Tracking the next pandemic: Avian Flu Talk |
"WHO Knows Better" |
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Posted: June 09 2006 at 10:00pm |
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WHO Knows BetterNeither the world, nor the World Health Organization, is prepared for a real pandemic.Saturday, June 10, 2006; IT'S LONG BEEN the world's public health monitor, responsible for detecting and eradicating infectious diseases. Now the World Health Organization has accidentally acquired another role -- as a source of disarray in global financial markets. When the WHO announced a while back that the sixth member of a single Indonesian family had died after contracting the virus strain known as H5N1, stock markets that were already jumpy plunged. The Indonesian rupiah, the Singapore dollar and the Thai baht all fell against the U.S. dollar. In fact, the agency had
concluded that there was no bird flu pandemic: The family members who
contracted the disease were all blood relatives living in close
proximity to one another. Other family members, unrelated by
blood, did not get sick, suggesting both that those who died had a
genetic susceptibility, and that the virus has not in fact mutated in
such a way that it is spread easily from human to human. Markets
concluded otherwise. The lesson for the WHO, and for governments, is clear: Managing both the medical and the economic reaction to bird flu now requires superb communication of good information in real time. Yet information coming out of Indonesia has been sporadic and incomplete. This is both because understanding of the disease is not very good in general -- the health agency did say it was not raising its alert level to the pandemic phase -- and because the WHO is still understaffed in rural Indonesia and most everywhere else. Unofficial reports also indicate that medical facilities are so bad in parts of rural Indonesia that people there are reluctant to go to hospitals, because they see others enter them and die. The
long-term implications are also clear: Any international response plan
that relies on sending caches of Tamiflu or another antidote into the
less-developed world to stamp out early signs of an epidemic is
unrealistic. Instead, the developed world needs to work harder on
coordinating and targeting its work on vaccine production -- and on
helping the WHO, which, despite all the scare stories about bird flu,
still has neither the staff nor the funding to deal with a serious
outbreak of infectious flu. http://www.birdflubreakingnews.com/templates/birdflu/window.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fwp-dyn%2Fcontent%2Farticle%2F2006%2F06%2F09%2FAR2006060901545.html |
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Good find aurora, I've been looking for something like this to legitimize my belief that the WHO's hands are bound because of economics.
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Jhetta
Valued Member Joined: March 28 2006 Status: Offline Points: 1272 |
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Really It is no wonder Dr Lee Jong-Wook WHO director-general had a stroke... the job must be very stressful.
Old news but interesting... shows the process.
Comment in: Probable person-to-person transmission of avian influenza A (H5N1). Ungchusak K, Auewarakul P, Dowell SF, Kitphati R, Auwanit W, Puthavathana P, Uiprasertkul M, Boonnak K, Pittayawonganon C, Cox NJ, Zaki SR, Thawatsupha P, Chittaganpitch M, Khontong R, Simmerman JM, Chunsutthiwat S. Bureau of Epidemiology, Department of Disease Control, Thai Ministry of Public Health, Nonthaburi, Thailand. kum@health.moph.go.th BACKGROUND: During 2004, a highly pathogenic avian influenza A (H5N1) virus caused poultry disease in eight Asian countries and infected at least 44 persons, killing 32; most of these persons had had close contact with poultry. No evidence of efficient person-to-person transmission has yet been reported. We investigated possible person-to-person transmission in a family cluster of the disease in Thailand. METHODS: For each of the three involved patients, we reviewed the circumstances and timing of exposures to poultry and to other ill persons. Field teams isolated and treated the surviving patient, instituted active surveillance for disease and prophylaxis among exposed contacts, and culled the remaining poultry surrounding the affected village. Specimens from family members were tested by viral culture, microneutralization serologic analysis, immunohistochemical assay, reverse-transcriptase-polymerase-chain-reaction (RT-PCR) analysis, and genetic sequencing. RESULTS: The index patient became ill three to four days after her last exposure to dying household chickens. Her mother came from a distant city to care for her in the hospital, had no recognized exposure to poultry, and died from pneumonia after providing 16 to 18 hours of unprotected nursing care. The aunt also provided unprotected nursing care; she had fever five days after the mother first had fever, followed by pneumonia seven days later. Autopsy tissue from the mother and nasopharyngeal and throat swabs from the aunt were positive for influenza A (H5N1) by RT-PCR. No additional chains of transmission were identified, and sequencing of the viral genes identified no change in the receptor-binding site of hemagglutinin or other key features of the virus. The sequences of all eight viral gene segments clustered closely with other H5N1 sequences from recent avian isolates in Thailand. CONCLUSIONS: Disease in the mother and aunt probably resulted from person-to-person transmission of this lethal avian influenzavirus during unprotected exposure to the critically ill index patient. Copyright 2005 Massachusetts Medical Society.
PMID: 15668219 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] |
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