H5N1

New B2B outbreak in northwest China

Xinhuanet reports Bird flu virus found in NW China.

China has discovered H5N1 bird flu virus in poultry in the northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) has said.

The National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory on Thursday discovered the H5N1 bird flu virus from the samples collected at the Xuanhe town of Zhongwei city in Ningxia, the MOA said on Friday evening.

Upon the case was identified, the MOA immediately sent expert teams to Zhongwei to control any possible outbreak.

An emergency mechanism has been launched and the local veterinary departments have set up examination stations to disinfect people and vehicles into and out of the affected area.

Bird flu spreads to new state in Nigeria

Via Reuters: Bird flu spreads to new state in Nigeria.

The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has appeared in remote Taraba state in eastern Nigeria, but in most other parts of Africa's most populous country the spread of the virus is slow, officials said on Friday.

The first African country to be hit by bird flu, Nigeria has not reported any human cases of the disease although experts warn surveillance may not be completely effective and cases may have gone undetected. The detection of the virus in Taraba means bird flu is now present in 14 of Nigeria's 36 states and in the Federal Capital Territory. The state that had most recently joined the list was Lagos in April.

"We have identified it in three places in Taraba, one commercial farm and two places where there are backyard poultry," said Lami Lombin, director of the National Veterinary Research Institute which tests for bird flu.

Africa worries me almost as much as Indonesia. Western media seem to have zero interest in African news unless it involves thousands of deaths, and even then it depends on the cause of death. An overcrowded bus going into a ravine is news. People dying of cholera or AIDS in an overcrowded hospital are not news.

So H5N1 will keep eating away at African economies and communities without our noticing until something like an H2H outbreak finally gets our attention.

Brazil: Chicken exports down, but domestic consumption is up

Brazzil Magazine reports Exports Are Down But Brazilians Are Eating More Chicken.

Bird flu, which killed thousands of chickens in Asian countries in 2005, caused Brazilian exports to decline. On the other hand, chicken prices fell on the domestic market, and Brazilians consumed more chicken.

This is the assessment made by Adriana Santos, an analyst with the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), on the basis of a study released by the institute yesterday, June 29.

The study shows that between January and March of this year slightly more than a billion chicken were slaughtered, a 12.21% increase in comparison with the same period last year. The total number of chicken slaughtered was, however, only 1.71% greater than in the final quarter of 2005.

US says H5N1 now in 53 countries

Via the Bangkok Post: US monitors: Bird flu in 53 nations.

Outbreaks of the H5N1 avian virus have been confirmed in 53 countries, with 16 announcing cases within three months of one another, said Mike Leavitt, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in an updated report released June 29 on U.S. pandemic planning efforts. The report also calls for continued vigilance against a possible pandemic outbreak.

The Agriculture Department said in a report on its pandemic planning efforts, also released June 29, that it has stepped up domestic and international avian flu-detection activities, including the establishment of offices in five Asian countries where H5N1 has hit poultry flocks and humans.

Leavitt said more troubling than the spread of H5NI was the first report of human-to-human transmission of the bird flu strain in an outbreak in Indonesia in May. The World Health Organization confirmed it last week.

I don't have time at the moment to find the Agriculture Department report, but it should be easy to dig up through the department's avian influenza site (under H5N1 Government Sites in the left-hand column).

Branswell: Bird flu most deadly in teens and young adults

Another must-read from Helen Branswell, via C-Health: Bird flu most deadly in teens and young adults.

The H5N1 avian flu virus has exacted an alarmingly high death toll among adolescents and young adults, - an eerie echo of the infamous Spanish flu, a new analysis of cumulative cases by the World Health Organization confirms.

"The differences in the age-related case-fatality distribution among H5N1 cases are reminiscent of those observed during previous pandemics, particularly in 1918, where case-fatality rates were higher among young adults," the review said.

The report, published Friday in the WHO's publication the Weekly Epidemiological Record, also urges countries to share data on avian flu cases, saying doing so "will collectively defend all countries against a common threat."

The link will take you to a page on the WHO site where you can download the PDF of the report.

WHO warns of more easily spreadable birdflu form

While I was watching Argentina lose on penalty shots to Germany, alas, my readers were sending me links. Thanks for this Reuters story: WHO warns of more easily spreadable birdflu form. Excerpt:

The risk of bird flu mutating into an form more easily spread between people is still high and there could be an upswing in human infections at the end of the year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned on Friday.

In a report analysing more than 200 known bird flu cases, the United Nations agency identified three peaks in human infections since 2003, all concentrated during the winter and spring seasons in the northern hemisphere.

"If this pattern continues, an upsurge in cases could be anticipated starting in late 2006 or early 2007," the WHO said, adding that further analysis was needed.

"Moreover, the widespread distribution of the H5N1 virus in poultry and the continued exposure of humans suggest that the risk of virus evolving into a more transmissible agent in humans remains high," it said.

It's a long article, and deserves a full reading.

Bird flu vaccine "10 years away"

Thanks to the reader who sent the link to this BBC story: Bird flu vaccine '10 years away'. It quotes Dr. David Fedson, a retired professor of medicine.

According to Dr Fedson, who also worked for a number of years in the vaccine manufacturing industry, the vaccine produced from H5N1 was proving particularly difficult to grow up.

It was also proving ineffective at stimulating an immune response that would give a person a good defence against bird flu.

He told BBC News: "Right now, worldwide, we can produce 300 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine, but it turns out that the H5N1 vaccine is so poorly immunogenic and replicates so poorly that... we could immunise globally, with six months of production, about 100 million people.

"From a public health point of view this is catastrophic," the former professor of medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, US, said.

The ABARE report

The Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics has gained a lot of worldwide attention for its new report, Avian Influenza: Potential Economic Impact of a Pandemic on Australia. The link will take you to a page where you can obtain the full report in PDF or HTML. I'll also put a link to it in H5N1 Special Reports.

Hawaii stockpiles pandemic supplies; Alaska makes plans

Via Yahoo News, a story from KITV, a Hawaiian TV station: Medical Community Stockpiles Bird Flu Supplies.

Hawaii's medical community has been quietly stockpiling huge caches of medical and emergency supplies in case there is an outbreak of bird flu or a bioterrorism event.

The emergency supplies and medicines are stacked in warehouses, stashed at every hospital in the state and put away in other locations that aren't being disclosed.

The federal government has been giving the state millions of dollars to stock up. Officials said that they have bought more than just medicine.

"Personal protective equipment, suits, masks, swabs, communication equipment, handheld radios, sat radios, computers, pharmaceuticals, nerve agent antidotes, even shelter," said Toby Clairmont of the Healthcare Association of Hawaii.

The ABC fictional movie "Fatal Contact" depicted tents and trailers being turned into hospital wards. Health officials said the movie was accurate.

"The general consensus was it's pretty much on the mark," Clairmont said.

Much of the equipment, supplies and emergency gear seen in the movie is exactly what the state has been stockpiling, Clairmont said. Officials said they had to have it on hand before any outbreak.

This is good to hear, but is the US government funding similar stockpiles in other states? I thought their message was "You're on your own."

Meanwhile, Anchorage is planning for a pandemic and trying to figure out how police could enforce quarantines without themselves becoming infected.

Sitting on flu data

Declan Butler, a reporter for Nature, doesn't blog often. But when he does, it's always a must-read, like today's post: The time for sitting on flu data is over.

The post is a comment about today's editorial in Nature, with extended excerpts. (The editorial itself, alas, is available only to subscribers.) It's instructive to hear the quarrels going on among the scientists when they think we've been safely tucked in bed for the night.