H5N1

Dr. Mackay on MERS, H7N9, and dabbling ducks

Dr. Ian Mackay is having fun on his blog Virology Down Under (VDU), keeping up to date on MERS and H7N9 and now experimenting with "stuff from the literature"—for starters, dabbling ducks' response to flu viruses. Highly recommended.

A Chinese H7N9 blog

Thanks to Lucie Lecomte for sending the link to H7N9 avian flu strikes. This is a Chinese-language blog with a great deal of news on the virus. You'll see a set of links at the top of the page for other languages; I tried English and Español and got websites that seem to be dedicated to discrediting the Falun Gong sect.

Google Chrome will translate the H7N9 site—not brilliantly, but adequately, and it offers a great deal of material. I'm putting a link to it in the H7N9 Resources list.

An interesting new H7N9 resource

Lucie Lecomte has sent the link to a useful site: Information Security Biweekly. This website has both English and Chinese posts, and the H7N9 category has some good posts. The most recent, Anatomy of China's bird flu outbreak so far, has useful charts and tables. I've put a link in the Bloggers list.

Tracking H7N9 in the twitterverse

Far more than during the H1N1 pandemic, Twitter is playing a critical function in spreading information about the emergence of a new disease. We have been living with H7N9 for less than a month, and we still know very little. But we'd know far less without the tweets of some remarkable individuals and agencies. So here, with some annotations, are the handles (Twitter names) of those I most rely on for solid information about H7N9:

Helen Branswell: The star health writer for The Canadian Press and present at the creation of Flublogia. 

Mike Coston: The author of Avian Flu Diary offers breaking news plus highly useful background and context.

FluTrackers: They handle floods of information. Don't even try to keep track without them.

Jennifer Yang: The health reporter at the Toronto Star is a welcome new observer.

Declan Butler: A top writer for Nature and a founding father of Flublogia.

Tom Watkins: As Treyfish, Tom is another founding father.

Jason Anthony Tetro: An expert; he knows what he's tweeting about.

WHO: Tweeting H7N9 before it goes on their website.

Gregory Härtl: WHO's tireless communications maestro, patiently answering questions.

Lisa Schnirring: She pulls the news together every day for CIDRAP, picking up what I've missed.

Mara Hvistendahl: Writer/editor for Science, based on Shanghai.

Li Yin: No idea who she is, but she's sending intelligent tweets from China.

Pasi Penttinen: In ECDC's Epidemic Intelligence division, new to Twitter but likely to be a major source.

Not enough? Bookmark #H7N9 and follow everyone.

When it goes without saying, I try not to say it. But in this case I'll say it anyway: Without you folks, I wouldn't have much to say at all. Thank you.

H7N9 and surfing the Chinese media

After years of rolling my eyes at computer-translated news reports, and using them only with extreme reluctance, I confess that H7N9 has made me see the error of my ways. (Now FluTrackers can roll their eyes at me.)

Again and again, surfing the provincial Chinese-language media has turned up details that never make it up the ladder to Xinhua. The translations aren't always clear, but they get the basic message across. It takes some patience and willingness to experiment; using Google Chrome as your browser, set on automatic translation, makes it easier.

Some websites display images of the paper page by page, rather than translating headlines. Even then, you can find the articles (as I did with the Zhejiang post earlier today) by looking for "H7N9" in a mass of Chinese ideograms. When you do, click on the story and it will pop up.

The place to start is ABYZ News Links, and in particular the page China Newspapers - China Newspaper News Media Guide. This will give you a host of foreign, national and provincial links, listed alphabetically by the cities they serve. Scroll down and explore. A few provincial links will be dead, but most should give you something.

When a news item from Xinhua mentions a particular city or province, my instinct is to go there, or as close as possible. I don't expect to find a contradiction of the Xinhua story, but vivid and useful details often turn up.

Good luck. If you find any notably good sources, please let me know. And if you find a better way to surf these sites, so much the better.

A crash course in tuberculosis

The excellent blog Infection Landscapes has a new mini-course, this one on Tuberculosis. The introduction:

This time on Infection Landscapes we are going to cover one of the most significant infectious diseases to affect humans: tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is an ancient disease and is currently the world's second leading cause of death due to an infectious disease. 

The Pathogen. Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria in the Mycobacteriaceae family. This family is comprised of many slow growing, acid-fast bacilli, most of which live in soil and water and help to degrade organic material. However, there are five species that are capable of causing tuberculosis in humans, and three of these are highly pathogenic. Mycobacterium tuberculosis, M. africanum, M. bovis are the three highly pathogenic agents capable of causing  tuberculosis in humans. M. tuberculosis causes the vast majority of human tuberculosis worldwide.

Surfing for H7N9 news

Judging from traffic, a lot of new people have been coming here since I posted this item back on April 2: Following H7N9 on your own. The links there are ones I'm still using, and many of them are now in the H7N9 Resources list in the right-hand corner. 

An additional word about ABYZ News: It provides links to newspapers and other news resources in countries all over the world. Go to China, and you'll see it breaks down into nationwide and provincial sources—most of them, of course in Chinese. If you use Google Translate, you can copy and paste stories to convert them to (sort-of) English text.

Better yet, if you use Google Chrome as your browser, go to Advanced Settings in its Preferences and check "Offer to translate pages that aren't in a language I read." Then, when you land on a Chinese page, Chrome will ask if you want it translated (and if you want it done automatically every time you land on such a page).

The translations sure aren't pretty, and sometimes they're baffling, but you'll get a better sense of what's being said in China.

Halfway through our third week of H7N9, I continue to be impressed by the sheer collegiality of this new flu community. Even the experts are groping for answers, and sharing their highly educated guesses with the rest of us. It speaks very well for the whole global-health system.

H7N9: Bloggers pry open guarded details

Via The Standard in Hong Kong: (H7N9 watch) Bloggers pry open guarded details. Excerpt:

Photos of 10 dead sparrows on a Chinese pavement which went viral on social media and drew a swift official response show how hard covering up a bird flu outbreak would be in the internet age. 

China has won international praise for its transparency on the H7N9 strain, which has killed 14 people so far, in sharp contrast to criticism for trying to conceal the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic, AFP reports. 

But analysts say the government has little choice, as technological change over the past decade and the proliferation of “weibo’’ microblogs help drive greater official openness. 

Mao Xiaojiong's images, shot beneath a magnolia tree near her home in the city of Nanjing – which banned live poultry trading and culled birds after confirming H7N9 in people – were a case in point. 

When she posted them on her weibo account earlier this month, asking authorities to investigate, they were reposted 20,000 times, racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and became a top topic on Internet portal Sina. 

Police took away one of the dead birds the same night to test for H7N9, and within two days authorities publicly ruled out the virus as a cause of death. 

Mao said the spread of her post “showed this matter received great attention from the public.’’

“It made it easier to attract attention of the government,’’ she told AFP. 

But she also deleted her original post because of worries over the uproar she caused. 

“Really nervous seeing so many reposts... As it hasn't been confirmed by officials, I deleted the post so as not to cause panic,’’ she explained at the time.

Coston on the newshounds

Mike Coston at Avian Flu Diary has a new post: Newshounds On The Trail Of The Latest Beijing H7N9 Report. I heartily second his praise of the newshounds of the flu forums. 

A new H7N9 list

I've added a new H7N9 Resources list; you'll find it in the right-hand column, just below the search window. It certainly doesn't include all the sources I check, but these are links I've found generally current and reliable Some require Google translation. If you're using Chrome as your browser, that's an automatic function. It's not great, but delivers the gist of the report. New links will go up as I find them. I hope you find them useful.