Bird flu virus 'unlikely to reach Australia' (updated)

Via the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Bird flu virus 'unlikely to reach Australia.' Excerpt:

An international conference in Brisbane has been told that it is unlikely a deadly strain of the bird flu virus will ever reach Australia.

It is the first time Australia has hosted the World Poultry Congress, with more than 2,000 delegates attending the first day.

Immunologist and Nobel prize-winner Peter Doherty says although the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain has killed 240 people overseas, Australia's dry climate and isolation will help prevent the virus entering the country.

"It's not something we have to worry about," he said.

But virus expert Dr Andrew Turner says there is still a slight risk.

"We have to be prepared, it may not be H5N1 which starts the pandemic - there are other viruses circulating in birds at the moment," he said.

However he says Australia's strict quarantine system is helping keep bird flu out of the country.

An inquiry into last year's horse flu outbreak blamed weak quarantine procedures for the spread of the virus.

Dr Turner says poultry is monitored more closely than horses.

Update: Mike Coston at Avian Flu Diary has a good analysis of this story, which he finds confusing and reflective of generally poor reporting on H5N1.

Comments

[Edmund]

I am going to assume that this is bad reporting rather than informed scientists conflating a panzootic and a pandemic.

Australia *might* be able to keep H5N1 from infecting its birds. But it certainly is not going to be able to keep a pandemic strain from infecting its humans, quarantine or not.

Thanks to this kind of reporting, many people who don't follow H5N1 news (ignorance must be bliss) are still confused about the threat that a pandemic poses.

[Jonathon Singleton]

Edmund, your concise comments give "informed" establishment scientists the benefit of the doubt in understanding the evolutionary nature of pathogens such as A/H5N1. As a regular flublogian, you're aware that I position myself firmly in the Niman camp of recombination -- I consider this hyper-evolutionary transgenic (genetic code species-barrier rupture) paradigm timeline consistent with the last decade's global release of unstable viral-based genetically modified crops, so it makes perfect sense...

Yes, just like a sci-fi movie plot, corporations greedily -- without the proper longterm safety testing -- fast-track blended disparate genetic material into commerical crop constructs via an unstable promoter, which is virus based. And just like a sci-fi movie plot which has that explanatory intro, then fades to black and dissolves to a sunny ocean scene with this years date, we now see an emergence of an evolutionary viral monster which, seeking to actualize itself within a suicidal man-made paradigm, creates a cross species supervirus altering prior life cycles on planet earth...

Well Edmund, yobbo smalltown West Aussies have branded me "crazy" before back when I had "fight or flight" insight into the 1997 Hong Kong A/H5N1 human fatalities! To be honest, I was stoned when watching an early morning SBS tv news show item on the first recorded bird flu fatalities in humans. But, my instincts certainly knew what was what and they were screaming for me to get away from this tiny planet ASAP -- silly, silly me for letting Aussies know what I was thinking.

Right now, I'm thinking about the words from Recombinomics -- they certainly appear to describe the suicidal viral monster:

Recombinomics Commentary -- Slippery Slope of New Biology of Recombination in Influenza (June 26, 2008)

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/06260802/Flu_New_Biology_Slippery.html

Excerpt: Examples of concurrent acquisition of the same polymorphism onto divergent genetic backgrounds, as well as aggregation of diverse polymorphisms into the same gene, provide examples of movement of single nucleotide polymorphisms via recombination, which serious challenges the basic tenet of influenza evolution...