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June 27, 2006
The first half of 2006 is coming to an end. So far it was the world's worst for avian influenza, as the disease spread to birds across Asia, Europe and Africa, with new human cases being reported every couple of days.Since January, at least 54 people have died from the H5N1 avian influenza strain…
June 27, 2006
The fact seven people in Azerbaijan contracted bird flu from wild birds has been assumed for some time and now has been officially confirmed by researchers in Germany:
Four people have died after catching avian flu from infected swans, in the first confirmed cases of the disease being passed from…
June 27, 2006
Better not have a "sudden event" in China. Or rather, you can have one, but don't tell anyone about it.
What's a "sudden event"?While state media did not offer a definition of "sudden events," in the past they have included natural disasters, major accidents, public health or social safety…
June 26, 2006
Beltway journalists in traditional media outlets like the New York Times must find it tiresome to take dictation for the Bush administration day after day. Concurring Opinions blogmeister Daniel Solove has taken pity on them and crafted a template (or stationery, in word processing terms) for use…
June 26, 2006
Mount Sinai School of Medicine has just entered into "a territory limited license agreement with Avimex Animal Health" to produce a new biological that combines an H5 flu vaccine combined with portion of another important disease virus for commercial poultry, Newcastle Disease.The privately owned…
June 25, 2006
The war in Iraq is going down as history's most dangerous for journalists. War correspondents have some idea what they are getting into, however. Reporters covering local funerals of bird flu victims and poultry culling operations are usually general beat reporters and didn't sign up for ultra…
June 25, 2006
A quiet Sunday in America. Here's something on being quiet from Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:
Pope Benedict XVI went late last month to that place where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered -- that memorial to the very worst in mankind, that factory whose sole product was death,…
June 24, 2006
Helen Branswell, whose sources and reporting are the best, has a fascinating follow-up to the Chinese report in the New England Journal of Medicine the other day giving clinical details of a human case of bird flu in China that occurred a full two years before China officially reported any cases…
June 24, 2006
In August of last year we wrote a post, Festering wounds of Iraq. It was about an antibiotic resistant organism, Acinetobacter baumannii, proving very troublesome in wound infections in soldiers. A. baumannii resides in the soil and is a problem world-wide, not just an Iraqi problem. But it is also…
June 23, 2006
Indonesia registered its 51st official case and 39th death this week, a 13 year Jakarta boy who had helped his grandfather slaughter sick chickens, took sick a week later and was dead less than a week after that. There's more discouraging news from this benighted bird flu hotspot.
The Indonesian…
June 23, 2006
If you live in Europe, you probably like to complain about your national health care system. I have no doubt you have a lot to complain about. But you could live in the US, be over 65 and have to contend with the new government sponsored (but privately administered) prescription drug plan.
Anne and…
June 22, 2006
Getting crank letters (or comments) goes with the territory on a blog. But what Sri Lanka's UN Ambassador Prasad Kariyawasam is getting seems a bit excessive. 100,000 letters from Americans complaining a UN Conference on illegal small arms trade is taking place on -- imagine this -- July 4, that…
June 22, 2006
The latest chapter in the Chinese Disease Cover-up Follies involves a just published report in the New England Journal of Medicine by eight Chinese doctors reporting the genetic sequences of an H5N1 case that occurred in November of 2003. Old news. Except China didn't officially report its first…
June 22, 2006
The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) is a resource for all manner of information on infectious diseases and especially avian influenza. At their website one can find a technical overview which compiles a lot of bird flu information scattered over many sources. But it is a…
June 21, 2006
I once read the restaurant industry in the US (and probably elsewhere) is one of the highest mortality businesses around. About half of new restaurants don't make it through the first year. It is a tough business, long hours, low wages for most. Immigrant labor is common.
Some restaurants do very…
June 21, 2006
Old soldiers -- and young ones, too -- do die, but if there's a flu pandemic with a lot of absenteeism in the workforce, the VA has plans to let them just fade away. Or something like that.Families of veterans who die during a bird flu outbreak shouldn't count on burying their loved ones in any of…
June 20, 2006
There is currently no vaccine for a pandemic strain of H5N1 avian influenza, and if a pandemic strain does emerge it will take at least 6 months to get the first batches of one. Currently the productive capacity for influenza vaccines is so overmatched by the needs of a global population, only a…
June 20, 2006
As you read this a meeting of more than three dozen avian flu experts should be convening in Jakarta to discuss the disastrous state of public health in that country. Many poor countries have disastrous public health systems, but Indonesia has something else: a huge population of people living in…
June 19, 2006
One of the distinctive things about influenza outbreaks in humans is its seasonality. That's why we call "ordinary" influenza seasonal influenza. Interestingly, we don't know what controls that seasonality, nor do we know if it also is a factor in pandemic strains. Pandemic strains are different in…
June 19, 2006
I've spent some time here (old site, here, here, here, here and here) explaining WHO's place in the international system. It explains certain things I thought important to understand.
An important part of the international "system" (Westphalian-style) is there is no official authority over…
June 18, 2006
An interesting article, The effect of temperature and UV light on infectivity of avian influenza virus (H5N1, Thai field strain) in chicken fecal manure, has appeared in Southeast Asian J Trop Med Public Health(2006 Jan;37(1):102-5). I can only read the abstract as no library around here carries…
June 18, 2006
The Ten Commandments. They are so important to our civilization, they should always be in front of us -- always. In our churches. Our homes. Our bars. Our whorehouses. Even in the Houses of Congress. If we don't know them, how can we be decent Americans?
That's why Congressman Lynn Westmoreland,…
June 17, 2006
The journal Science has just published an important letter from veterinary pathologist Dr. Ilaria Capua of the Istituto Zooprofilattico delle Venezie and her colleagues in national veterinary laboratories in the UK, Australia and the US pledging to deposit avian influenza gene sequences into the…
June 17, 2006
Some of the really good issues ads on TV these days come from oil giant British Petroleum (BP). They feature ordinary looking people who ask tough questions about energy policy to which BP just responds with a brief statement that they are working on it and "it's a start." Very understated, earnest…
June 17, 2006
The 64 World Cup soccer (fotbol) matches started a week ago in 12 German cities and will continue until July 9. Three million soccer fans are expected from Europe and beyond. Three of the cities where matches will be played, Cologne, Dortmund and Gelsenkirchen, are in the German state of Nordrhein…
June 16, 2006
We recently posted about the confusion about the diagnosis of the seven year old girl in Indonesia for whom local tests indicated H5N1 infection but where the WHO laboratory was not able to confirm it. We contrasted the news reports from AP and Bloomberg, the first of which quoted Indonesian…
June 15, 2006
If you want a preview of what widespead absenteeism in the health sector, overloaded health care facilities and a breakdown in social infrastructure would be like in an influenza pandemic, we've got one for you. It isn't from a biological virus, but the viruses of hatred, intolerance and sectarian…
June 15, 2006
Two articles in local Indonesian news sources are of interest. They illustrate the difficulty of trying to figure out what is happening using local news reports. Both relate to the hospitalization of a reporter for the Indonesian magazine Tempo who had covered the culling of poultry and the funeral…
June 15, 2006
Yesterday's WaPo story that HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt is the heaviest user of CDC's Emergency jet is being played like a scandal. This is the most scandal-prone administration in recent memory, not a surprise. But I'm of two minds about it (or maybe 1.56 minds). First the details.
Health and…
June 15, 2006
What do you do when the chickens come home to roost and they look healthy (but might not be)? Ask the folks in Hong Kong. Except they don't know either.
Update, 6/15/06: The Chinese Ministry of Health is confirming the diagnosis of H5N1 in the 31 year old truck driver from Shenzhen. He is now…