U.S. Unprepared For Bird Flu Epidemic

Thursday, October 06, 2005

With or without the military, however, some lawmakers fear that America's public health system is not up to the challenge of fighting this flu. Senate Democrats criticized the Bush administration Tuesday for not yet releasing a national plan instructing public health agencies on how to prepare for an outbreak.

In a letter sent to the president, 32 Senate Democrats warned that the nation was "dangerously unprepared" to respond to a bird flu outbreak because the "public health infrastructure is weak" and because advance planning has been "needlessly delayed."

HHS (search) Secretary Leavitt said such plans will be released in a few days.

Why all the panic now?  Finally a year later they are making all these "disclosures" over the AVI strains having this particluar virulence a year later from it's original discovery??

New strain of bird flu found in China's poultry markets

The H5N1 virus Hawk Jia 31 October 2006 Source: SciDev.Net

The results were published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday (30 October).

"This strain may have begun the third wave of transmission of H5N1 avian flu and could potentially spread throughout Eurasia," say the researchers.

Genetic analysis indicates that the new strain, called Fujian-like because it was first identified in Fujian province in May 2005, became the dominant strain in southern China early this year.

It is responsible for recent human H5N1 infections in China and has already spread among poultry in Hong Kong, Laos, Malaysia and Thailand.

The strain may have become resistant to vaccines, and may even be aided by China's compulsory chicken vaccination programme that was introduced in September 2005.

The researchers tested chickens, ducks and geese randomly caught in markets in six southern Chinese provinces for the H5N1 virus between July 2005 and June 2006.

They found that 2.4 per cent tested positive for H5N1, an increase of 1.5 per cent from the preceding 12 months, pointing to an increase in virus activity among poultry that the researchers suggest is caused by the Fujian-like virus.

The virus became increasingly dominant over other H5N1 strains, increasing from three per cent of H5N1-positive samples collected between July and September 2005, to 95 per cent of samples for April-June 2006.

Guan Yi, a virologist and professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong who led the research, said that the new strain is unlikely to be caused by viral mutation.

Instead, it is probably a previously unidentified strain that is becoming dominant, facilitated by the compulsory poultry vaccination.

"The existing H5 avian vaccines are not able to prevent infection by this virus as efficiently as they do with other types of H5N1," Guan told SciDev.Net, adding that he hopes to cooperate with the Chinese authorities to fight the new viral strain.

The findings underline how difficult it is to control the H5N1 virus as different strains can become dominant in a short time.

Strains used in poultry vaccination against this virus should be assessed and, if needed, updated on a regular basis, says Guan.

However, Zheng Shijun, of Beijing-based China Agricultural University, said that more laboratory, field tests and experiments are needed before reaching the conclusion that the new strain can resist the H5N1 vaccine in poultry.

"It is also possible that poultry could have strong natural resistance to this new viral strain so that there are no reports of massive outbreaks," Zheng says.

Millions of poultry have been culled and 14 people have died in China as a result of H5N1 infection.

The first wave of H5N1 outbreaks occurred in late 2003 and spread to many parts of Asia. The second wave began in China's Qinhai Lake in May 2005 and spread to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

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hi Mahshadin .....

Scientific research released this week said that the new strain — called H5N1 Fujian-like — had spread widely over the past year, being found in almost all poultry outbreaks and some human cases in China and now becoming prevalent in Hong Kong, Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Despite that prevalence, the Agriculture Ministry has not given the WHO any samples of the new strain, said Julie Hall, an infectious disease expert at the WHO's Beijing office.

"There's a stark contrast between what we're hearing from the researchers and what the Ministry of Agriculture says," Hall said in a telephone interview. "Unless the ministry tell us what's going on and shares viruses on a regular basis, we will be doing diagnostics on strains that are old."