bird flu
revere | November 7, 2008The virulent influenza A subtype H5N1, known colloquially as bird flu, has caused sporadic cases of human disease but has not yet become a pandemic strain. There are several things which still separate H5N1 from the kind of seasonal influenza infections that are a serious periodic public health threat to humans. A significant population immunity to the seasonal virus subtypes is probably a major factor preventing seasonal flu from being the pandemic monster that the 1918 flu became. But there are other differences, too.
H5N1 currently seems to prefer birds to humans, a second difference. We…
revere | October 23, 2008With the advent of flu season the perennial question of the "next pandemic" is again making an appearance, although I think it is more of a cameo appearance than a substantive one. WHO, CDC and numerous state health departments are warning citizens about seasonal flu, still a major public health problem, and the continuing threat of emergence of a novel flu virus to which the earth's population has little or no immunity. There is something both plaintive and formulaic about these warnings. Seasonal flu is with us every flu season (hence its name) and the feared pandemic of bird flu has yet to…
revere | October 12, 2008I am still trying to retrieve my lower jaw from the floor, where it fell after reading this:
When Indonesia's health minister stopped sending bird flu viruses to a research laboratory in the U.S. for fear Washington could use them to make biological weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates laughed and called it "the nuttiest thing" he'd ever heard.
Yet deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a single sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries designated "state sponsors of terrorism."
The reason:…
revere | October 6, 2008A story in CIDRAP News by the always excellent science journalist Maryn McKenna provides food for thought:.
A flu vaccine manufacturer's decision not to build a US facility has highlighted the perpetual mismatch between flu-shot supply and demand--and the reality that the mismatch may undermine plans for pandemic flu vaccines.
On Tuesday, Solvay Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Marietta, Ga., announced that it was canceling plans to build a US flu-vaccine manufacturing plant, a $386 million project that Birmingham, Ala., and Athens, Ga., have been competing for. The plant would have made both seasonal…
revere | October 5, 2008An article in The Straits Times from newswire Associated Press (AP) drew my attention to a festering disagreement between proponents of an innovative global sharing initiative for influenza information and the World Health Organization, the official UN Agency that has run the global influenza surveillance system for more than a half century. The new system, The Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID), began midway through 2006 and has made rapid progress. It came into being to deal with dissatisfaction with the existing system wherein WHO allowed influenza gene sequence…
revere | September 27, 2008The Chinese food adulteration scandal is spreading. I'm calling it a food adulteration scandal because it's not just milk any more. Products with milk derived ingredients are also suspect:
Seven instant coffee and milk tea products made in China are being recalled in the U.S. because of possible contamination with melamine, as health fears increased worldwide over the safety of Chinese dairy exports.
The Mr. Brown brand mixes are being recalled by King Car Food Industrial Co., based in Taiwan, and were made by China's Shandong Duqing Inc., the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said today in a…
revere | September 10, 2008We're well into September and flu season is approaching. Seasonal likely won't peak for another four or five months in the US and Europe but we should expect to start seeing cases in the northern hemisphere soon. A pandemic strain could happen at any time. The 1918 flu's second wave started in late August, so the timing of the start of a pandemic is not so predictable. At least one things seems certain, however. We shouldn't expect to see it starting in the current hot spot for human bird flu, Indonesia. Because the Indonesian government, in the person of Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari,…
revere | September 5, 2008When influenza viruses with different genetic make-up co-infect a cell there is the possibility that they will mix their genetic endowments. The influenza virus is designed to do only one thing: make a copy of itself. It does this by tricking the host's protein manufacturing machinery to use the virus's genetic blueprint to make a viral copy. Influenza genes come in eight discrete packages and at some point these genetic segments are naked in the cell. If the segments of two viruses are in the cell at the same time the segments can mix and match, with some of the segments of one virus being…
revere | August 27, 2008I have been severely critical (many posts among those here) of the Indonesian government's irresponsible assertions of ownership of potentially pandemic pathogenic viruses isolated from their citizens. The question of Intellectual Property is a difficult one in many instances but when it comes to a public good involving a global scourge, some of the gray areas become more black and white. The world has been struggling with the issue regarding the global influenza surveillance system for two years now, precipitated by Indonesia's refusal to cooperate any longer, resulting in a significant gap…
revere | August 6, 2008A curious paper on the 1918 flu pandemic appeared this month in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases. It seemed provocative, at least on the surface. It claimed that the conventional wisdom underlying pandemic flu preparations was wrong. It's not the flu virus we should be defending ourselves against but the common bugs of the upper respiratory tract that take advantage of new fertile ground to grow in after the flu virus invades:
Medical and scientific experts now agree that bacteria, not influenza viruses, were the greatest cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic.
Government…
revere | August 3, 2008We have numerous examples of basic science that becomes unexpectedly useful and other examples of how veterinary science is useful to human health. Once you begin to understand how the world works it gives you tools that can be extended. The first stick used to knock a banana off a tree proved useful for lots of other things as well -- for example, whacking another monkey trying to poach on your personal banana patch (the Second Amendment of the Monkey Constitution gives all primates the Right to carry a club). So it's not such a big surprise that work on bird flu to save humans might have…
revere | July 31, 2008There's a tremendous amount of influenza A/H5N1 ("bird flu" virus) all over southeast asia and other areas where the virus is endemic in poultry. Where is this virus, exactly? We know it's in the infected birds and in their respiratory secretions and feces. We know it occasionally infects mammals (including humans). Is it found in the environment? We know very little about this, although there is good evidence it is in water where aquatic birds like ducks spend time and likely one way the virus is spread from bird to bird. In lab experiments, the virus remains intact on inanimate surfaces for…
revere | July 24, 2008The headline said, "Vaccination plan puts health care workers first," but you had to read the article to find out who goes next: the military. This according to the Guidance on allocating and targeting pandemic influenza vaccine released yesterday by the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The guidance is premised on the assumption that in the early phases of a pandemic, any vaccine will be in short supply and will need to be rationed. The document gives "strong advice" on how DHHS thinks this rationing should take place, although much is left unexplained. Since the allocation…
revere | July 11, 2008Melanie Mattson was one of the founding Editors of the FluWiki, its initial "public face," the official publisher, and our colleague. More importantly she was our friend. We are grieved to announce her unexpected death.
On her blog, Just a Bump in the Beltway, Melanie was among the first on the internet to understand and write about the significance of reported human cases of avian influenza as a potential harbinger of a pandemic. She joined forces with us to start the FluWiki in June 2005 where she was a dedicated and innovative practitioner of a new medium, collective information generation…
revere | July 10, 2008I always cringe when I see headlines that say, "Whatever happened to bird flu?" Usually what comes next is a recital of other "scares" that never materialized, the poster child being Y2K (although it has been strongly argued that the reason Y2K didn't happen was precisely because the business world prevented it with a sustained and intense effort). The article in question, however, just appearing in Nature magazine, still the world's pre-eminent science journal, is authored by one of Nature's senior correspondents, Declan Butler, the same journalist writing in the same journal who helped put…
revere | July 7, 2008So Roche Pharmaceuticals now has sufficient productive capacity to make their influenza antiviral Tamiflu (oseltamivir) meet demand. More than enough, it appears, since they now have come up with a new scheme to unload some of their inventory before its 3 year shelf life expires and to keep turning over the inventory year after year, whether or not there is a demand in any particular year:
With an endorsement from US health officials, Roche, maker of the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu), today unveiled a program to encourage more businesses to stockpile the drug to protect employees in…
revere | June 25, 2008In our earlier discussion of the science behind greenhouse gases we pointed out that all objects radiate electromagnetic radiation, doing so at a peak wavelength dependent upon their surface temperatures. That means two things. One is that things at the usual temperatures in our world are radiating EM radiation at wavelengths characteristic of the far infrared region. The other is that by measuring the intensity of infrared you can also measure the surface temperature of the body without touching it. Commercial devices are touted as highly accurate. Clinicians use them to measure body "core…
revere | June 23, 2008There is a great deal of activity on the bird flu vaccine front. Several different new techniques to make vaccines are being tested and so are additives to vaccines, called adjuvants, that boost the ability of the preparation to induce the body to make sufficient antibodies to protect us against infection. The smaller the dose needed for protection, the more people can be vaccinated for a given amount of production. Since we are talking about enough productive capacity to vaccinate a significant proportion of the world's population in the event of a catastrophic pandemic, this is obviously a…
revere | June 21, 2008The beach in Indonesia may look nice, but don't let that distract you:
There is an English word for deliberately neglecting to tell people something they have asked you about. It's called lying. On that basis, the Indonesian government, primarily in the person of their Minister of Health, Siti Fadillah Supari, are liars. They have publicly declared their intention to lie by announcing they will no longer notify the world promptly about new human cases of bird flu. The acknowledged motive is to improve the reputation of Indonesia in the eyes of the world. Currently the country is the world's…
revere | June 12, 2008Crof, over at H5N1, has an important piece on Indonesia that is worth thinking about. He observes something that lots of us haven't paid attention to: Indonesia hasn't been notifying the UN agency on animal health, the OIE, about bird flu outbreaks in poultry for almost two years:
Here is the very last post from Indonesia: OIE DAILY UPDATE ON AVIAN INFLUENZA SITUATION IN BIRDS. As you will see, the date is September 26, 2006. Since then, Indonesia has told the world nothing about its poultry panzootic.
Look at this map of B2B H5N1 outbreaks. Indonesia looks as clean as Argentina.
Look at this…