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.
The US Govt has ordered more of this prepandemic vaccine for the national stockpile. Still only enough for
10% of the total US population, and we do not know if it will work. Additionally, receiving this vaccine does not mean that the recipient will not get sick, but it might help to prevent death should they become infected.
So who would receive this prepandemic vaccine? Political families in power?
The military? Police, fire fighters, those responsible for keeping the water
clean? Some, but certainly not all HCW? Just wondering...
Glaxo hopes to begin a 4,400-patient Phase III trial for the vaccine
later this year
No trial yet. Do you feel reassured?
For the average person, which is most of us. Better to begin with preparing
your family by stockpiling everything that you will need for at
least three months.
The bottom line is that there is no real barrier to this disease except avoiding other people completely. Antivirals and vaccines remain in the hopes and dreams category for most of the world's population, imo.
Not a preventative, but it provides reduction in lung damage according to this
press release, at least in mice that is.
In the studies, 30% of StatC-treated lung samples had H5N1 virus detected in comparison to 50% of Tamiflu treated samples, according to the company. Histopathology which measures lung damage due to influenza infection demonstrated in these studies that mice treated with StatC had statistically significant reduction in lung damage as compared to the group treated with Tamiflu.
Canopus BioPharma's strategy for developing its StatC drug includes continued animal testing in partnership with its extensive network of European- and Chinese-based biotechnology research laboratories. In addition, a human influenza challenge study will be conducted to compare StatC as a preventative intervention for influenza against other currently available antivirals.
Press reports said around 14 other birds had also been found dead in the area, but it was not known if they were infected with the virus, which is potentially deadly to humans.
More than 150 wild birds have died of H5N1 in southern and eastern Germany in the past few weeks, and a month ago the disease spread to a smallholding in the eastern state of Thueringen.
It was the first time this year that the highly pathogenic strain of avian flu had been found among domestic birds in Germany. Scientists have suggested it could have jumped the border from the neighbouring Czech Republic where it has infected poultry on large turkey and chicken farms.
A number of countries have banned poultry exports from Germany, which battled a widespread bird flu epidemic in 2006. The disease spread to mammals last year, infecting three cats and a marten.
The panic heightened after Divyoday Krishi Vigyan Kendra, a central government- funded farm at Chebri in Khowai subdivision of West Tripura, slaughtered and buried more than 500 chickens with symptoms like fever and spasms on Thursday.
“We ordered mass slaughter of the chickens because we were against taking any chance. Blood samples of the dead fowl have been sent to the central laboratory in Bhopal,” said Nandalal Dasgupta, the director of the centre.
...the 1957 influenza pandemic that sickened some 25 to 30 percent of the American population was a medical watershed for the clues that it offered about how a new strain of influenza could spread.
...Maurice Hilleman, a physician at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., read about an unusually large number of people--some 250,000--who had come down with flu-like symptoms in Hong Kong. Concerned, he immediately requested samples from American servicemen in Asia and within days had his answer. The genetic structure of this strain was like nothing immunologists had ever seen before.
Pharmaceutical companies worked furiously to produce a vaccine, ultimately distributing some 40 million doses. But "they were just a little bit too late," says Arnold Monto, an influenza specialist at the University of Michigan. "They only had significant doses available when the pandemic was peaking." Earlier, scarcities raised questions about who deserved the vaccine first. Official protocol gave priority to military personnel and necessary civic workers, but that didn't stop members of the San Francisco 49ers football team from getting vaccinated before police and firemen.
The war of words continues between Indonesian officials and the WHO over virus samples, with Indonesia indicating it may be November before an accord can be reached and samples released.
Of course, all of this was supposedly resolved last April. Samples sent to the WHO in May, we are now told, contained no intact virus. Whether that was by accident or design is impossible to tell from this vantage point.
While China has finally, after a year's delay, sent a few samples; they too lag far behind in providing virus samples to the international community.
Indonesia, the country worst hit by bird flu with 81 human deaths, has accused WHO of misusing its specimens by sharing them with drug companies without its permission.
Jakarta argues these companies use the specimens to develop vaccines poor countries like Indonesia cannot afford.
Bird flu has killed a teenage boy in Vietnam, the second human death announced in as many weeks as the virus continues to spread among poultry, health officials confirmed Tuesday.
The H5N1 virus continues to spread among poultry in Vietnam, killing or forcing the slaughter of more than 200,000 birds this year.
The country had been hailed as a bright spot in Asia for beating back bird flu after a nationwide poultry vaccination campaign was started. No human cases were reported in the country in 2006, but the virus flared again in poultry early this year.
This is seasonal flu season in Australia. It has been severe.
They are trying to educate the public about how not to spread the infection.
Considering that even HCW will go to work when sick, and they should know better, it's an uphill battle. Do you think that people will change their behavior?
SICK Queenslanders are being urged to stay home and consider wearing face masks against this year's strain of virulent flu.
A five-year-old who died yesterday in Victoria was believed to be the sixth child killed by the virus in the past two weeks. In Queensland, there have been 1400 confirmed flu cases, three times as many as normal for this time of year.
With the Ekka due to open in Brisbane tomorrow – a gathering of 500,000 people over 10 days – Queensland's Chief Health Officer, Jeanette Young, has urged those not vaccinated to consider staying away. People with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease and asthma should particularly avoid crowds, she said.
And GPs want patients who may have the flu to stay out of their waiting rooms to avoid the risk of infecting others.
Queensland Health will provide 127,000 packs of hand wipes and 20,000 bottles of antiseptic hand gel at the Ekka to try to stop the virus spreading.
This is a very interesting little story of what could occur when there is limited access to a vaccine for a contagious disease, the disease is present in the area, and the public is aware that there is some vaccine available.
In the cool early morning of Wednesday, March 21, 1900, a crowd began gathering outside the offices of the Board of Health in Macquarie Street, Sydney. Inside the building, the secretary of the board, Clarence Simms, was already anxious. Bubonic plague had broken out in The Rocks three months earlier and the newspapers were full of lurid stories about the "Black Death". People had died and their relatives had been marched off in the night to the quarantine station at North Head.
The NSW government had stockpiled Haffkine's serum, the new plague vaccine cultivated in mutton broth. It had a few hundred doses to inoculate frontline health workers, new plague victims and their contacts, but the Sydney newspapers were campaigning for a public vaccination program.
Poultry deaths alert health authorities that there may be a dangerous disease in the area, not just to birds but to humans also. That is how works in much of the world. But, what happens when the deaths never stop, and instead they just continue to occur? And then, they just stop being reported...
What does it mean for the rest of the world?
Indonesia has so many problems, corruption, poverty, earthquakes, diseases,
ignorance...
It has the distinction of being the country with the highest number of human
bird flu fatalities. And, we no longer have access to viral samples of H5N1
as it is occurring in that country to prepare vaccine specific to those strains.
If the predicted pandemic originates from that country, then we are in serious trouble.
Avian influenza has killed no less than 500,000 chickens in Greater Jakarta in the last six months but not all outbreaks have been reported to the health authority, local press reported Wednesday.
Many bird flu cases were not detected by the health authority because there was a shortage of field officers, reported English daily The Jakarta Post.
Bird flu was first reported in poultry in the capital in 2003.
The government, meanwhile, has insisted it complies with World Health Organization standards for handling bird flu outbreaks by vaccinating healthy poultry and culling infected chickens and birds within a one-km radius of affected farms.
Heru Setijanto, a veterinarian with the Bogor Institute of Agriculture, warned that the bird flu cases reported could be the tip of the iceberg.
"Chickens die everywhere. The problem is that the deaths are not always reported," he was quoted as saying.
With permisson from the editors of Effect Measure:
The Editors of Effect Measure are senior public health scientists and practitioners. Paul Revere was a member of the first local Board of Health in the United States (Boston, 1799). The Editors sign their posts "Revere" to recognize the public service of a professional forerunner better known for other things.
Turkeys in Nebraska and the USDA
Category: Bird flu * Food safety
Posted on: August 10, 2007 7:44 AM, by revere
The turkeys were doomed anyway, so the discovery they had a "mild strain of bird flu" didn't seal their fate, which had already been hermetically sealed. The birds showed no sign of illness. The evidence for infection came from finding the presence of antibodies to the low pathogenic strain prior to being sent to slaughter. The US Department of Agriculture reassured everyone: no human has ever caught bird flu after eating properly cooked poultry or eggs. So who cares? It turns out lots of people in the poultry industry elsewhere care a great deal:
But officials in Japan, Russia, Turkey, the Philippines and Taiwan, as well as Hong Kong, are taking no chances. Karen Eggert, with the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, confirmed Thursday that those countries have barred all poultry and related products, such as eggs, coming from Nebraska.
"This ban and other emergency measures were necessary to protect human health and the poultry industry in the Philippines," Arthur Yap, agriculture secretary for the Asian country, said in a news release issued Tuesday.
Yap ordered inspectors at the country's major airports and seaports to confiscate all poultry shipments from Nebraska and Virginia, which last month faced a domestic band on live poultry sales after 54,000 turkeys tested positive for avian flu antibodies. (AP)
This low pathogenic virus is of concern because all the high pathogenic viruses probably started out life as low path variants.That's one of the reasons agriculture officials in other countries don't take chances. In this case there most likely was [no] public health issue, even if the turkeys had entered the food supply. But the USDA's Eggert was also misleading in the way she minimized the public health aspect. We've discussed it pretty often here, but to summarize, the claim that there is no risk from eating "properly cooked poultry or eggs" is not the point. There is no risk of salmonella from eating properly cooked poultry, either, but we have tens of thousands of foodborne salmonella infections yearly. And many people handle the food prior to "proper cooking," and we know from the H5N1 experience in Asia that handling, and sometimes eating, infected poultry is one of the principal ways people contract avian influenza infection, which is fatal more than half the time.
The USDA has a built in conflict because it both regulates and promotes the food industry. The confusion is clearly seen in this statement by USDA.
Time to separate these two roles.
We can't say this often enough. This conflict of interest is dangerous.
Last night I lamented over the superficial, and frankly, hyperbole filled reporting on the `breakthrough' in H5N1 research at the NIH. The wire services were filled with reports that a great new vaccine was on the horizon, and that we may be able to `beat bird flu before it starts'.
Here are just a few of the headlines:
New bird flu vaccine may prevent outbreak MSNBC 23:40 9-Aug-07
Hope for Bird Flu Vaccine ABCNEWS.com 23:28 9-Aug-07
New vaccine may beat bird flu breakout Stuff.co.nz 23:16 9-Aug-07
New vaccine may beat bird flu IOL 09:12
New vaccine may beat bird flu before it starts (Reuters) Yahoo! US 22:17 9-Aug-07
While the discoveries at the NIH are certainly impressive (as I noted here) we are a long way off from having a vaccine in hand to fend off a pandemic.
Of greater immediate interest to me was the disclosure that scientists at the NIH had managed to create a more `human adaptable' H5N1 virus.One that would cleave readily to human receptor cells.
THAT seemed to me, to be the big story here.
Well, after yesterdays' heady celebratory reporting, we are starting to get some reportage on this facet of the research.
This article, by Jeff Nesmith, provides a far more reasoned look at the story. I've just provided an excerpt, follow the link for the full story.
Mutant flu virus may show how pandemic could start
By Jeff Nesmith
Cox Washington Bureau
Published on: 08/10/07
Washington --- Government scientists have created mutant viruses that may hold the key to understanding how the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu might change into a disease that spreads from human to human.
Except in the relatively small number of cases where people have gotten bird flu, hemagglutinin in H5N1 will not bind to the "spikes" on human cells. The virus just slips off the human cells.
Using genetic engineering, Nabel's group made changes in the H5N1 form of hemagglutinin to see if the changes would cause it to bind to human cells. The mutated viruses were then sent to Emory, which maintains a "library" of molecules that appear on human cells.
By adding the mutated viruses to these molecules, the Emory group quickly established that the viruses attached themselves to a particular human molecule.It took only two of these mutations to change H5N1 into a virus that would readily lock onto human cells, Nabel said.
"While nobody knows if and when H5N1 will jump from birds to humans, [the researchers] have come up with a way to anticipate how that jump might occur and ways to respond to it," said Dr. Elias Zerhouni, National Institutes of Health chief.
(Full Story)
Isn't that just great? They took a virulent virus that humans have no resistance
to, and they made it be more adaptable/transmissible to humans.
But, not to worry, they no doubt, believe that they are working in a biosecure,
and very safe environment. They are being so very careful. Nevermind, that mistakes sometimes occur...
Where is Emory University located? Atlanta isn't it?
indigo girl
5,173 Posts
US Govt Orders More Prepandemic Vaccine
The US Govt has ordered more of this prepandemic vaccine for the national stockpile. Still only enough for
10% of the total US population, and we do not know if it will work. Additionally, receiving this vaccine does not mean that the recipient will not get sick, but it might help to prevent death should they become infected.
So who would receive this prepandemic vaccine? Political families in power?
The military? Police, fire fighters, those responsible for keeping the water
clean? Some, but certainly not all HCW? Just wondering...
http://afludiary.blogspot.com/2007/08/us-govt-orders-additional-pre-pandemic.html
And look at this:
No trial yet. Do you feel reassured?
For the average person, which is most of us. Better to begin with preparing
your family by stockpiling everything that you will need for at
least three months.
The bottom line is that there is no real barrier to this disease except avoiding other people completely. Antivirals and vaccines remain in the hopes and dreams category for most of the world's population, imo.