H5N1

Second case of H5N1 bird flu in Cambodia confirmed

Via the Khmer Times: 2nd case of H5N1 bird flu in Cambodia confirmed. Excerpt:

The Ministry of Health has just issued a statement confirming the discovery of a second case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A(H5N1) in Prey Veng province – the father of an 11 year old girl who died from the virus on Wednesday  

The outbreak is centred around Roleang village, Romlech commune, Sithor Kandal district, Prey Veng province.  

The Ministry says that after the girl’s death, the emergency research work team of the Ministry of Health in collaboration with local authorities and Prey Veng Provincial Health Department, together with health partners, arrived at the village immediately on February 23, 2023.  

The emergency response team collected samples from 12 people.  One of the 12 samples – taken from a 49-year-old man living in Roleang village – has been confirmed as positive.   

The Ministry of Health states that the virus was not previously found in humans for the past 9 years in the Kingdom of Cambodia.   

The emergency response team has been investigating the outbreak of the H5N1 virus and is responding to national procedures, and has been working with the emergency response team, human and veterinary vets, to find the source of the infection.  

Animals and humans will continue to be tested for suspected cases to prevent transmission to others in the community in the village where the incident occurred.  

Public health expert Dr Quach Mengly said the disease has symptoms similar to a cold, cough, and fever and is highly life-threatening without treatment.  

“To prevent the infection, please avoid touching and eating sick and dead animals,” he said. “Bury the dead animals properly, and wash your hands properly after that.”

11-year-old Cambodian girl dies of H5N1 bird flu

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Via Vietnam+: 11-year-old Cambodian girl dies of H5N1 bird flu. I couldn't find anything about the case in the Cambodian media, but FluTrackers are all over the story from multiple sources.

Phnom Penh (VNA) - An 11-year-old girl from southeast Cambodia's Prey Veng province had died of H5N1 human avian influenza, the country's Ministry of Health's Communicable Disease Control Department reported on February 22. 

The girl fell ill on February 16, with the symptoms of a high temperature of 39 degrees Celsius, cough and sore throat, the department said, adding that she first sought local health service, but her condition saw no improvements, so she was then transferred to the National Pediatric Hospital in Phnom Penh. 

On February 21, the doctor took her samples for diagnosis at the National Institute of Public Health and the results came out one day later, confirming that she was positive for H5N1 bird flu, and the girl died later.  

The department called on people not to touch ill or dead poultry and if suspected of having been infected with the virus.

Want to fix public health? Stop thinking like a doctor

Via The Nation, Eric Reinhart writes: Want to Fix Public Health? Stop Thinking Like a Doctor. Excerpt:

A changing of the guard in US public health is impending—and, with it, a chance to rejuvenate a flailing field. Anthony Fauci has retired in the shadow of one of the worst preventable disasters in history, and President Biden is moving to make new appointments while establishing a permanent White House Office for Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. 

In doing so, Biden and his advisers must confront the fact that the rot in public health is structural: It cannot be cured by simply rotating the figureheads who preside over it. Building effective national health infrastructure will require confronting pervasive distortions of public health and remaking the leadership appointment systems that have left US public health agencies captive to partisan interests. 

 Part of what has made public health vulnerable and a plaything of partisan politicking is the field’s gradual medicalization. Consider, for example, the history of the nation’s most important public health agency. Since 1953, every director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has had a doctor of medicine, or MD, degree as their primary credential, with secondary degrees serving mostly as résumé decor. 

Given that medical interventions constitute only 10–20 percent of modifiable factors affecting health, the backgrounds reflected in CDC leadership—and, likewise, at most state and local public health agencies—are notable for their consistent prioritization of narrow biomedical expertise at the expense of other fields that represent the remaining 80–90 percent of pertinent knowledge for making public health policy.  

Physician and public health scholar Milton Roemer once observed that for the work of public health, “most of medical education is irrelevant.” But neither doctors’ irrelevant medical knowledge nor relative ignorance of essential fields—labor history, social anthropology, political economy, epidemiology, environmental sciences—is the most troubling aspect of physician control of public health. Rather, it’s the lack of epistemic humility, conferring an inability to recognize the limits and hazards of clinical reasoning, with which medical training often imbues them. Clinical reasoning is not only not the population-level logic of public health; it is frequently antithetical to it.

When we treat patients, doctors are appropriately oriented around taking care of the individual in front of us. We recognize that we typically cannot change their life circumstances—such as economic and housing conditions, employers’ demands, student and medical debt, neighborhood violence, or social isolation—and so we focus our clinical attention on helping them live as well as possible within existing constraints.

Public health, by contrast, is about treating populations. As with medicine, the goal of public health is to enable individuals to be free of health limitations that curtail their ability to live as they please. But public health pursues this by very different means. The task is not to help individuals accommodate to oppressive social or labor contexts. It is instead to use the power of government to change conditions that are constraining people’s freedom. The core tools of public health, then, are not just vaccines or lab tests but also policies pertaining to corporate regulation and consumer safety standards; labor protections; public jobs and housing programs; investments in community health workers, decriminalization, and decarceration; and civil rights lawsuits.