In Oceania, during the same period, influenza A (H3N2 and non-subtyped) viruses predominated in Australia; influenza B viruses were responsible for outbreaks in New Zealand. Influenza B viruses were also reported in Australia and New Caledonia. In Africa, both influenza A virus subtypes (H3N2 and H1) and influenza B viruses were reported in South Africa, and influenza A (H3N2) and influenza B viruses were reported in Madagascar. Influenza B viruses also were reported in Kenya. In South America, influenza A (H3N2 and non-subtyped) viruses were associated with regional outbreaks in Argentina and Chile during May 22--September 3 and were reported in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay. Influenza B viruses were associated with an outbreak in Colombia in July and also were reported in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. Influenza A (H1) viruses were reported in Peru. In North America, influenza A viruses (H3N2 and non-subtyped) and influenza B viruses were reported in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The United States reported one influenza A (H1) virus. Influenza A (H3N2) viruses also were reported in El Salvador and Panama (2--4). Characterization of Influenza Virus IsolatesThe WHO Collaborating Center for Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Control of Influenza, located at CDC, analyzes influenza-virus isolates received from laboratories worldwide. During May 22--September 3, a total of 77 influenza A (H3N2) viruses (47 from Latin America, 21 from Asia, eight from the United States, and one from Oceania) were collected and characterized antigenically. All 77 influenza A (H3N2) viruses were antigenically related to the A/California/07/2004 reference virus. However, four South American viruses and nine Asian viruses had reduced titers to A/California/07/2004. An A/ California/07/2004-like virus was recommended as the H3 component for the 2005--06 Northern Hemisphere vaccine. No influenza A (H1) viruses collected during this period were received and characterized by CDC. " http://www.who.int/csr/don/2003_12_23/en/index.html
"Influenza activity associated with influenza A(H3N2) viruses continues to increase in Africa (Tunisia), Europe (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Russia Federation and Ukraine) and North America (the United States), and persists in France and some parts of Canada. In other European countries (Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom) and most parts of Canada, activity has declined. Most influenza infections this season have been attributed to influenza A(H3N2) viruses." All work involving infectious H5N1 influenza was performed in government-approved biosafety level 3–enhanced containment facilities with experimental protocols in compliance with applicable federal statutes and institutional guidelines.
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