H5N1

Health chief slams irresponsible bird flu info

From the Philippine Daily Inquirer, via inq7.net: Health chief slams irresponsible bird flu info .

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III expressed dismay over the continuing misinformation, circulating through text messages and e-mails, that the Philippines, just like its neighboring Asian countries, is experiencing an avian or bird flu outbreak.

"This sounds alarming and a bit pathetic, for as far as the government is concerned, it is doing its best to prevent this disease from coming to the country—then, all of a sudden, this kind of misinformation will occur. For the record once again, there's no such thing as avian flu here in the country," Duque said.

I share the minister's frustration. One of the great ironies of electronic communication media is the accelerated spread of rumors and outright lies. We can expect misinformation to outpace the truth almost every time, just like those computer-virus warnings that gullible people send to all their friends.

Doctors accused of ignoring bird flu threat

The UK Times Online reports that Britain's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, is tearing a strip off his colleagues: Doctors accused of ignoring bird flu threat . Last week Sir Liam told 30 public-health leaders that H5N1 could kill between 50,000 and 750,00 Britons.

Donaldson said he was dismayed after hearing that some hospitals were "full of dead parrot jokes and people (don't) believe this is actually going to happen." The first victim of bird flu in Britain was a parrot infected with the H5N1 strain that died in quarantine at Heathrow last month.

Well, I'm as fond of a good dead-parrot joke as the next buffoon, but I take his point:

“Many doctors think, ‘Flu is flu, we see it every winter’,” Donaldson said. “We have got to get the message through that this is going to be much more serious.

“I can’t give a likelihood of it starting this year, next year or in five years, but it will come. There is a biological inevitability and we’ve got to be prepared for it.”

APEC expected to make pandemic a priority

Via canada.com: APEC leaders will cooperate on fighting bird flu.

Fears that recent bird flu outbreaks in Asia and Europe could trigger a global human pandemic have pushed the issue of health security high onto the agenda of the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum, whose leaders will hold their annual summit later this week.

A statement expected to be adopted by foreign ministers on Wednesday notes "the threat that the highly pathogenic avian influenza posed to the APEC region as well as to the world," according to a draft obtained by The Associated Press.

Filipino cockfighters close ranks to resist H5N1

Earlier today I marveled that a single Vietnamese family could own 200 fighting cocks (and lose them all to H5N1). The story made me think that the cockfighting industry would try to evade culling rather than sacrifice its birds. But this story from Asia News Network says that the Filipino cockfighting industry, at least, is ready to battle avian flu:

Filipino breeders and owners of fighting cocks have joined the national campaign to ward off the bird flu virus that could wipe out the P50-billion (US$1=P54.39) industry.

According to Games and Amusements Board (GAB) chair Eric Buhain, cockfighters nationwide are uniting to implement the measures imposed by the National Avian Flu Task Force headed by the Department of Agriculture.

"They are more than willing to participate [in the campaign] and abide by the bio-security measures to protect the industry," Buhain said in a press briefing Friday (Nov 11).

With billions of pesos in investments and revenues at risk, local breeders are strictly following restrictions in the import of fighting cocks, Buhain said.

This outbreak has made us into armchair veterinarians, but it should also make us amateur anthropologists. If we don't understand the cultures of southeast Asia, we're not going to be very useful in helping them to fight the pandemic.

Another human death in Indonesia

Via ChannelNewsAsia: Indonesia registers another bird flu death.

It's not yet a confirmed H5N1 fatality, but the female patient reportedly had all the symptoms and came from a village where a neighbour's ten chickens had just died. The story says test results will be known on Monday.

Hong Kong website offers latest flu news

The Hong Kong government has created a Bird flu website with latest news updates. It's in Chinese, and I've put a link to it in H5N1 News Sources and Websites. This is an important and intelligent step, and I'll be glad to add as many more such sites as I can find—whatever the language.

The cost of culling

Xinhua has an excellent article on the cost of culling poultry as China battles avian flu.

Culling poultry for bird flu prevention has proven a double-edged sword. While it could help curb the rampage of the deadly virus, it has had a huge impact upon farmers' incomes. This was a big concern for Vice-Minister of Agriculture Yin Chengjie, who said slaughtering poultry has brought huge losses to farmers.

He told a seminar on Friday in Beijing the government has compensated farmers 10 yuan (US$1.2) for each bird killed, but "it cannot make up for the huge losses for farmers, as in some provinces, nearly half of their income derived from poultry rearing."

Last year, per capita net income of Chinese farmers reached 2,936 yuan (US$362), up 6.8 per cent year on year the highest increase rate since 1997.

Please pay attention to that last paragraph: It means the average Chinese farmer is living on about one US dollar a day. A chicken sold in the open market would presumably earn more than $1.20, so government compensation isn't enough.

And that in turn means Chinese farmers are really in trouble. People won't buy their chickens, the government won't pay them enough, so they aren't going to have the money they need to feed their kids—unless they feed them chicken.

When hundreds of millions of farmers are living on a dollar a day, and they can't even make that dollar, China is in big trouble even if H5N1 never goes human-to-human. And if China is in big trouble, we are all in big trouble.

The view from Mexico

I'm always looking for H5N1 stories in Latin America, which has been entirely too quiet. So it's a pleasure to link to El Universal Online in Mexico City. The English-language story won't have much news value for most flu trackers, but it's a concise summary of the situation with some facts about the Mexican government's response to the problem.

Vietnam: H5N1 in 9 provinces

Here in its entirety is a story from Vietnam's Thanh Nien Daily:

Vietnam's animal health agency said Friday that bird flu had spread to 30 communes in nine provinces and cities where nearly 30,000 fowls died or were culled.

The provinces are Bac Lieu and Dong Thap in the south, Thanh Hoa in the center, Bac Giang, Quang Nam, Hai Duong, Hung Yen, and Ninh Binh in the north, besides the capital Hanoi.

Two hundred fighting cocks belonging to a family in Quang Nam died Thursday of suspected bird flu.

The province's Department of Animal Health culled 1,500 chickens later the same day.

Two hundred fighting cocks? In one family?

OIE on Liaoning

OIE's November 11 "Disease Information" has the numbers from Liaoning. What struck me was not the numbers of poultry that died or were culled—it was that in response to the outbreak, the Chinese have inoculated 198 million birds.