H5N1

Mexico reports two outbreaks of highly pathogenic H7N3 bird flu: OIE

Via Thomson Reuters: Mexico reports two outbreaks of highly pathogenic H7N3 bird flu: OIE.

Mexico reported two outbreaks of highly pathogenic H7N3 bird flu virus in the central part of the country, of which one at chicken farm, the World Organisation for Animal Health said on Monday, citing a Mexican agriculture ministry report.  

The virus killed 1,380 birds at a rural farm with 1,900 approximately-80-weeks-old Rhode Island Red chickens and white chickens in the state of Guanajuato, the ministry said in the report posted on the website of the Paris-based OIE. The remaining birds were culled.  

Another outbreak was detected among backyard birds in the neighboring state of Queretaro where it killed seven birds out of a flock of 26. 

 Mexico had reported an outbreak of H7N3 in May last year.

Mexico reports H7N3 bird flu outbreak on commercial farm: OIE

Via Reuters: Mexico reports H7N3 bird flu outbreak on commercial farm: OIE. Excerpt:

Mexico has reported an outbreak of the highly contagious H7N3 bird flu virus on a commercial farm in the state of Jalisco, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said on Thursday, citing a report from Mexico's agriculture ministry.  

The virus, which does not pose a serious danger to people, was detected among laying hens in a flock of 15,000 birds that had been vaccinated and did not show any clinical signs of the disease, the Paris-based OIE said in a notification. 

The farm, located in the town of Tepatitlan de Morelos, is under quarantine and the birds have been sent to a slaughterhouse near the site, it said.  

Mexico's agriculture ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mexico is a major chicken exporter.

Idle speculation on the Tennessee avian flu outbreak

Yesterday the Tennessee department of agriculture announced the outbreak of HPAI avian flu, and identified it as an H7 strain. Today the US Department of Agriculture reports that the outbreak seems to have been contained, and we should know the precise strain by sometime Tuesday.

So I dug around in Wikipedia and found no fewer than six varieties of H7 known to infect poultry. Little seems known about H7N1. H7N2 gained recent notoriety when cats in a New York animal shelter contracted it.  H7N3 has been found in both Canada and Mexico (in 2004, it nearly destroyed the poultry industry in the Fraser Valley, Vancouver's back yard—and got me interested in the subject of avian flu). H7N7 caused a serious outbreak in the Netherlands in 2003, infecting 89 people and killing one. H7N8 caused devastation in US turkey farms last year. And H7N9 came out of nowhere four years ago to become a major problem in China.

H7N8 seems the likeliest to be identified as the cause of this outbreak. But if it turns out to be H7N9, we'll be in for a "wait, what?" moment.

Cambodia reports outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in southeast

Via the Daily Mail Online: Cambodia reports outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in southeast.

Cambodia has reported an outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu virus among backyard poultry in the southeastern part of the country, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said on Tuesday. 

The virus was found in chickens in the region of Svay Rieng last week, killing 68 birds and leading to the destruction of 322 others, the Cambodian farm ministry said in a statement posted on the OIE website.

I can't find the statement on OIE's site, even after a search. There is a mention, dated January 27, of the first outbreak in Cambodia of H7N3, a low-pathogenic strain. Nonetheless, it's reported to have killed 3,700 out of 4,000 free-ranging ducks.

Canada: H5 avian flu detected at two Fraser Valley poultry farms

Here we go again. Via CBC News: Avian flu detected on 2 B.C. poultry farms in Fraser Valley. Excerpt:

The H5 avian influenza virus has been detected on two poultry farms in the Fraser Valley, located east of Vancouver, officials in B.C. have confirmed.  

Testing found the virus at a turkey farm in Abbotsford and a broiler chicken breeding facility in Chilliwack, officials said in a statement released just after noon on Tuesday. 

"The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has placed the two farms under quarantine to control disease spread and the industry sector has been notified to adopt enhanced biosecurity  practices," said the statement. 

Testing was conducted on Monday after large numbers of birds died at the farms over the weekend. 

"Further testing by the CFIA is underway to confirm pathogenicity and to determine the precise subtype and strain of  the virus," CFIA said. 

Pathogenicity refers to the severity of the illness caused in birds, said officials. The results are expected within days.   

The remaining birds on the farm will be killed and disposed of under CFIA supervision and the farms will remain under quarantine until the barns, equipment and vehicles are disinfected.

A 2005 outbreak of H7N3 resulted in the culling of effectively all poultry and domesticated birds in the Fraser Valley, which is one of BC's key agricultural regions and right in Vancouver's back yard. Then in 2009 the valley was hit again, this time by low-path H5N2. So we have more experience than we'd like with such outbreaks.

Mexico: Two more H7N3 poultry outbreaks

Via The Poultry Site: Mexico Reports Two More H7N3 Bird Flu Outbreaks. Excerpt:

Two new outbreaks of H7N3 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) have been reported - the first in a village flock of quails and the second in a flock of commercial layers. 

The Mexican veterinary authority has sent Follow Up report no. 10 dated 31 August to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). 

The report covers two new outbreaks of HPAI, later identified as the H7N3 sub-type. 

The first outbreak started on 12 August in a small village quail flock in Valle de Santiago in the state of Guanajuarto. The situation is described as "resolved". 

On 19 August, a 10,000-strong layer flock in the stare of Jalisco - at Lagos de Moreno - was hit by the virus. The number of cases/deaths is not reported; the case is on-going.

Branswell: Plane diverts to Edmonton with sick patient; tests show man had H7 flu

Via the Times Colonist, Helen Branswell of The Canadian Press writes: Plane diverts to Edmonton with sick patient; tests show man had H7 flu. Excerpt:

The Public Health Agency of Canada says an American man who ended up in an Edmonton hospital tested positive for previous infection with an H7 influenza virus. 

Canada's acting chief public health officer says the man is not currently ill with flu and therefore is not contagious. 

Dr. Gregory Taylor says, though, that the event is a reminder that viruses like the new H7N9 bird flu are only a plane ride away. 

The blood test used to diagnose the previous infection cannot determine the neuraminadase or N component of the virus with which the man was infected. 

But the infectious diseases specialist who treated him in Edmonton was on the lookout for H7N9 flu, which has infected 132 people in China this spring, killing at least 39 of them. 

The man had travelled in southern China in late May, though apparently not in a part of the country where human infections with H7N9 flu were recorded. 

"Could he have been infected with H7N9? Maybe. We don't know for sure," Taylor says. 

But he notes Canada has been on heightened surveillance for the new virus and this case suggests the system is working. 

"It's a small world and these plane rides are short," Taylor says. 

The unidentified man, described as elderly, has been travelling extensively in recent weeks. 

Taylor says he did not know where the man was from in the United States. 

He travelled to China and from there to Singapore and India.

Someone really needs to find this gentleman and have a long talk with him. 

CIDRAP: Flu news for June 12

Via CIDRAP: FLU NEWS SCAN: H7N3 in Mexico, H5N1 in smuggled bird, South American respiratory virus activity. Excerpt:

Eight more outbreaks of H7N3 avian flu have struck Mexican chicken farms in recent weeks, prompting the destruction of more than 800,000 birds and the vaccination of 5 million more, Mexican authorities reported to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) today. 

The outbreaks involved two commercial layer farms, two heavy breeder flocks, three broiler flocks, and a backyard farm in four different states: Jalisco, Puebla, Guanajuato, and Aguascalientes. The number of susceptible birds totaled 1,049,220, of which 815,034 were destroyed to stop the outbreaks. 

The report says only three actual cases were reported but notes that information was missing. In Guanajuato, the outbreaks have prompted the vaccination of 5,512,080 chickens on breeder and layer farms. The earliest outbreaks started on Apr 4 and the latest on May 23. 

Mexico's last report to the OIE, on May 8, listed five outbreaks, which prompted the culling of 850,000 birds.

nCoV: A new naming battle

Via ScienceInsider, a report by Martin Enserink: International Group Settles on Name for New Coronavirus. As the British say, this will end in tears before bedtime. Excerpt:

New MERS cases. The MERS coronavirus. Or—if things turn really bad—the MERS pandemic. That's how the world may soon be talking about the new virus that surfaced in the Arabian Peninsula last summer and that has been rattling health experts since. In a move that may end more than 7 months of confusion, an international group of scientists and public health officials will soon recommend that the new virus be called Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). 

The group plans to publish a paper recommending the new name, says Raoul de Groot, a veterinary virologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who has coordinated the effort. De Groot chairs the Coronavirus Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), which took the initiative to find a new, widely accepted name. The study group has no power to enforce use of the name, however; it will be up to researchers to decide whether to adopt the moniker. 

News of the name comes as Saudi Arabia has reported 13 new cases of the virus, including seven deaths, in just the past 5 days. The wave—more than a month after the last reported case, a 73-year-old man from Abu Dhabi who died in Munich on 26 March—has sparked fresh worries that the virus might start spreading between humans and trigger a global outbreak. As of today, the total reported number of cases is 30, including 18 deaths. 

Confusion had reigned over the new name since the virus was first reported by Ali Mohamed Zaki, an Egyptian microbiologist who isolated it in June 2012 from a patient at a hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he worked at the time. Zaki sent the virus to Ron Fouchier's virology group at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, which characterized it further in a paper published in m Bio in November. Alexander Gorbalenya, a coronavirologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and ICTV's vice president, was a co-author, and the group provisionally called the virus HCoV-EMC/2012, short for human coronavirus-Erasmus MC. 

The reference to the Dutch lab didn't sit well with Saudi health officials, who said that Zaki lacked authorization to send the virus to Rotterdam in the first place. Still, most researchers have accepted HCoV-EMC as the name to use. Some have dropped the "EMC," however, and called the virus simply HCoV, a name that might cause confusion because there are five other human coronaviruses. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has adopted the more neutral "novel coronavirus"—abbreviated initially as NCoV but more recently as nCoV—a name that by its very nature was not meant to last.

We've seen this before. The Indians are still sulking about NDM-1, the resistance gene first identified in a sample from New Delhi. Even the most dedicated health experts suddenly become defenders of the local brand when something embarrassing breaks out on their turf.

So never mind that the Middle East is already branded as a sorry mess; naming a virus after it will unite even that fractious region in opposition.

The (still) novel coronavirus is only the latest bug that we can analyze right down to its genes even as we grope for something to call the damn thing. I've been dealing for eight years with "bird flu" and "avian flu," "high-path H5N1" and "low-path H5N1." And don't get me going on "swine flu," "swine fever," "pandemic H1N1" and garden varieties of that wretched virus. I don't want to hear about earlier versions of H7; H7N9 is sufficient to blight my life.

We are also dealing with our innate laziness: It's so much trouble, so time-consuming, to spell out an initialism like Enn-See-Oh-Vee rather than snap out an acronym like SARS. And nCoV is a copy editor's nightmare. My esteemed blogging colleague Dr. Ian Mackay prefers HCoV; fine, it's a Human virus, but so are plenty of others.

Between the virologists worried about next year's tourism statistics and the complications inherent in defining various hemagglutinins and neuroaminidases, it looks as if one effect of influenza, even before you catch it, is to make you tongue-tied.

Maybe, as a recovering English major, I'm taking this too seriously. But my own modest proposal is a new term for all influenzas since H5N1 appeared in Hong Kong in 1997: Nyfia. Capitalize the whole thing if you like; you can pronounce it either niff-ee-uh or knife-ee-uh.

Nyfia stands for "Not Yet Found In Antarctica," where the penguins have little access to the media and the human residents don't consider themselves residents with a stake in tourism. So H5N1 could be Nyfia1; pandemic H1N1 could be Nyfia2; H7N9 could be Nyfia3; and this stupid new coronavirus can be Nyfia4. (Hyphens are deleted to make it easier to hashtag these terms.) SARS is already a politically acceptable term and therefore exempt.

If we accept this nomenclature, we can number many new health threats without offending the sensibilities of political leaders or presidents of hoteliers' associations. If the numbers get too big, we can switch to Nyfom (Not Yet Found on Mars).

Then we can get on with trying to keep these stupid viruses from killing people, and talking about it at the same time.

H7N9: A Canadian comment

Via CMAJ: World watching as troubling new type of avian influenza surfaces in China. This is a concise account of the situation so far, with Canadian experts' comments, and a Canadian angle in this excerpt:

H7- and H5-group influenza viruses have characteristics that are of particular concern in birds. "It is known in the scientific community that H7 and H5 viruses are prone to mutate," explains Dr. Abed Harchaoui, senior staff veterinarian in the Foreign Animal Disease Section of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. 

H7 and H5 subtypes normally circulate in wild birds and may be transmitted to domestic poultry such as chickens and turkeys in several ways. "It can be contact between wild birds and poultry through free-range farming," explains Harchaoui, "Also from excretion from the birds from outside to inside of the barn. People can step in it and get it on their boots." 

"In some situations, like ducks and geese, the virus is low pathogenic, but might mutate very quickly in chickens and turkeys," becoming highly pathogenic and causing severe symptoms and death. 

This was demonstrated dramatically in an outbreak of a related influenza, H7N3, in a chicken farm in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia in 2004. The virus had caused only decreased egg production and a slight uptick in mortality in a barn on the farm. But an outbreak 10 weeks later in a second barn caused a spike in mortality, because of a genetic mutation occurring between one barn and the other (Rev Sci Tech 2009;28:349-358).