bird flu
revere | August 18, 2006Another bird flu death has occurred in the same village where two other cases were recently reported. This one is a nine year old girl. The others were the 17 year old we discussed in a recent post, who left the hospital against medical advice and is reported to be recovering at home, and his deceased 20 year old cousin. Cikelet village is in West Java, 990 km from the city of Bandung. Authorities say the village is rife with bird flu, with dead or sick chickens common (Reuters).
Health authorities say they are on top of this outbreak, have taken blood samples from neighbors and relatives and…
revere | August 16, 2006A helpful reader (hat tip to easy hiker) sent along a story from New Scientist concerning a new report in The New England Journal of Medicine. The NEJM paper is a case series of six subjects who almost died as a result of a clinical trial of a monoclonal antibody being tested as a drug for rheumatoid arthritis. Within an hour of receiving the drug, TGN1412, all six suddenly developed a cytokine storm syndrome, with severe pain rapidly developing to multiorgan failure and respiratory distress. This result was unexpected as nothing like it had occurred in the animal trials and the dose given…
revere | August 15, 2006Whatever is going on in Thailand, everybody seems uncomfortable with it. After being praised by WHO for its bird flu measures because the country had not reported cases since last December, the virus has come roaring back, as if to remind us it isn't going to be so easy. Which most of knew, of course. Now WHO is telling Thailand to reassess the bird flu program it had formerly lauded:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) on August 9 warned the government to urgently review measures taken to control the H5N1 bird flu virus, both in poultry and humans, to tackle the spread of the disease in the…
revere | August 15, 2006The most recent human case of bird flu in Indonesia raises some extremely interesting questions. Here are the facts.
A 17 year old farmer, named Umar Aup, in a remote province of West Java became seriously ill with an influenza-like disease after he and his cousin collected the carcasses of about 100 chickens from their backyard flock that had died suddenly. They fed the dead chickens to dogs. The cousin took ill and died of a disease that appeared to be bird flu but he was buried before any testing could be carried out. Aup also became ill and was admitted to a hospital last Wednesday but…
revere | August 14, 2006India has declared itself avian flu-free. Unlikely, but technically correct, at least in the sense of the definition of the Office International des Epizooties (OIE, the World Organization for Animal Health).
India first detected highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 in its poultry flocks earlier this year (2006):
Outbreak of bird flu was first reported on February 18 in Navapur and Uchchal districts of Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Further outbreak was reported in Jalgaon district of Maharashtra and it spilled over to the adjoining areas of Madhya Pradesh.
The last outbreak was detected on April…
revere | August 11, 2006The venerable and slightly right-of-center (but excellent, nonetheless!) British publication, The Economist, has taken note of the Indonesian decision to release the bird flu sequences. [NB: also see Addendum, after the continuation below the fold. The Peiris and Guan labs in Hong Kong are now fully open on sequences. Kudos to them. Additional note: Excellent article by Helen Branswell here on the same subject.]
"For the sake of basic human interests, the Indonesian government declares that genomic data on bird-flu viruses can be accessed by anyone." With those words, spoken on August 3rd,…
revere | August 10, 2006China now admits what everyone knows already knows. It had a death from H5N1 in November of 2003, a full year before its "official" first case (The Guardian). In fact everyone also knows that there was H5N1 in February of that year when the disease was diagnosed in Hong Kong in a family just returned from a visit to Fujian province. That occurred at the outset of China's now infamous SARS cover-up. As interesting, the Chinese explanation for why the case not been reported earlier, was it had been misdiagnosed as a SARS case. This may in fact be what happened but it raises another question:…
revere | August 10, 2006The lull in bird flu is over. At least the lull in the news about bird flu. The virus didn't go away. Editors got tired of it and national agricultural officials were quiet about it. Now Thailand is again engulfed with poultry infections and experiencing human cases and Indonesia continues to percolate away with both bird and human cases. In both countries the endemic poultry problem is the underlying cause.
"When you have trouble controlling infection among the chicken flocks, you are naturally going to see continuing infections among humans," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US National Institutes of…
revere | August 9, 2006The Indonesian government has given permission to release the sequences of some 40 or so H5N1 viruses isolated from human cases in that country to publicly accessible gene databases. The US CDC has now removed any password protection preventing general access at the Influenza Sequence Database at Los Alamos National Laboratory and has indicated the sequences will also be deposited in the US National Library of Medicine's database, GenBank.
The move to put the data in the public domain, giving scientists from around the world free access, came after the Indonesian government told the World…
revere | August 9, 2006For a country that claimed to be bird flu free just a month ago, things seem to have changed rapidly in Thailand:
The government Tuesday declared twenty nine central and northeastern provinces, including Bangkok, as disaster zone as part of measure to curb bird flu, government spokesman Surapong Suebwonglee said.
The cabinet also approved the creation of chicken "death squads" responsible for terminating infected birds as well as all poultry within a one-kilometer radius of any future bird flu outbreaks.
[snip]
The government also issued strict safety measures for another 30 provinces,…
revere | August 8, 2006Some people are likely to formulate a simple strategy for bird flu. Get rid of the birds. Here's a cautionary tale:
An attempt to control pigeons at a hospital escalated into a hazardous material incident as sick and dying birds falling from the sky forced a temporary shutdown of the emergency room.
"Birds were coming down like dive bombers," said Schenectady Fire Chief Robert Farstad.
There were no reports of illness or injury from the incident Thursday evening at Ellis Hospital, but several people went through decontamination after emergency crews discovered the poisoned birds.
The…
revere | August 7, 2006There is an AP story circulating in Florida newspapers that IBM Corp. and The Scripps Research Institute want the federal government to pony up $500 million for some of their research on computer models to track the spread of bird flu. Why Florida? Because they also want Palm Beach Country and the city of Boca Raton to fork up $20 million to put their supercomputer facility in Boca Raton.
I guess what I would most like to say to the IBM Corp. and The Scripps Research Institute is this:
are you out of your fucking minds? $500 million dollars? And another $20 million that could be used for…
revere | August 5, 2006Indonesia is making its sequences available to the world scientific community, at long last. We aren't going to ask how or why or continue to chide them for keeping the sequences until now. We applaud their decision to do so and urge others to follow their example.
"I've learned that scientists across the world have complained that they could not access the data and made statements as if we had hidden it," Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari told a press conference here Thursday.
"For the sake of basic human interests, the Indonesian government declares that genomic data on bird flu viruses…
revere | August 4, 2006A dead swan in a Dresden, Germany zoo signals the return of bird flu to that country (AFP). It is not the only locale where the disease is reappearing after a lull. Laos and Thailand have cases in birds and Thailand has just registered its second death in a week, a nine year old girl. Several more cases are hospitalized and over a hundred are on a watch list because of symptoms that might indicate infection (Reuters).
Vietnam is looking on with worry.
Deputy Agriculture Minister Bui Ba Bong said bird flu, which erupted across much of Asia in late 2003, often hit Thailand first and broke out…
revere | August 3, 2006Karo, Indonesia is back in the bird flu news. Another village in Karo district was the scene of the largest human bird flu cluster to date (eight cases, seven of whom died). Human to human transmission was grudgingly acknowledged by WHO as occurring in this case, although Indonesian health authorities still resist it. Now it is the site of seven more suspect cases, including at least one family cluster.
"Whether it is a new cluster or not, that must be scientifically proved," said Runizar Ruesin, head of the bird flu information centre at Indonesia's health ministry.
He said the seven were…
revere | August 2, 2006I have now had a chance to read the PNAS paper by Maines et al. and it is surprising in two respects. The first is it isn't that interesting. The second is related to the first. Why did they bother to hold a press conference about it? Even more, why did the press conference focus on the reassortment question when that didn't establish much. Anyway, that's how I read it. Here are my reasons.
The most important part of this paper is methodological, testing a ferret infection model for transmissibility. Ferrets have been used as a reasonably good biological model for infectivity and virulence in…
revere | August 2, 2006Thailand seems to have gone from "no bird flu in the country" two weeks ago to having the whole nation on alert.
As the number of suspected bird-flu cases increases nationwide, Thailand Agriculture Minister Sudarat Keyuraphan declared Monday (July 31) all 76 provinces of the country animal epidemic control areas, with stricter rules on the transport of poultry and handling of dead birds.
The move follows the mass culling of 300,000 chickens at 78 farms in Nakhon Phanom province on the weekend. (The Nation [Thailand])
Even more interesting is that they are following a godawful number of people…
revere | August 1, 2006The long awaited reassortment experiment where the 1997 H5N1 virus was combined with a seasonal strain of human H3N2 virus is being reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, known colloquially amongst scientists as "penis"). As of this writing I was not able to get a .pdf so all I know is what is being reported on the newswires as a result of a press conference held by CDC Director Gerberding and a co-author of the study, Dr. Jacquiline Katz of CDC. It's hard to know the real significance of this work until we see the actual paper but here is the synopsis as…
revere | July 31, 2006I noticed that Governor Mitt Romney, Republican presidential hopeful and much despised Governor of Massachusetts, just vetoed $8.15 million in funding for addiction treatment and prevention in his state. I'm not an expert on substance abuse issues, but I know it is an area of public health where we are in real trouble because of budget cuts. I have written quite a lot about bird flu here and the need to address it by strenghtening the public health infrastructure. Substance abuse is part of that infrastructure. But what, if anything, does cutting these programs have to do with bird flu? I…
revere | July 29, 2006Yesterday we posted on the failure -- the refusal, really -- of Indonesia's Ministry of Health to release any of the human flu sequences or isolates. Indonesia is now the country with more fatalities than any other, having passed Vietnam for that dubious honor. We now learn via Declan Butler that Indonesia had also been withholding isolates from poultry.
Nature has learned that very few -- if any -- avian flu samples from Indonesian birds have been sent to official labs for sequencing over the past year.
The data blackout comes just as surveys of the country are revealing a startling number…