H5N1

Meteorite in Russia: All videos in one place

Via Alexander Zaytsev, who slept through the whole thing: Meteorite in Russia: all videos in one place. Excerpt:

I happen to live 300kms away from Chelyabinsk, where a meteorite exploded earlier today. Here are all the videos I could find featuring the meteorite explosion.

And they are extraordinary. So are the photos he's added.

Swedish shops to churn horsemeat into biogas

Via The Local.se: Swedish shops to churn horsemeat into biogas. Excerpt:

Horsemeat-hit Swedish supermarket chain Ica has recalled so many ready-made meals that its overstuffed warehouse in southern Sweden has started sending excess food to be recycled into biogas. 

After Sweden was hit by the scandal surrounding "beef lasagne" imported through French supplier Comigel, retailers have been forced to recall the equine-heavy products. 

Swedish retail chain Ica has called for all such products to be sent to its central warehouse in Helsingborg, southern Sweden. 

Malmö store manager Jerry Rosengren, however, admits that the 63,000-square-metre storage facility has had too much horsemeat to handle. 

"It creates extra work for us, of course, but the most important thing is that they are no longer sold," he told Sveriges Radio. 

"The customers should always feel safe when they come here to shop," he added. 

Recalled products are now to be transported to a recycling station in Ängelholm, where they will be turned into biogas. 

Swedish food manufacturer Findus, meanwhile, is sending its own products to a warehouse in Bjuv, around 20 kilometres east of Helsingborg. 

Since the Findus horsemeat scandal broke last week, authorities at other retailers have been scrambling to find out if they too have been affected.

Vaccinator killings set back Nigerian polio eradication drive

Via IRIN Africa, a February 15 report: Vaccinator killings set back Nigerian polio eradication drive. Excerpt:

Unknown gunmen on mopeds shot dead 10 polio vaccinators last week in separate attacks on two polio clinics in the northern Nigerian city of Kano, capital of a polio-endemic region where concerted global efforts are being made to stamp out the virus by the end of 2013. 

In 2012 polio infected 28 children in Kano State, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). 

Health officials fear the attacks will slow progress on the polio campaign in the region. 

“The attack on polio immunization workers is a setback to the [polio] programme and the success we have recorded so far… [The] polio eradication campaign is a very important issue with the Kano State government,” Kano State Health Commissioner Abubakar Labaran Yusuf told IRIN. 

“This shooting is a serious threat to polio immunization in Kano,” Aminu Ahmed Tudunwada, head of Kano State Polio Victims Trust Association (KSPVTA), told IRIN. “It will take at least three months to get the programme back on track because vaccinators are now scared of going out to do their work.” 

Polio vaccinator Naja’atu Usman, 21, was shot but survived the attack. Her elder brother said his sister would continue her work to eradicate polio when she recovered. 

“When she fully recovers we will encourage her to continue because polio eradication campaign is a noble undertaking,” he told IRIN. 

The vaccinators had just finished a four-day polio immunization campaign in two districts of Kano State and were about to start a one-day mop-up exercise to reach children missed in the initial round. 

Health workers were trying to vaccinate 90 percent of all children under five to build up “herd immunity”, or a group’s ability to withstand an epidemic.

Nepal: Poultry farmers resist H5N1 culling

Via República: Bird flu on rise, farmers resist vets. Something very similar happened a few years ago in West Bengal. Excerpt:

With the growing incidence of bird flu in the Valley, vet officials and technicians have been encountering intense resistance and threats from poultry farmers, the Directorate of Animal Health (DoAH) said. Due to the resistance and threats from farmers, efforts to control the disease have becoming a serious challenge for the officials. 

According to DoAH officials, poultry farmers have even stopped reporting the death of fowls to veterinary offices, which they said is a dangerous trend and a great threat to public health. 

The office said that strains of H5N1 virus have been spreading rapidly in the poultry farms of the Valley and adjoining districts. This week alone, the capital witnessed four outbreaks of the virus, in which over 12,000 chickens were culled. 

In the last one-and-half months, a seventh outbreak has occurred in the district. Rapid response teams comprising vets destroyed thousands of chickens in Dhading, Nuwakot, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur during this period. 

"The disease has been spreading rapidly and we have been encountering more resistance from farmers," said Dr Narayan Prasad Ghimire, senior veterinarian at DoAH, adding, "They tried to dare the rapid response teams to destroy the infected chickens." 

The office had to seek the assistance of police to carry out disinfection in several farms. 

Ghimire, who is also spokesperson of DoAH, said that the trend of obstructing vet officials disinfecting the tainted farms is dangerous. 

"Had we not intervened on time, they (farmers) would sell all the ailing chickens in the market," he added. He said that due to the resistance of farmers, the office could not assure that all the chicken in the market is safe for consumption.

UK: Third family member has 'Sars-like virus'

Via BBC News: Third family member has 'Sars-like virus'. Excerpt:

A third member of a family in the UK has been infected with a new respiratory illness similar to the deadly Sars virus, officials say. 

It strengthens evidence that the virus can spread between people, however experts say the risk to the general population remains small. 

Of the 12 people confirmed to have the virus, five have died. 

This case appears to be a milder form of the infection and the patient is not being treated in hospital. 

The infection is thought to come from contact with animals. However, if the virus can spread between people it poses a much more serious threat. 

This is the fourth case identified in the UK. The first was a patient flown in from Qatar for treatment. The second was linked to travel to the Middle East and Pakistan. 

The virus is then thought to have spread from the second patient to his son and another member of the family.

Here is the report from the Health Protection Agency.

Global health needs more statistics

Via ScienceInsider: Global Health Needs More Statistics. Click through for important links. Excerpt:

What is the best way to estimate how many people suffer from tuberculosis, from the forests of Central Africa to the highlands of Peru? At a 2-day meeting organized and hosted by the World Heath Organization (WHO) here, 60 leaders in the field of global health statistics drew up a set of proposals to improve the world's ability to count the sick and the dead. 

They called for helping countries to collect better information on disease and death and pledged to work together to produce the best estimates from the sparse data sometimes available. 

Knowing how many people in which areas suffer from which maladies is crucial for designing effective public health policies. But there's a problem. In areas that have some of the most urgent public health needs, no one is keeping adequate statistics. In many places, there are no records of either births or deaths. 

"Where disease burden is greatest, our capacity to measure trends doesn't exist," said Margaret Chan, director-general of WHO, at the start of the meeting yesterday. 

And even in places with sophisticated health systems, cause-of-death records are often misleading or incorrect. In the United Kingdom, 17% of the deaths are recorded incorrectly, said Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, Seattle. 

Scientists use the available data and complex computer modeling to fill in the gaps and estimate the burden of, say, turberculosis in Peru or high blood pressure in Italy. In the biggest effort ever undertaken, a group of scientists in December published the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2010 study, which estimated disease burdens—death as well as years of life affected by disability—for 291 diseases and injuries in 20 age groups in 21 global regions. 

On 5 March, the study, which Murray coordinates, will publish its country estimates for the same set of diseases. (They will also announce plans to launch a Global Burden of Disease 2.0, which will be updated annually—or even more frequently.)

Mexico: H7N3 outbreak in 5 poultry farms

Via El Heraldo de León in Guanajuato state: Reportan influenza aviar in Guanajuato. [Bird flu reported in Guanajuato] Excerpt, with my translation:

De acuerdo con un reporte de la Bolsa Mexicana de Valores, emitido este jueves 14 de febrero, Industrias Bachoco en Celaya reportó un posible brote de influenza aviar en cinco granjas de aves reproductoras. 

According to a report from the Mexican stock market, issued Thursday, February 14, Bachoco Industries in Celaya reports a possible outbreak of avian influenza in five poultry farms.  

Se “ha detectado un posible brote de influenza aviar tipo H7N3, en cinco de sus granjas reproductoras de aves ubicadas en el estado de Guanajuato” dice el reporte. 

"A possible outbreak of type H7N3 avian influenza has been detected in five of its breeding farms in the state of Guanajuato," the report said.

Esta compañía cuenta con cerca de 100 granjas de este tipo en México, que producen huevo incubable para producción de pollo. 

This company owns close to 100 farms of this type in Mexico, producing eggs for chicken production.

Este tipo de influenza es similar a la detectada en el 2012 en granjas de huevo comercial pertenecientes a otros productores en el vecino estado de Jalisco.

This type of influenza is similar to that detected in 2012 in commercial egg farms belonging to other producers in the neighbouring state of Jalisco.

I first picked up this report from Bloomberg.com, which considered it a significant business story.

Russian meteor largest in a century

This is not a public health story (despite hundreds of reported injuries), but too fascinating to ignore. Via Nature News & Comment: Russian meteor largest in a century. Click through for the full report and a dramatic video. 

A meteor that exploded over Russia this morning was the largest recorded object to strike the Earth in more than a century, scientists say. Infrasound data collected by a network designed to watch for nuclear weapons testing suggests that today's blast released hundreds of kilotonnes of energy. 

That would make it far more powerful than the nuclear weapon tested by North Korea just days ago and the largest rock crashing on the planet since a meteor broke up over Siberia's Tunguska river in 1908. 

"It was a very, very powerful event," says Margaret Campbell-Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, who has studied data from two infrasound stations near the impact site. 

Her calculations show that the meteoroid was approximately 15 metres across when it entered the atmosphere, and put its mass at around 40 tonnes. "That would make it the biggest object recorded to hit the Earth since Tunguska," she says. 

The meteor appeared at around 09:25 a.m. local time over the region of Chelyabinsk, near the southern Ural Mountains. The fireball blinded drivers and a subsequent explosion blew out windows and damaged hundreds of buildings. So far, more than 700 people are reported to have been injured, mainly from broken glass, according to a statement from the Russian Emergency Ministry. 

Despite its massive size, the object went undetected until it hit the atmosphere. "I'm not aware of anyone who saw this coming," says Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency's space debris office at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. Although a network of telescopes watches for asteroids that might strike Earth, it is geared towards spotting larger objects — between 100 metres and a kilometre in size. 

"Objects like that are nearly impossible to see until a day or two before impact," says Timothy Spahr, Director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which tracks asteroids and small bodies. So far as he knows, he says, his centre also failed to spot the approaching rock. 

The meteoroid itself was likely made of actual rock, but may have also been made of nickel and iron. Campbell-Brown says it probably came from the asteroid belt, a region containing hundreds of thousands of rocky bodies and located between Mars and Jupiter. 

ESA does not believe the meteor is related to a much larger asteroid known as 2012 DA14, which will be passing within about 20,000 kilometres of Earth later today. Both the timing of the meteor's appearance and its location indicate it came from a different direction, Klinkrad says. 

Campbell-Brown agrees: "We happened to have close approaches to two of them, and one of them got us," she says.

Life and death in Haiti: A doctor’s diary

Via The Globe and Mail, a special report by Canadian orthopedic surgeon Andrew Furey about a week spent in Port-au-Prince: Life and death in Haiti: A doctor’s diary. It won't be a surprise to those who follow Dr. John Carroll. Excerpt:

January 16 

First full day and we’ve all had our eyes opened to the realities of Haiti. These people live in constant survival mode. A 17-year-old came in with a dislocated hip in the middle of the night. His wails woke us up as we slept in the hospital dorm. We reduced [manipulated] his hip and the young man walked out four hours later because he had to go to work or his family wouldn’t eat. Incredible. 

Today, we did a few surgeries where, in Canada, the patients would be in hospital a couple of nights and go home on fairly strong narcotics. Here, our patients go home about four hours after coming out of the OR with a prescription for Tylenol and Advil. One woman gave birth without any real painkillers and walked out with her baby a couple of hours later. It’s an extremely opioid naive population.

WHO: Monthly H5N1 risk assessment

WHO has published Influenza at human-animal interface - Monthly Risk Assessment Summary for February. This is a multi-page PDF. I completely missed the Egyptian case mentioned below. Excerpt:

From 2003 through 15 February 2013, 620 laboratory-confirmed human cases with avian influenza A(H5N1) virus infection have been officially reported to WHO from 15 countries, of which 367 died. Since the last update on 16 January 2013, ten new laboratory-confirmed human cases with influenza A(H5N1) virus infection were reported to WHO.

Since 16 January, Cambodia reported seven new human cases with influenza A(H5N1) virus infection including six fatal cases. These cases come from four provinces all located in southern Cambodia. These cases do not seem to be linked epidemiologically, and most had contact with sick poultry in the village. Enhanced surveillance has been put in place and did not detect additional cases linked to these cases.

Current evidence does not support human-to-human transmission. It has been suggested that the A(H5N1) virus is endemic in poultry in Cambodia, and that there is more poultry and human movement around the Lunar New Year. As such, additional sporadic human cases might be expected.

Egypt has reported one new human case with influenza A(H5N1) virus infection in Behera Governorate. The A(H5N1) virus is also endemic in poultry in some areas of Egypt, and additional sporadic human cases are possible.

On 10 February 2013, China reported 2 new human cases of influenza A(H5N1) virus infection. Both remain in critical condition. The cases come from the same province but do not seem to be epidemiologically linked. Neither had documented contact with sick or dead poultry. Contact tracing and follow up is on-going but no additional cases have been identified. The last official report of A(H5N1) in poultry in mainland China was from Guangdong Province in September 2012.