H5N1

H7N9: OK to eat poultry

The news from China is very quiet tonight, April 29. This Xinhua report on China.org.cn is about all I can find—even after checking some Chinese-language sites: Safe to eat poultry products: experts. Excerpt:

Poultry is safe to eat provided it is properly handled and cooked, according to a joint study group on Monday. 

To date, there has been no evidence to indicate that anyone has been infected with the H7N9 bird flu virus following the consumption of poultry or eggs, said the study group. 

The group was jointly organized by the Ministry of Agriculture and the World Organization for Animal Health. 

Fearing a bird flu outbreak, the Chinese government ordered the culling of poultry in some areas and the safe disposal of the animals in order to prevent them from entering the food chain as well as the feed chain. 

The study group, made up of experts on veterinary epidemiology, new avian diseases and policies for disease prevention and control, began working in China on April 25 and detected no virus in poultry farms. 

They said China had responded adequately to the challenges of the H7N9 avian flu.

Fukushima's radiation: BC health risk, or fish tale?

Via The Tyee: Fukushima's Radiation: BC Health Risk, or Fish Tale? Excerpt:

Would you eat fish from Japan? Nearly two years after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan killed more than 15,000 people and damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, some people still believe dangerously contaminated fish could reach Canadians' dinner tables. 

The debate should be well over in the view of the person entrusted with overseeing public health in British Columbia: public health officer Dr. Perry Kendall. Time and again Kendall has tried to explain that there is, to quote the headline on one of his press releases, "Nothing to fear from radiation in B.C." 

Yet The Tyee has learned that Kendall became so concerned about calming the public fears that he considered unfounded that he urged the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to carry out a special round of testing as a "vital communications initiative." 

Last December, Kendall's office said that such testing was no longer necessary because Ottawa had taken new safety measures. But then last month it appeared to reverse itself a second time, telling The Tyee that, due to "continuing misinformation on the internet," it would ask Ottawa yet again to conduct new fish testing in 2013.

H7N9: "The worst bird flu crisis in history"

Via Meat Trade News Daily.co.uk: China - The Worse bird flu crisis in history. (They mean "worst," but they're in the meat trade and I'm in the grammar trade.) Excerpt:

The H7N9 avian influenza outbreak that has killed 20 people and infected more than 100 people in four provinces in China is also wreaking havoc on the poultry industry on a national scale, according the official Xinhua news agency.     

The director of the poultry association in south China’s Guangdong Province estimated that Wen’s Food Group Co. Ltd., one of the largest poultry producers in China, has lost 20 million yuan ($3.2 million) in a single day during the crisis. 

He called the latest outbreak “the worst in history,” the agency reported. The poultry industry lost at most 5 million yuan ($801,077) per company during the 2003 SARS outbreak, the H5N1 crisis in 2005 and the H1N1 infection in 2009, according to Xinhua. 

Drastic declines in poultry prices and consumption caused Wen’s Food Group to lose up to 100 million yuan ($16.2 million) between April 1 and April 14, with the total loss expected to hit 150 million yuan ($24.3 million) this month alone, the general manager of the company’s branch in Zhejiang Province told Xinhua.   

Some companies reportedly have been trying to get financing, but aren’t sure they can cover the financial gap caused by the drop in demand.

Quite apart from the damage done to an industry employing millions, millions more will have to do with less animal protein, or with other forms of it...perhaps the dubious pork that would otherwise have ended up in the local river as too diseased to sell.

In 1983, a Chinese colleague explained to me why everyone in China took a xiuxi, a siesta, after lunch: "We don't eat enough protein to get through the day without a nap." Better-fed relatives in Hong Kong thought their cousins up the Pearl River in Guangdong were a bunch of layabouts.

But it was sheer malnutrition behind that noonday sleepiness, and my family and I soon learned to enjoy a nap as well. So the economic and political consequences of H7N9 could undo 30 years of nutritional progress, and that would indeed be a major crisis.

Chinese poultry industry struggles to survive H7N9

It's almost noon Tuesday in China, and I don't find any reports of new cases or deaths. But a few minutes ago Xinhua posted a bleak new report of H7N9's increasing damage to the economy: Chinese poultry industry struggles to survive H7N9. Excerpt:

Lin Yuanzhong has killed more than 40,000 ducklings in the past 10 days as there is no sign anyone will patronize his duck breeding farm in Zini Town, Longhai city in east China's Fujian province. 

"If this continues for another 20 days, all the feed manufacturers, breeding farms and poultry raisers will be bankrupt," said Lin, who has been engaged in the industry for decades. 

Even though the fast spread of H7N9 avian influenza has so far only hit Shanghai, Beijing and the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Henan, the ensuing fear has reached nationwide. 

The outbreak since earlier this month has given China's poultry industry its hardest hit in a decade, with drastic declines in both poultry prices and consumption. 

Xiao Zhiyuan, director of the poultry association of south China's Guangdong Province, labeled the current crisis "the worst in history." 

The SARS outbreak in 2003, H5N1 in 2005 and H1N1 in 2009 inflicted at most a daily loss of 5 million yuan ($801,077) per company, but Guangdong Wen's Food Group Co Ltd, one of the largest poultry raisers in China, has suffered a loss of 20 million yuan in one day this time, according to Xiao. 

"We lost up to 100 million yuan from April 1 to April 14 and the loss is expected to hit 150 million yuan this month," said Liang Zhiyong, general manager of Wen's Food Group Co Ltd's branch in Zhejiang Province. 

"We have been trying to get financing from various channels, but the gap is still huge," said Liang. 

The area worst hit by the H7N9 crisis is east China, where the largest number of human cases of the virus have been recorded. 

The wholesale price of live chicken was three to four yuan per kg on April 15, one-third of the price before the outbreak, according to the Jiangsu Provincial Commission of Rural Affairs. 

The wholesale price of eggs was 6.5 yuan per kg, down 20 percent compared with that of late March. 

Four cities in Jiangsu, including the provincial capital of Nanjing, have shut down live poultry trading markets, stagnating sales of poultry.

In Xuzhou City alone, there are more than 300,000 live poultry to be sold every day. Jiangsu Lihua Animal Husbandry Co Ltd, which sold 160 million broilers in 2012 and reaped 3 billion yuan in revenue, has killed more than 2.73 million growing broilers since the H7N9 outbreak as raising them will be cost-prohibitive, according to the commission. 

As a whole, China's poultry industry suffered losses amounting to 10 billion yuan in the week after the first case of H7N9 was confirmed, according to the China Animal Agriculture Association. 

The real impact of the disease will be far more than that as many consumers have been reluctant to eat poultry and some restaurants have stopped offering poultry dishes. The number of tourists visiting the affected provinces is also likely to decline.

H7N9: Stop mainland China chicken imports, says Hong Kong expert

Via South China Morning Post, an April 22 report: Stop mainland China chicken imports, says expert. This could be a very interesting political fight. Excerpt:

The city should stop importing live poultry from the mainland to cut the risk of the deadly H7N9 bird flu entering Hong Kong, said the government's former top vet who is a specialist in epidemics. 

Howard Wong Kai-hay, who was principle veterinary officer at the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department until late last year, warned the inspection process was not thorough enough and food safety was at risk. 

Experts have said imported poultry is the most likely path for the new bird flu to pass from the mainland into Hong Kong. There is so far no indication that the virus is capable of human to human transmission. 

Wong, who is now head of City University's life sciences programmes, wants to see a change in government policies to encourage the city - where farmed birds are subject to a mandatory vaccination scheme and stringent AFCD inspection once every seven days - to become self-sufficient in poultry. 

"Getting rid of local farms was the wrong direction to take," said Wong. 

"The government wanted to eliminate local farms to lower the risk of bird flu after the pandemic in 1997, but it has had the opposite effect. 

"By buying poultry from outside the city, it has increased the risk, to the extent we are no longer able to guarantee our food is safe," he added. 

The number of local poultry farms has fallen from 192 to 30 after a voluntary surrender scheme introduced to poultry raisers in 2004 and 2008. But Wong said: "If all the birds are home-grown and subject to testing at different ages, it is more likely to be disease-free." 

There are 63 mainland poultry farms registered as suppliers to Hong Kong. The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department said it had inspected 29 of them last year, down from 41 inspection visits in 2010. Last year, these farms sent 3.54 million live birds across the border to the city.  

Wong said: "It is clear that the problem of disease and food safety has not been solved, it simply has been pushed somewhere else that is out of our control. 

"We can only test and cull the birds after they have been brought into the city, but we cannot participate in how they are raised. Producers always try to use ways to increase their profits. Sometimes they may use chemicals or drugs to boost animals' growth, which may or may not affect human health. 

"If a small pig or bird is fed with drugs, it may not be detectable when it grows older and is tested." 

Tang Wai-lun, of the New Territories Chicken Breeders Association, wants to see all mainland imports of poultry suspended with immediate effect as a precaution against a pandemic. 

With the 30 existing poultry farms providing 1.3 million chickens, Tang added: "Local farms are perfectly capable of supplying all the 7,000 live chickens consumed daily by Hongkongers if the government policy could be more encouraging to us."

H7N9 puts spotlight on age-old traditions in China

Via VietNamNet News, a CNN report: Bird flu puts spotlight on age-old traditions in China. Excerpt:

At Sei Wui, a remote town in western Guangdong Province, a live goose will cost you little more than $US3 a bird. 

"They're 18 kwai a piece," said one market trader, using the Chinese vernacular for the renminbi, China's currency, and pointing to her gaggle of geese honking furiously at one end of a bamboo pen. "Buy it now and they'll cook it for you," she added, pointing down the road to a small stall doing a brisk business serving a lunchtime crowd of pavement diners. 

It may taste delicious; but the way the birds are handled, stored and slaughtered has the potential to make you very sick. 

It's no accident, then, that China's public health authorities are now proactively targeting small towns and villages, taking throat swabs from live food dealers and their customers in wet markets where the rough and ready food culture provides a perfect environment for viruses -- such as H7N9 bird flu -- to flourish. 

As with all things in China, the scale of the undertaking is witheringly massive. 

China's Ministry of Agriculture says its medical dragnet has taken samples from poultry markets, farms and slaughterhouses across the country. So far, 84,444 samples have been taken, 47,801 have been tested and 39 samples confirmed as H7N9 positive. 

Of these, 38 positive samples came from live poultry markets in the Shanghai municipality and Anhui, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. One sample, worryingly, was found in a feral pigeon; an indication of the virus's ability to spread undetected in wild species. 

"Basically, at the moment poultry seems to be the source of the virus so there's a risk if there's direct contact with the poultry or indirect contact with the fecal matter or other products. Of course, if the food is being cooked properly then the risk is limited," said Dr. Leo Poon Lit-man, associate professor, at the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong. 

While the World Health Organisation has not established a direct link, medical investigators are concentrating their efforts on China's poultry farms and vendors. 

"That is the reality," he said. "That is what we learned from H5N1," he added, referring to the outbreak of the bird flu virus in Hong Kong in 1997 that killed six and left 18 seriously ill. 

Like most of China, Hong Kong back then liked its chickens fresh. Poultry in bamboo cages on street corners was a common sight and grandmothers could be regularly seen blowing on chickens' anuses -- a common local method of checking the bird's cloaca to gauge its age. 

All of these practices have ended in Hong Kong. After 1997, millions of poultry were slaughtered and hundreds of vendors put out of business. 

According to Poon, reducing the risk in any market place is not just a matter of improving hygiene; restricting transport and creating overnight "rest days" are all ways of bringing down the viral load in China's ubiquitous wet markets. 

"Once a month we leave a day that allows the poultry to sleep and then on that day we have a very thorough cleaning procedure of the market," Poon said, adding that the almost 24/7 nature of many market places in China made it difficult for health authorities to break the cycle of the virus. 

"Basically, we come up with a package -- we need more than one single measure to reduce the risk," he added.

H7N9: Shanghai authorities reassure customers locally raised birds safe to eat

Via Shanghai Daily, an April 13 report: Authorities reassure customers locally raised birds safe to eat. Excerpt:

Poultry raised in Shanghai is safe to eat, the city's agricultural authorities said yesterday amid reports of plummeting demand because of bird flu concerns. 

The reassurance came after an estimated 600,000 live chickens raised at local farms and ready to be sold were stuck there because of the ban on live poultry trade. 

That problem is on its way to being resolved with 11 designated slaughterhouses in the city beginning work yesterday. 

But once the chickens are killed, there is, for the moment, no market for them. 

"We have to freeze all these chickens after they are slaughtered because nobody buys chicken due to the outbreak these days," said Li Jianying, director of the Shanghai Animal Husbandry Office. 

"The sales of poultry are crippled, which creates huge pressure for us, and we have received a large number of worried poultry farmers these days," Li said. 

About 1.8 million chickens are raised in the city each month but not many have been sold since the H7N9 outbreak hit the headlines. 

As of yesterday, city authorities had collected 8,263 poultry samples and tested 6,186 of them. All tested negative for the virus. 

Farms that have had their chickens checked can apply for a certificate from animal disease control centers which will allow them to have their chicken purchased by the designated slaughterhouses. 

Li said experts were considering whether a permanent ban on the sale of live chickens would be adopted to prevent the transmission of bird flu in humans. 

Meanwhile, local travel agencies say the bird flu infections have not had a significant effect on the tourism market. 

There has been some reduction in tourist numbers as some people give up travel plans to avoid places with large crowds but the impact of the outbreak is "not strong," He Yiwei, deputy general manager of Shanghai Datong Travel Agency Co, said.

Sudan: The silent catastrophe continues

As if to underline the post just below, this Radio Dabanga article reports: Ten thousands of Darfurians fleeing Sudan to seek refuge in Chad. Excerpt:

At least 50,000 people have been fleeing Sudan to Chad in the past week due to fightings between various groups in Central Darfur. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says it is the largest exodus of people from Darfur since 2005. 

UN agencies and local sources in Chad have confirmed the arrival of at least 50,000 people who are fleeing inter-tribal fighting in Central Darfur. They are joining another 24,000 who have previously sought shelter in Tissi town due to other conflicts. 

Civilians escaping the recent violent clashes in Umm Dukhun between the Salamat and Misseriya tribes do not have water, food or medicines and are sleeping under trees, a local source told Radio Dabanga. These claims were confirmed by the UN agency for refugees UNHCR:   

"They are in great risk of waterborne diseases as they drink water from a nearby river. More refugees continue to arrive daily. Among them are wounded by bullets that are abandoned to their fate and are sleeping on the ground”. 

It added that most of them are traveling on foot, donkeys or on carts to save their lives. People are "exhausted, traumatized and visibly disturbed by the recent violent events". 

Central Darfur refugees saw their houses being destroyed and villages completely burnt down. Many reported their relatives being killed in the latest round of violence, UNHCR reported. 

According to a Tissi native, refugees come mostly from Abugaratil and surrounding villages, which were heavily targeted during the tribal war. Besides Tissi, the villages of Killi, Rumaliya, Ratret, Haraza and Koza are also housing refugees. 

The source disclosed that the local health center is treating 40 injured people, noting that another eight persons who were in critical conditions have been transferred to a hospital in Abeche.  

"Thick heavy smoke" 

The government of Chad and aid agencies, which had been hosting the first wave of 24,000 displaced, are reportedly deploying committees to assess the current situation in Tissi and send aid to the new arrivals. 

Local authorities have provided 100 tons of food that have already been transported by UNHCR to Tissi. 

In a press statement, however, the UN agency expressed concerns that the number of refugees could increase as clashes continue across the border. 

Its staff has witnessed “thick heavy smoke in the Darfur skies fearing this may be the result of more houses being set on fire in the nearby Darfur villages.”

H7N9: Premature thoughts about the Beijing case

Having known about case #44, the 7-year-old in Beijing, for all of 30 minutes, I know it's way too early to discuss the details (of which we have very few) But it's not too soon to consider some implications of our persistent ignorance.

Beijing, Wikipedia tells me, is 1,318 km (819 miles) from Shanghai. But we still don't know where H7N9 originated. For all we know, it may have been Tibet or Tashkent. A virus that doesn't make poultry sick can go a long way in modern Asia, and it may have been sheer chance that a strain in eastern China acquired the unfortunate ability to infect humans.

So H7N9 may well be distributed over vast areas of China; by this time next week, I expect every medical lab in the country will be studying fresh samples from local birds. For the same reason, hospitals across China will be ransacking their recent files for odd pneumonia or flu cases, especially in people connected to the poultry business.

If H7N9 really is concentrated in its original zone (three provinces and a megalopolis with a total population of 215 million), how would it have reached Beijing? Follow the money: The Black Plague reached Europe on the trade route known as the Silk Road. Poultry smugglers in southern China and northern Vietnam have often let H5N1 hitch a ride, maybe both ways. Cheap air travel did the same for H1N1. So who's shipping birds around China, from where to where?

The little girl's father is reportedly in the poultry business. A lot of the earlier cases had some kind of contact with chickens, and perhaps all of them did—if not to consume them, then to touch them or some object that infected birds had shed virus onto. In the Beijing case, Dad may have brought home a free bird from work, and while he and Mum didn't get sick, their little girl did.

So far, we haven't seen any clear evidence of poultry-free human-to-human spread of H7N9. Even then, of the tens of millions of chickens slaughtered and consumed since mid-February in the Shanghai-Anhui-Zhejiang-Jiangsu region, only a minute fraction have transmitted H7N9 to a human host.

If the virus is widespread, that would imply we have more immunity to it than we think. If the virus is actually focused on a few hundred or few thousand birds (perhaps all from the same place), then we might be able to determine their origin and eradicate H7N9 in its nest.

Either way, I'm not too personally worried about H7N9 turning into a pandemic. If the nurses and doctors in Beijing Ditan Hospital start coming down with it, that's another story. But the absence of confirmed, persistent human-to-human transmission is very encouraging. 

Less encouraging is the thought that H7N9 may also find itself at home in other mammals. We have to get over ourselves; we're not the only potential targets, and H7N9 could learn to infect dogs, cats, and livestock as well. That could pose an enormous food-security issue for 1.4 billion people or more.

Don't take any of these comments as even remotely accurate. This post has been a kind of letter to myself, the kind I'd write if I had an idea for a novel and was trying to work out the plot—to try to make the story make sense.

But as Keiji Fukuda says in the Branswell story just below, "what's likely to happen are the things which you can't imagine." H7N9 has been outwitting us right from the start.

Could H7N9 spread out of China?

Via Shanghai Daily: Concern at spread across borders. Excerpt:

The exact source of infection remains unknown, though samples have tested positive in some birds in poultry markets that remain the focus of investigations by China and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. 

Speaking in Bangkok, the FAO's Subhash Morzaria said: "This particular region is land linked and so there is a possibility that if, inadvertently or advertently, somebody moves infected poultry across borders we can anticipate the spread of this virus." 

Morzaria added: "We are proactively initiating surveillance programs in neighboring countries like Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam which border China and are at particular risk and we are trying to understand how the poultry movement has taken place so we can identify more accurately where the risk is going to be." 

The new virus is severe in most humans, leading to fears that if it becomes easily transmissible, it could cause a deadly influenza pandemic. 

However, Morzaria said: "This new H7N9 virus hasn't been demonstrated to be transmitted between humans, so from that context we think that the H7N9 virus is not going to be a pandemic like H1N1 strains."

Given what we know so far, I tend to agree that we're not looking at a pandemic. But widespread H7N9 in poultry would create enormous economic and food-security problems. The costs of testing and inspection would be high, and even birds that passed the tests would be a hard sell in many Asian markets. So the industry would falter, thousands would be out of work, and consumers would need another source of animal protein. All of which would result in more public health problems stemming from stress, unemployment, and malnutrition.