The question of bird flu in Thailand

Please comment this thread (especially about cattle mass deaths) if you can:

http://tinyurl.com/rbr5f

Then there's this out of Thailand. It's also from The Nation, part of a longer article.

Avian influenza suspected after two dine on doves

Two cases of suspected bird flu in humans have been found in Uttaradit, one of the seven provinces declared a "red zone" by the Department of Livestock Development (DLD), a local health official said yesterday.

A 67-year-old man and his 35-year-old son-in-law were recently admitted to Uttaradit Provincial Hospital. They had developed symptoms similar to those caused by the bird-flu virus after eating spotted doves, said Dr Boonrieng Chuchaisaengrat, head of the provincial health office.

The men were transferred from Tha Pla District Hospital on Friday and detained at the provincial hospital, said Boonrieng.

Blood samples were collected from the two patients and sent for testing at the Northern Medical Science Centre in Pitsanulok. The results were expected in a few days, he added.

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2006/07/23/national/national_30009355.p…

slovenia: Thanks. Saw it and considered adding an update, then decided to wait.

Thinlina: Read the thread but have no way to evaluate it. Influenza A is a pretty nasty virus, so reports of how bad someone felt doesn't mean that much. Regarding the cattle and the Columbian thing I have no way to know from this information so I have no opinion. I've not heard anything on the public health grapevine along these lines, which is all I can say at this point.

Waiting to post on the two dove-eating Thais makes sense until we know what's what. In the meantime, Crof a story with three other suspected cases in Thailand.

Sorry. Dropped a word. Should have read: "Crof's reporting a story with three other suspected cases in Thailand." Here's a link to the story as it appears in The Nation.

Revere,

Want to comment on the "cooking" suggestions by the WHO? I have been watching the suggestions of the WHO about cooking poultry and/or wild birds for a while and I have to assume that these people around the world are not stupid, just in crappy areas of it. My son and I this past weekend conducted the "Great Experiment" which is required for an over the summer science project. We cooked for the time suggested using a fully thawed bird to ensure objectivity. Mom of course was not aware her broiler bird was being used as the test subject. She was out of town.

So we baked this mug and then upon the ding on the oven, removed it and let it cool. It was pretty hot. Too hot to touch in fact. After a bit out came the slides and using surgicals gloves and a scalpel we took samples from the still wet areas inside the bird. What we found was pretty scary. Amoeba, lots of amoeba. Mind now this bird was washed down first as suggested and never hit the cutting board. Just a pot of water to wash him down in.

So on a 3 x 1 slide with a shield on top and internal bird water/tissue (blood vessels)squished down on it we found the amoeba. We did a quick check of the tap water to ensure nothing was in the slides there...zip. Of course we dont have a scanning electron microscope to look for virus particles but if the amoeba are there, its reasonable to assume that viruses are alive and kicking if they are there. Good science project for entry to the 10th grade. Scary though.

Are the guidelines right or is this another wishful thinking program on the part of the WHO? If they are wrong and this stuff is pathogenically hot if cooked in accordance with the guidelens then a lot of people are going to die unnecessarily.

Comments?

Oh yeah, we took it up to 350 for one hour after that and tested again. No activity, but one danged crispy bird. The dogs loved it.

Randy: Amoebae? Not very likely. They are protozoa and I'd be surprised if they were visible or even in a bird like that. How did you visualize them? I'm skeptical.

Randy, my question is (I tried several times to reach you via e-mail, but I don't get anything in from you last days and I can't reach you either) on this nice chicken cooking experiment: what you see by microscope: is it alive or dead? Because my usual thinking about boiled water is, everything in it will be killed after boiling it some time, but the 'stuff' will not be removed of course.
I'm not surprised you find some 'beasts' in the chicken, for a huge amount of chicken in W-Europe is contaminated by salmonella or campylobacter.

Randy, aside from what you saw under the slides:

Did you use a meat thermometer to test the internal temperature?

USDA recommends: "Check the internal temperature in the innermost part of the thigh and wing and the thickest part of the breast." They recommend a "minimum internal temperature of 165 degrees F."

Surprisingly, USDA no longer recommends washing the bird before cooking. All my old cookbooks say to "Wash," but USDA now says that this is not necessary, and can contribute to the spread of bacteria in the vicinity of the sink.

Revere. I didnt look it up for exactly what was, but ameoba/protozoans or something were moving on the slide. . I was using a Labomed CXL (great stuff for cheap from the military surplus). I think that goes to 100x so I dont know what we were looking at. We were expecting nothing and got something. I dunno but if indeed it doesnt kill those kinds of bacteria, wouldnt it fail to kill viruses too?

Tannie. Try me again at memphisservices@bellsouth.net or mail25368@bellsouth.net (governmental email).

Revere did you catch the news about Creutzfeld-Jacob in Colorado?

Bests to all.

Randy: I should also have mentioned the meat thermometer issue brought up by PF. Regarding what you saw, you can't see bacteria without stains and if you had stuff under a cover slip with fluid you might easily have been seeing particles moving by convection, i.e., passively and not on their own. If they were moving in a smooth flow that is what you were seeing. Amoebas "crawl" along by little extensions. What exactly did it look like?

No, didn't see the CJD in CO you referred to. Link? CJD exists (about 1 per million i the population) independent of BSE, so age and history are important.

Regarding Randy and son's experiment: as a science teacher I am afraid it wouldn't get a very good grade, guys. First, where's your controls? Did you check a similar chicken - or that same one - for similar microorganisms internally before cooking? I all the time, when teaching the microbiology section of my courses, have students mistake the motion of water and water bubbles under the microscope as something alive. Amoeba are actually really hard to spot, as they are mostly clear, slightly grayish and move quite slowly - as revere said, by extensions of their protoplasm (like the blob in that old sci fi movie). They are probably the least likely organisms you would find in a chicken, as most are free living fresh water organisms. They also are much more fragile than bacteria, which can encapsulate themselves to withstand high temperatures and other stresses, so it is unlikely they would have been the one organism to withstand the cooking test. If you wish to redo the test, I would suggest buying another fresh chicken, and also some sterile agar plates used for culturing bacteria. Use a sterile cotton swab, or some kind of instrument (needle, butter knife etc) that you presterilize with rubbing alcohol) to get samples from the inside of the chicken (I would go bone deep)and rub these on the agar plates, being careful to use sterile techniques so that bacteria from the air, your hands etc doesn't touch the plates. Then cook your chicken as before and take new samples from deep inside the chicken using the same method as before. If you compare the two plates, the before one should have some bacteria growth, and the after plate - if WHO is right - should have none.
If you still get bacteria growth on the cooked chicken, now we're in trouble.

We hit the slide with crysal violet for about 20 seconds via sterile syringes courtesy of the nurse next door. Then washed it with distilled water from another syringe.Then flooded it with gram iodine for about a minute with another and then drop by drop rinsed it with ethanol until it looked clear. Washed it again with the distilled water. Then we flooded it with someting called safranin (recommended by a local biologist who said it would make it stand out) and then blotted it with some very strange looking paper that he gave us to dry it out. They were of course dead after all of that but initially what we saw was moving. I have been looking at H.S. biology books on and off today and I think thats a bit limited because I only saw a couple of close things which was kind of one celled and amoeba-like. The other six things were elongated.

Everything we saw initially was moving though. We werent looking for things that were moving around initially. We contacted the biologist who was very interested and is planning a visit this weekend for a repeat performance. Mind this bird had been in the freezer for a week.

Path Forward, we set it for 225 and 45 minutes. The skin and outside was sizzling and starting to brown a bit. Meat thermometer (stick in kind) went thru the breast and registered 170 at the 45 minute mark. It was still what I would have called "wet" though on the inside. Frying it I believe might have killed everything but baking it, I doubt it. Like I said we were looking to disprove the WHO/USDA recommendations. We found something when we expecting nothing. No. 1 son took the slides to school today to the biology teacher and I guess she will let us know what they are. Will advise.

Randy: I do not believe there were any viable pathogenic bacteria at 170 degrees. Nor are most of the bacteria you would expect motile (move by themselves). I don't know what you saw but I am pretty sure it wasn't live bacteria and certainly not amoebae.

Randy: the procedure you describe is the gram stain for bacteria. Amoeba are at least 100 times bigger than bacteria, and I doubt that they would take up the stain (it has to do with bacterial cell wall structure, which amoeba don't even have). Another clue: you mentioned looking at the amoeba with 100x. At 100x most amoeba would appear quite large under a microscope, whereas most bacteria would look about the size of a period or comma. Amoeba move quite slowly, bacteria tend to "wiggle" in place in constant motion but not going very far. There are some kinds of amoeba that do form cysts within animal hosts, but usually they are found in the digestive tracts, sometimes migrating to the liver or other parts of the body. The cysts protect them from digestive enzymes, but not against temperature extremes. I am sure you saw something that looked alive and cellular in your chicken, maybe coacervates...which are little spheres made up of phospholipids (a kind of fat) enclosing a small amount of water. The water itself tends to push little molecules and particles along, in something called "brownian motion" which becomes more pronounced the higher the magnification.
It's doubtful the high school biology teacher will be able to tell much from the slides: as I said, those are gram stain techniques used to tell one kind of bacteria from another, but per your description they were too large and motile to be bacteria.

ooops...I misspoke on one thing above that needs clarification. When I described how things appear at "100x" I was thinking you meant the markings on the objective lens, which means the object being looked at is magnified 1000 times. (100 times by object lens times 10 by the eyepiece lens) However if you actually meant that the object was only being magnified 100 times (the objective lens marked 10X) then an ameoba would look like a single grain of rice on a saucer, but you wouldn't be able to see any bacteria at all (you pretty much need to magnify them 1000 times to see them.) Sorry for any confusion.

Randy: It would be 'nice' when someone there in Memphis had some H1 or H3 type of A flu, and you could see some of that under a microscope. Is it possible with a 1000 times (100xmarked)magnifying microscope you could see a virus like that? Or can one only see bacteria then? Oh, no, thinking about this I conclude one cannot distinguish various types of bacteria when they are the size of period or comma. And viruses not at all.
Can we , somewhere on this earth infect a chicken with a common human A influenza virus and repeat this experiment of Randy's?

Revere, I do miss the e-mail line you had on the old Effect Measure site, for now it's impossible to reach someone 'off the line' by mail. Since about the time the Indians spoke about censorship I can't reach and don't receive some international postings. I don't suspect my national CIA (AIVD) to be blocking some lines selectively; I don't even know if that is possible. I certainly can have their attention, as I am informing a church network and some local disaster plan experts about the individual opportunities civilians have to play a constructive role in times of a possible pandemic. But prefer neither to be paranoid nor narcissistic about my position here.

tan06: No, you can't see influenza virus with a light microscope. Need specially prepared specimens and a good electron scope.

Don't know why you can't get postings, I'm afraid. Check with your ISP.