On his VDU's blog, Dr. Ian Mackay writes: H7N9 case announcements dropping: is Wave 2 under control? Excerpt:
Its a very tough question to answer. There has been public pressure by China's poultry-farming groups on China to take measures to stem the industry's financial losses. These have been driven by the public concern that H7N9 can seriously afflict people and in about a fifth of recorded instances, kill them.
And rightly so. The concern for those of us outside China is that reporting may be artificially halted, reduced or stemmed to calm the public - while doing nothing to stop the march of H7N9. This concern extends into thoughts about why we have so very few 2014 H7N9 sequences to date. Background for this paranoia about non-biological reporting limitations takes the form of :
• MOA noting no evidence of H7N9 in poultry farms (1). Perhaps time to propose an alternative source then?
• Poultry industry writing to demand that descriptors like "H7N9 bird flu" or "people infected with H7N9 avian flu" be changed to "H7N9 influenza" (2)(4). No argument from me there - bird flu is not part of the WHO nomenclature anyway. It's a media thing.
Seriously though, will the name change the infections? Of course not. Same virus, same bird/poultry association with human disease. Call it Frank if you like but the process of infection, morbidity and mortality in 1:5 cases will go on.
• Poultry industry groups asking Guangxi and Guangdong provincial governments to stop reporting each H7N9 case (3). Not acceptable and not addressing the problem at the source.
So, when we see a chart like this one, we may have those doubts at the forefront of our minds; more so than other reasons for what appears to be a constant decline in case reporting in recent days.
One such reason would be that the market closure (22-days ago for Zhejiang) and the laboratory reporting delay (currently 8.7-days for Wave 2) have finally caught up to the present day - and we are seeing a real impact of reduced exposure of humans to birds (poultry or market-based wild/song birds).
Click through to read the whole post, see his graphic, and check the links.
