The H5N1 strain of influenza - often referred to as bird flu - is first known to have jumped from chickens to humans in 1997. Since 2004 it has ripped through poultry and wild bird populations across Eurasia, and had a 53% mortality rate in the first 147 people it is known to have infected. Health authorities fear this strain, or its descendent, could cause a lethal new flu pandemic in people with the potential to kill billions.
Flu has been a regular scourge of humanity for thousands of years. Flu viruses each possess a mere 10 genes encoded in RNA. All of the 16 known genetic subgroups originate in water birds, and especially in ducks.The virus is well adapted to their immune systems, and does not usually make them sick. This leaves the animals free to move around and spread the virus - just what it needs to persist.
But sometimes a bird flu virus jumps to an animal whose immune system it is not adapted to.
Dr. Rajeev Venkayya, Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense
Ambassador John Lange, State Department Special Representative on Avian and Pandemic Influenza
Dr. John Clifford, USDA Chief Veterinarian
Admiral John Agwunobi, Assistant Secretary of Health
Dr. Jeff Runge, DHS Chief Medical Officer on Pandemic Preparedness
The following quotes are from Admiral John Agwunobi, Assistant Secretary of Health:
...since 2005, Congress and the people of our nation very appropriately invested and provided $5.6 billion in funds to assist HHS in mobilizing the nation to prepare for pandemic influenza, and the results are quite obvious.
For the first time ever, HHS has licensed -- and I think this was in April of this year -- a pre-pandemic vaccine that can help carry through the early months of a pandemic. Enough antiviral drugs are now stockpiled among state and federal governments for the treatment of more than 50 million Americans affected by pandemic influenza.
Communities now have a series of interim guidelines to assist them with their planning. I'm very proud of the fact that HHS helped host the pandemicflu.gov website, which is a really good resource for communities, for individuals, and indeed, for government, as we share information across the many different branches -- federal, state and local.
The therapies, of course, of our guidelines offered to the public has been the CDC's community strategy for pandemic influenza mitigation. I just would insert here that all of our interim guidelines -- all of our guidelines are interim, and the very nature of pandemic preparedness is such that as science advances, as experience is accumulated, we will update all of these guidelines over time.
Interim advice on the use of surgical masks and respirators is now available, and several public discussions of vaccine prioritization have been held. Now, the results of these discussions will, we hope, help inform how we use vaccine, both pre-pandemic and pandemic vaccine, should the need arise.
Through a series of exercises with senior government officials and the media -- we've actually had sessions where we sat with our colleagues in the media at roundtables and discussed what we would do under different scenarios, a better understanding of how government interacts with the media, and how media interacts with government in a crisis resulted.
We've released a series of radio and television public service announcements to help better inform citizens and individuals.
Dr. Rajeev Venkayya, Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense
Ambassador John Lange, State Department Special Representative on Avian and Pandemic Influenza
Dr. John Clifford, USDA Chief Veterinarian
Admiral John Agwunobi, Assistant Secretary of Health
Dr. Jeff Runge, DHS Chief Medical Officer on Pandemic Preparedness
The following quotes are from Dr. Jeff Runge, DHS Chief Medical Officer on Pandemic Preparedness:
...there are others in the room, sitting in the audience, who have actually been here with us every step of the way -- the Department of Transportation, Interior, Defense, the Vice President's Office. This truly has been a remarkable effort, in the true spirit of the Department of Homeland Security,
In addition, there are other partners, which we understand have a big stake in this -- police, fire, EMS, emergency management, and especially the private sector -- both the medical private sector and non-medical private sector.
...we have the unique responsibility of the protection of our nation's critical infrastructures. I don't hesitate to remind you that 85 percent of those critical infrastructures are privately owned and, therefore, depend on the investment of both time and resources of the private sector.
We are focused on management of our nation's borders, and especially management of the overall incident, if the institutions of the United States are threatened by a high-category pandemic, including integrated bio-surveillance, planning and exercising our plans for incident management. Maintaining domestic security and civil order falls within our bailiwick, as well as assisting in providing mass care and coordination of federal resources in the event of a high-category pandemic, as well.
Some highlights also that I will just toss out to you is that our incident management planning team has completed work on the Federal Con-Plan -- the concept plan which pulls in all of the federal agencies' plans and turns them into a single document from which other operational plans will be cascading. Our critical infrastructure partnership division published a critical infrastructure and key resource guide last July to help our private sector critical infrastructure partners to figure out what they need to do in order to make sure that they are able to function in the event of pandemic.
In so doing, our private sector office and policy -- and our Critical Infrastructure Protection Office have conducted over 100 symposia around the country with the private sector, large and small businesses, EMS, state, local officials, police and fire. In May, DHS released the 17 all-hazards sector-specific plans as part of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan, which systematizes the ability of critical infrastructure to maintain their business operations.
We have developing guidelines and best practices for law enforcement, EMS, public works, and emergency management through a series of conferences.
And TSA is leading a group of officials from CBP, the CDC, State Department, DOD and FAA to develop a plan for the management of the nation's commercial aviation system in the event of a pandemic.
But a few things that the department is involved with -- I would like to echo Dr. Venkayya's comment that these activities, though they are intended for the mitigation of a human influenza pandemic, will indeed provide the structure to deal with any other biological threat, whether natural or an instrument of terrorism. We at DHS are focused on multi-use institutions that we can put into place for whatever emergencies arise.
Results of laboratory tests of the chicken blood samples sent to Bhopal following the deaths of 132 chickens reared at a farm located within Imphal Municipal area may be available by July 22.
Stating that consumption of chicken does not pose any health risk, the Director appealed to the people to informed the Veterinary and Animal Husbandry Department if there is any case of sudden death of chicken and other fowls.
So, testing is not complete and birds are dead. How can this possibly
be low path (LPAI), we would like to know? Do we need to point out that India
is boardered by countries that have positive cases of HPAI? Would migratory birds dare to cross the boarders into India?
We know that cooking the birds kills the virus, but what about safe handling
of dead birds before cooking? Any risk associated with that?
But the public is given no instructions on safe handling, just told, that
it is safe to eat if cooked. Please, don't stop eating chicken.
"There were 144 chickens at the farm in Imphal West. An unknown disease killed 132 of them between July 7 and 10. We have collected blood samples of the chickens and sent those to High Security Animal Disease Laboratory, Bhopal," the director of the department, Th. Dorendro, said.
The joint commissioner of the department, A.B. Negi, rushed to Imphal to supervise surveillance. "There is no reason to panic," he said after assessing the situation.
"Had it been bird flu, none of the birds would have survived. Death of so many chickens is, however, quite unusual. But nothing can be said until we get the blood reports."
In keeping with the guidelines of the department, the owner of the poultry farm has buried the dead chickens. The 12 chickens were culled and buried. All equipment of the farm had been destroyed.
No, he didn't just tell people that because 12 chickens survived, it could not be
Cormorants have started dying on a large scale along the Kaliningrad section of the Curonian spit
Russian authorities in Kaliningrad stated this week that the sudden bird deaths will be investigated and that samples will be taken for analysis.
Ornithologist at the Curonian Spit National Park, Gediminas Grazulevicius, said that as yet there are no signs of an outbreak on the Lithuanian side of the border.
“This is the first I have heard of it,” he said, “Maybe these were young birds that just started dying from hunger. Everything is normal on our side.
Specialist of the State Public Health Service, Bronius Morkunas, was doubtful about the claims that bird flu was the cause of the deaths. "Usually swans, ducks, and chickens catch bird flu, but not cormorants,” he said.
Even though no cases of bird flu have been registered in Lithuania, veterinarians warn that the threat is real because of the numerous migration paths across the country.
I have never heard of any bird species that is immune to H5N1. I suppose that there could be a first time.
Welcome to the world where reality doesn't matter, only perception, or in the above cases, wishful thinking. I believe it is called ostrich syndrome, i.e. stick your head in the sand to hide and your enemies won't see you.
One basic truth of petty bureaucrats worldwide is that if they themselves do not know how to effectively deal with a situation they deny the problem exists. No problem = no need to act.
One basic truth of petty bureaucrats worldwide is that if they themselves do not know how to effectively deal with a situation they deny the problem exists. No problem = no need to act.
Ayrman
That post pretty much sums up managements' attitude toward staffing my hospital! !
... we've got 12 million doses of pre-pandemic vaccine stockpiled.
This is based on a Vietnamese Clade I virus, and there are serious doubts as to how effective it might be against the current, or future incarnations of the H5N1 virus.
Since this vaccine would require two shots to hopefully confer immunity, we have enough to inoculate 6 million people.
The HHS (Health & Human Services) has stated their goal is to have enough antivirals on hand to treat 81 million people. Roughly 1/4th of the population. Of course, that goal isn't expected to be met until sometime in late 2008.
The idea is that a pandemic may only affect 25% of the population. Of course, that's a guess.
The stockpile won't cover everyone's needs.
It was never intended to do so.
The reality is that during a pandemic we will all have to see to our own needs.
"Maybe these were young birds that just started dying from hunger. Everything is normal on our side. If they did die from bird flu then it is very bad because sick birds could reach Lithuania as well. Our birds also fly to Russia."
Specialist of the State Public Health Service, Bronius Morkunas, was doubtful about the claims that bird flu was the cause of the deaths."Usually swans, ducks, and chickens catch bird flu, but not cormorants," he said.
Dr. Rajeev Venkayya, Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense
Ambassador John Lange, State Department Special Representative on Avian and Pandemic Influenza
Dr. John Clifford, USDA Chief Veterinarian
Admiral John Agwunobi, Assistant Secretary of Health
Dr. Jeff Runge, DHS Chief Medical Officer on Pandemic Preparedness
It's interesting to see some of thinking and decision making that will determine what is going to be done. Here we have the feds giving guidance on the issue of early school closure. And, they make sure to say that the local authorities will have some explaining to do to their constituents if they make the wrong decision.
Q The 1918 flu, going back and reading some of the books about that, the school systems in Philadelphia, they didn't close those right away and they had a higher death rate, for instance, than in St. Louis or Minneapolis and some of the other cities where immediately they took action to close the schools. But then if they reopened real early, then the death rate went back up.Is it going to be local jurisdictions that will close the schools -- because that seems to be where most of it is transmitted -- or is it going to be a national -- will national authorities have the ability to actually do that, or what?
ADMIRAL AGWUNOBI: ...Today, we continue to believe that the front line of the fight against a pandemic will be fought locally. Local leadership and local communities are going to have to step up and lead.And that's including making decisions based on the existing infrastructure of our education system, which is local.
Having said that, we believe strongly that a coordinated approach across the nation will be much more successful than one that is not coordinated. And as you can well imagine, the CDC, Department of Homeland Security -- I mean, there are work force implications that relate to school closures, as you can well imagine, consequences, and indeed, Homeland Security and others will all be engaged in, number one, making sure we educate local leaders in no unclear terms as to the need to have plans that they can implement in an emergency; exercised plans so that they've worked out the kinks; and of the importance of doing so in a coordinated fashion.
Now, I don't want to leave you with the impression that a pandemic will hit all at once across the entire nation simultaneously and everybody will be asked to close their schools on the same day. It doesn't work that way, as all of you know in the stakeholder community, pandemics roll through communities in a somewhat unpredictable way. So the coordination that we're talking about are a set of key epidemiological triggers that we'd urge everyone to build into their plans and that they activate their school closures -- actually, their non-pharmaceutical interventions, the many non-pharmaceutical interventions that might be out there, that they would activate them in some coordinated fashion linked to those key epidemiological triggers.
When you look at the epidemiology waves in disease, there's a right time and perhaps a wrong time to intervene with different interventions. Our hope would be that we could get everybody to the point where they're pulling the trigger based on the same coordinated set of findings. I don't know if, Rajeev, you want to add to that in some way.
DR. VENKAYYA: Well, I know that Jeff at DHS has also thought a lot about this. We have great concern that in an eventuality like this, where the authority does reside at the local or state level, that you could have a patchwork implementation approach and have, say, a community on one side of the state line behave -- or one county behave one way, and the next county over behave differently.
And I think it's critically important for the federal government to provide that clear, unambiguous guidance early -- revised as needed, but provide that early so that communities know exactly what they're on the hook -- what the federal guidance is. And if they're not going to follow federal guidance, they probably ought to have a good explanation for their populations, because this is -- these are, essentially, potentially life-saving interventions.
And so if a community wants to deviate from that guidance in order to preserve something else, then I think that they're going to owe an explanation to their populations.
ADMIRAL AGWUNOBI: I'll just add one last point on this. The issue about community mitigation is that it has to be linked to data. As I've said, the epidemiological curve locally. And the first people that know what's happening in their community, in terms of illness and disease, are local public health providers. And it is just -- it's much more expedient to put key decisions in their hands -- when you first see these events, act in this way.
That would be the kind of guidance we would give them. It's a faster way to get things done, rather than trying to roll the data together and then send the action back down from through some central point, which delays an intervention.
Egypt's state news agency MENA identified the woman as Naima Abdu Gamil of the Nile Delta province of Damietta, in northern Egypt. It said she developed a high fever on Friday and was in good condition after receiving the antiviral drug Tamiflu.
The infection was a rare human case in Egypt's sweltering summer months. Egyptian officials had forecast the virus would hide away during the summer following a pattern set in 2006 when human bird flu cases disappeared between May and October.
While bird flu did diminish in Egypt as the weather warmed, human cases have continued to occur sporadically. Since bird flu first emerged in Egyptian poultry last year, 15 Egyptians have died from the virus.
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gr8hart
17 Posts
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