china
revere | December 22, 2007WHO [World Health Organization] is now saying that human to human (H2H) transmission has not been ruled out in China or Pakistan:
China:
The World Health Organization said Friday it was impossible to say whether a case of bird flu in China involving a 52- year-old man was due to human-to-human transmission - but, even if it was, it was down to very close contact between the victims.
The Assistant Director-General for Health Security at WHO, Dr David Heymann, said the only proven transmission of this nature so far, in Indonesia and Thailand, had been as a result of very 'close contact' in a '…
revere | December 17, 2007With everyone on tenterhooks over the confusing outbreak of human bird flu cases in Pakistan and the first reported case in Burma (aka Myanmar), WHO is taking the opportunity to give its member nations a pep talk about swift reporting. Since there is evidence the reporting might not have been so terribly swift in that case, one must assume they consider this a "teachable moment" rather than an exemplar:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Sunday praised Asian countries for swiftly reporting the latest bird flu cases after Pakistan and Myanmar were hit by a resurgence of the disease.
Asia-…
revere | December 15, 2007As noted yesterday, it's flu season. That includes bird flu. So we are seeing cases pop up. Yet another in Indonesia and the father-son cases in China. Then reports out of Pakistan of the first human cases on the Indian sub-continent. Those case are as yet unconfirmed. Now WHO is confirming cases in Burma (aka Myanmar), the first in that military dictatorship not known for being open about what goes on there:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced Myanmar's first human case of bird flu, the victim a seven-year-old girl who survived the disease.
The girl, from the northeastern Shan…
revere | December 14, 2007China tries to close the door on a possible H2H while Pakistan opens the door to human bird flu cases on the Indian sub-continent. First China. Two recent cases, a fatal case of a 24 year old male followed after a period of some days by the infection of his father raised the issue whether the son passed the H5N1 infection to the father. No one wants this to be the case and the Chinese, who are hosting the summer Olympics in Beijing have a lot at stake. The spin on this, though, is incomprehensible:
China's health authorities said here on Monday that no human-to-human transmission had been…
revere | December 8, 2007Earlier in the week we discussed the unfortunate 24 year old man who died of bird flu in Nanking in Jiangsu province. He had had no known contact with sick poultry. Now the father has bird flu. Did the father get it from the son? Did both get it from the same source? Or two different sources? Those are the open questions at the moment as Chinese health authorities struggle to follow up the health status of the father's 69 suspected contacts:
"The patient, a 52-year-old male surnamed Lu from Nanjing in Jiangsu, is the father of the serious case of bird flu diagnosed on December 2," said the…
revere | December 4, 2007China has just registered its 26th known case of bird flu and its 17th death. I emphasize known, because in a country of over 1.3 billion that has not been able to eradicate this virus from its vast poultry population, it would seem the real number is probably quite a bit higher. But what I want to return to about this case is something I have discussed before regarding the Chinese cases (and pertains to most of the other reported cases as well), but is starkest for the Chinese reports. But first, the pertinent part of the case:
China's first human case of bird flu in six months shows that…
revere | November 14, 2007The UK has a bird flu outbreak in turkeys. With any luck the government will do a better job of it than they did last time, although they are slashing funds for control of the problem, which doesn't make much sense. But at least we know about it and how serious it is or it isn't. We don't have to guess or wonder or suspect. Not true for China, also experiencing an outbreak in the southern city of Guangzhou. As usual, China is controlling the news. They are also probably suppressing it:
The outbreak in Guangzhou's Panyu district is the first of the H5N1 bird flu strain since May, but it has…
aardvarchaeology | October 30, 2007
Came to Luoyang in Henan province on the Yellow River by train yesterday morning, passing factories and quarries, fertile fields and homes cut into hillsides like hobbit homes. We were booked into the Yaxiang Jinling hotel, a high-rise in Luoyang's vast new area of airily spaced skyscrapers outside the old town. Such developments surround all major Chinese cities these days and give a strange impression, as if Manhattan had been stretched out to cover all of New York State, the intervals filled with car parks, lawns and expressways. The hotel has 23 floors, all decorated in a space-themed…
laelaps | October 30, 2007
The sculpted skull of the AMNH Deinonychus mount.
For nearly as long as I can remember, artistic depictions of Deinonychus and related dromeosaurs have featured the dinosaur as a pack hunter, often pouncing on a hapless ornithischian like Tenontosaurus (see here, here, here, and here for examples). After being confronted with such imagery time and time again I didn't think twice about the pack-hunting behavior in Deinonychus as a kid, but I started to wonder on what evidence all these gory illustrations were based. The popular books in my own library treated the behavior as a fact and gave…
aardvarchaeology | October 25, 2007Third day in Beijing, and I think my internal clock may finally have synched with local time. The past two nights have seen me spinning sleeplessly in bed in the small hours and finally reading Proust in the lobby. I padded around the hotel before four o'clock, listening to the snores of the night man, watching from the roof terrace as a night-shift demolition man in an excavator took down another low old house to build a shop or hotel for us, the tourists. A Hanoi-style temporary sidewalk restaurant had sprouted in our hutong lane near the Gulou bell tower. There was no sign left of it when…
revere | September 18, 200710,000 ducks in Guangdong Province in the south of China have died of bird flu and 100,000 more culled in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease. Massive bird flu outbreaks are not exactly a novelty these days but the Chinese incident is noteworthy because it is now reported the ducks were in vaccinated flocks:
According to Guangdong Animal Epidemic Prevention Center director Yu Yedong, the 9,800 ducks that died at Sixian village had been vaccinated. But he added the first vaccination could only be 65 percent effective, while a second shot would have made it 90 percent.
He believed the…
angrytoxicologist | August 27, 2007I'm traveling right now but wanted to post a link to NYTimes' "Choking on Growth" series. It's well worth a read (it's not the best written article I've seen - it repeats itself a lot, but the facts make a good story). The author of "The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future" will be online chatting today on the NYTimes' site.
Three facinating stats before I go:
In 2005 alone, China added 66 gigawatts of electricity to its power grid, about as much power as Britain generates in a year. Last year, it added an additional 102 gigawatts, as much as France.
and
Only 1…
revere | June 8, 2007We've written here about China's failure to share viral isolates, but we hope we've also made clear that many Chinese scientists have been forthcoming in sharing much other scientific information with colleagues in other countries about their experience with bird flu. A good example of interesting and valuable information has just appeared (published Ahead of Print in CDC's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases). The paper has details on six H5N1 cases that occurred in China between October 2005 and October 2006. The cases were all in urban areas and had no known exposure to sick poultry or…
zooillogix | May 29, 2007Wildlife officials from Southeast Asia met in Cisarua, Indonesia this week to discuss cross-border animal smuggling. Chief among their concerns was the rapid growth in pangolin trafficking. Scaled mammals with long, sticky, extendable tongues (up to 16"), Pangolins were once grouped with anteaters but recent DNA testing has shown that they are most likely a distinct group. Unfortunately for the pangolin, the Chinese prize their meat as a delicacy and believe their scales have medicinal properties, including reducing swelling, improving blood circulation and helping breast feeding women…
revere | May 26, 2007After saying yesterday morning that China has not shared any of its human viral isolates, along comes an Associated Press report that two isolates were just sent and will shortly arrive at a WHO reference lab in the US. I'd love to say this demonstrates the power of Effect Measure, but . . . Anyway:
The sample updates of the H5N1 virus from China's Health Ministry are awaiting customs clearance, said Joanna Brent, a spokeswoman for WHO's Beijing office.
They include specimens from a 2006 case in Xinjiang in China's far west, and a case in the southern province of Fujian in 2007, Brent said. (…
revere | April 30, 2007"China" was one of the founding members of the United Nations. Whatever you mean by "China," anyway. When the UN was formed in 1945 there was only one China. After the Revolution of 1949 the losing side retreated to Taiwan and claimed the title of Republic of China. The US and its allies stupidly continued to recognize them as "China" to keep another communist country from the Security Council, but by 1971 the absurdity of denying mot Chinese a seat in the UN was patently obvious and the People's Republic of China took the place of the ROC. At the time I was strongly in favor of this and I…
revere | April 17, 2007Some reporters are so good it just makes your head shake when you read them. In the flu world, the prize (always) goes to Helen Branswell of Canadian Press. She's not a stylish writer, just an exceptionally clear one. Her sources are the best and her reporting as reliable as her sources are good. My RSS reader seems to miss some of her stories, but when I get them they are usually head and shoulders above the competition. And sometimes there's no competition. Like her interview with Dr. Keiji Fukuda, head of the WHO's global influenza program.
In it we learn that China is still not producing…
revere | November 22, 2006China is becoming an environmental nightmare. Now experts from the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, a Chinese government think tank, have located the culprits. The rest of the world. We are forcing China to make products for them and as a result making their country an environmental paradise -- for polluters. Don't blame me for this bogus argument. I'm just telling you what they are saying:
A high-profile report released by a governmental think tank in Beijing, last week, berated current trade patterns, which resulted in China bearing the brunt of…
revere | November 10, 2006In an example of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for," China's choice for WHO Director General, Dr. Margaret Chan, is already finding her reputation will be held hostage to the behavior of China itself, not an enviable position.
The new chief of the World Health Organisation, Margaret Chan of China, pledged to put her nationality aside and to use her leverage on Beijing to combat major threats such as bird flu.
"Now I'm elected as the WHO's Director General I no longer carry my nationality on my sleeve. I leave it behind," she told reporters after her nomination was endorsed by more than…
revere | November 3, 2006It is tiresome to report the same story over and over again (for a few previous posts see here, here, here, here and here), but sometimes necessary. It has been widely reported -- again -- that the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture is withholding isolates of H5N1 it promised to provide. Indeed, WHO's Beijing office reports it has received no isolates since 2004.
The issue came to the scientific world's attention again last week when a team of Hong Kong and American researchers reported a new sublineage of H5N1 has become dominant in southern China and southeast asia in the last year, the first…