News inertia?

Crawford Kilian at the H5N1 blog makes the pertinent observation that the reports of suspected human bird flu in Vietnam have gone into a kind of limbo. He refers to it as "information inertia" because the same reports of the four suspect cases (and possibly two more) have been co-circulating for days with a single Agence France Presse report that further testing on four of the cases are negative. Both reports appear essentially unchanged on successive dates. Crawford speculates it may be related to short staffing over the holidays failing to catch up with the latest news the cases are not really cases.

This is a plausible explanation, but there is so little detail in the AFP report and the setting -- a family falling ill with pneumonias in an area where there are confirmed poultry outbreaks with H5N1 -- suggests the need for some additional confirming detail. In the past these negative calls have been made on the basis of rapid antigen testing to rule out influenza A, tests which we now know are not sufficiently sensitive for H5N1; or sometimes from swabs or specimens taken at the wrong time or in the wrong way or during intensive Tamiflu treatment.

Crawford's advice to check the dates of stories on news aggregators like NewsNow is well taken. In this case, it is hard to tell if this is "news inertia" or conflicting and unverified information.

As usual, we'll have to wait and see.