H5N1

Taking a break

I leave tomorrow for a few days in Jasper, so I won't post much if anything until this time next week. In the meantime, I wish my fellow-Canadians a very happy Canada Day tomorrow, and our American neighbours an equally happy July 4.

I know—Jasper is fantastically beautiful. We've been going there every summer for over 25 years, and it always has some new surprise, like the Colin Range in a late-evening sunset by the Snaring River.

Flu bloggers gaining attention

Helen Branswell of Canadian Press has published an article about the flu-blogging community. You can read it at Canada.com.

A state of unreadiness

Thanks to Declan Butler at Connotea for the link to Avian Flu: A State of Unreadiness. It's a long article from The Nation by Mike Davis, and it gives detailed and disturbing information about the fecklessness of the US Department of Health's planning for avian flu. They've been spending more money on "abstinence education," we learn, than on developing a vaccine for flu.

Another case of bad marketing, no doubt. If only the flu vaccine had been pitched as also eliminating libido, we'd have swimming pools full of the stuff by now.

Another death in Vietnam

Xinhua and several other news sources have reported the death of a 73-year-old Hanoi man from avian flu.

Xinhua also says:

To prevent potential outbreaks, Vietnam's Veterinary Department will focus on 3 measures, namely banning poultry raising in inner areas of cities and towns, building concentrated fowl slaughterhouses and distribution networks and vaccinating poultry against bird flu viruses, the report quoted the departmenthead Bui Quang Anh as saying.

This reminds me of living on the campus of a language school in the suburbs of Guangzhou in 1983. Many Chinese faculty lived in apartments near ours, and many families had their own little flocks of chickens. They'd wander around campus much of the day, and then go home for a proper meal (or to become one). If Chinese families are still raising chickens under these conditions, the potential for the spread of H5N1 is very great.

Avian flu a political issue? Surely not.

Morton Kondracke, a veteran Washington reporter, suggests that avian flu could become top '08 issue - seriously. Well, whatever it takes to get the politicians to pay attention.

But why push it off to the 2008 presidential campaign? It ought to be the hot potato in every candidate's lap between now and the congressional election in 2006—not to mention the Canadian election we'll likely get next winter.

Good news and bad news

Vietnamese media are happy to report the WHO finding of no human-to-human transmission of avian flu. But WHO's team in China reports that bird fatalities are far higher than orginally thought: 5,000 instead of 1,000 (which was bad enough), again with no indication of human deaths or infections.

While this is good news, we might stop to consider the consequences if H5N1 fails to mutate in our direction, but continues to attack both wild and domesticated bird species.

The cost to the Asian poultry industries has already run into the billions of dollars, and would likely continue—with impacts on both Asian economies and Asian nutrition. Unable to raise chickens and ducks, rural inhabitants would tend to leave the land and head for the cities. They'd create more crowding and increase the likelihood of old-fashioned epidemics of other diseases, plus considerable social unrest.

Meanwhile, widespread avian flu in wild species could have ecological repercussions. Some insect species might flourish without their predators, and relatively resistant birds would prosper. Like the starlings freed in New York's Central Park a century ago, such species could become serious pests. Asian ecosystems from India to Siberia to Japan could see disruption. Once established in east Asia, H5N1 could well cross the Bering Strait. And not long after that, the V formations of migratory species in our skies could become just a memory.

We can't afford to shrug off the birds' deaths. They and we (and likely many other species) are all in this together.

1000 sick kids in Cambodia

Thanks to Epidemi.CA for the link to a news story reporting that 1000 small children in Cambodia are ill with respiratory infections. No fatalities have occurred, but authorities should be watching such events very carefully and responding fast. It's important to identify what isn't avian flu, as well as what is.

International flu blogs

I'm trying to expand my resources beyond those of English-language sites. So far I've added a couple of Spanish-language sites, and one that's French as well as English. (The links are over on the left.)

But if anyone knows of sites in other languages—German, Russian, Arabic, whatever—I'd be grateful for the tip. They're not just for the benefit of multilingual English speakers, but for people who prefer to get information in their own language, even if it's from another country. Blogs, government sites, news sites—if they're about avian flu, I'll take them.

If you're running a flu blog yourself, in whatever language, I'll be delighted to put a link from this page to yours.

A vision of disaster

The new Flu Wiki has already become a huge success, and no wonder. Among its other resources is the pandemic scenario described by CanadaSue. It is absolutely superb, a brilliant working-out of avian flu's implications for a medium-sized Canadian city.

As a science-fiction novelist, I admire her ability to anticipate the mundane details and to present them in concrete language. You'll read her fictional diary thinking, "Oh God, didn't think of that. Oh God, that too. And that!" She has clearly done her homework, basing her scenario on facts and extrapolating reasonably from those facts.

I will be surprised and disappointed if this portrait of a pandemic isn't picked up by the print media and circulated widely. Impatient Web surfers may not want to click through the whole long story, but it's worth the effort—and on paper it would be a literally compelling page-turner.

Infected: 60. Dead: 18

A story in the English-language version of People's Daily Online says 60 persons in Vietnam have contracted avian flu since last December. Of those, 18 have died. I will leave it to Effect Measure and Recombinomics to analyze this report (links are on the left), but a 30 percent mortality rate does not sound good.

Henry Niman at Recombinomics says flu seems to be spreading "silently" through Vietnam in a relatively mild form. If so, the 60 cases reported may be only a fraction of the true number, and the mortality rate is not quite as serious as it seems. But it's still serious.