Thanks to Jennifer Yang for tweeting the link to this long Bloomberg.com report: China Said to Invite Four Flu Experts as Disease Outbreak Widens. Excerpt:
Four international flu experts will arrive in China within days to help authorities respond to the country’s widening bird-flu emergency, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Nancy Cox, director of the flu division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Anne Kelso, director of a World Health Organization flu research center in Melbourne, Malik Peiris from the University of Hong Kong, and Angus Nicoll, head of the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s flu program, will arrive on about April 17 to offer technical advice, said the people, who declined to be identified because the Chinese government hasn’t announced that the experts are being invited.
The group will seek to assist Chinese authorities grappling to identify the source and mode of transmission of the H7N9 avian influenza that has infected at least 60 people and killed 13. Beijing yesterday said that a 7-year-old girl has the virus, and Henan province reported its first two cases, opening a new front in the spread of the new pathogen in the world’s most populous nation.
“There’s no way to predict how this will spread,” Michael O’Leary, the WHO’s China representative, told reporters in Beijing yesterday. “The good news is we have no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission. That’s a key factor in this situation.”By "sustained," I think Mr. O'Leary means transmission from one case to a second and then from the second to a third, and so on.
The team going China is a formidable one. Malik Peiris is one of the giants of Hong Kong flu science, with experience going back to SARS and H5N1. And I had the honour of meeting Angus Nicoll in Stockholm last fall; he's the head of ECDC's Programme for Influenza and enormously experienced. You can learn about Nancy Cox here, and about Anne Kelso here—equally talented experts. Taken together, they show how seriously the global health community is taking this.
