Bird flu present in 47 Russian villages: agriculture ministry

MOSCOW - Russia's agriculture ministry said on Wednesday that the deadly bird flu epidemic was present in 47 villages, while another 80 villages were being kept under observation.

The statement came after Russia's sanitary chief, Gennady Onishzhenko, said last week that the bird flu outbreak that has spread to seven Russian provinces was under control and stabilising fast.

Wednesday's statement said that bird flu had spread to one additional village in the west Siberian province of Tyumen, while a quarantine imposed earlier on three other villages had been lifted.

Experts believe that migratory birds travelling from Asia brought bird flu to Russia.

The discovery has prompted Russian officials to slaughter tens of thousands of poultry lest the country's poultry industry be ruined.

Scientists are concerned that the H5N1 strain of bird flu that has killed more than 60 people in Asia could mutate to a form easily transmissible between humans.

The virus' westward spread has intensified debate in the European Union over how to protect poultry stocks.

A number of countries have imposed full or partial bans on bird product imports from Russia and Kazakhstan, where a bird flu outbreak has also been recorded.


08/31/2005 13:33 GMT

Bird flu reported in another Omsk region district

MOSCOW. Aug 29 (Interfax)

The Federal Veterinary and Phyto- Sanitary Oversight Service said bird flu has been reported in another district of the Omsk region.

Two further villages in the Novosibirsk region also reported suspected bird flu cases by August 29, the Russian Agriculture Ministry said.

The situation in the Altai territory and in the Kurgan and Chelyabinsk regions has not changed since August 26. Quarantine has been lifted in two populated areas of two districts in Tyumen region.

By August 29, bird flu cases have been confirmed in 46 populated areas, and 80 others are under investigation, as compared to 45 and 78 by August 26 respectively.

First case of deadly Asian bird flu feared in Finland

First case of deadly Asian bird flu feared in Finland
Rob Waugh

THE first case of a potentially deadly strain of bird flu may have been detected in Europe.

Finnish authorities fear they had found the virus in a gull in the north of the country, meaning that the potentially deadly strain of bird flu has arrived on the European continent.

The Nordic country's Agriculture Ministry said the case involved a gull near the city of Oulu, 370 miles north of Helsinki.

Final results of tests are expected in three weeks and it was not immediately clear if the strain of bird flu involved is the same as the one circulating in Asia and Russia, which scientists fear has the potential to start a global human pandemic that could kill millions.

If tests prove the flu to be the H5N1 strain ravaging the poultry industry in Asia, it would be the first recorded instance of it in Europe.
The discovery emerged a day after experts warned that migrating birds will bring the deadly strain of the flu to Britain.

Some estimates have suggested up to 50 million people worldwide would be killed by the virus.
Testing and surveillance of the European bird population is already being stepped up after the virus spread to Russia.

Two days ago, British Veterinary Association president Bob McCracken said: "It is inevitable that bird flu will be carried to this country by migrating birds." Dr McCracken called for free range birds and water fowl, such as ducks and geese, to be tested, as they would be most at risk of catching the virus from migrating birds.
However, the Government's Chief Veterinary Officer, Debby Reynolds, has also said there was little evidence to show that migrating birds could spread the virus to Britain. Dr Reynolds also played down Dr McCracken's warnings, insisting that the current risk was "remote or low".

She said veterinary experts had concluded that Britain should not follow the decision by Holland earlier this week to order all poultry to be reared indoors to reduce the risk of them catching the virus from wild birds.
27 August 2005

Three civit cats killed by bird flu

Aug 26, 2005, 16:55 GMT

HANOI, Vietnam (UPI) -- Three rare civet cats have been killed by bird flu in Vietnam -- the first time the species has contracted the disease.

The civet cats died in June at the Cuc Phuong National Park, about 85 miles south of Hanoi, officials said.

Vietnamese officials have yet to determined the cause of the infection, the BBC reported Friday. No other animals or people became ill.

The civet cat is a mammal distantly related to the Felidae family of which the domestic cat is a member, but is more closely related to the mongoose. It was a primary source of the flu-like virus SARS -- severe acute respiratory syndrome -- in China.

Wild civets are often captured and served as a delicacy in restaurants in Vietnam and China.

Deadly flu break-out 'inevitable'

Matthew Franklin, national political editor
24aug05

TENS of millions of people could die in an avian flu pandemic that experts believe is inevitable, welfare organisation CARE Australia has warned.

CARE chief executive Robert Glasser yesterday called for a major international effort to help the developing world prepare for the expected outbreak, which he said could be more deadly than the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed at least 40 million people.

"The only defence against this is forward defence – our responses need to be in developing countries in the region where these outbreaks are likely to occur," Dr Glasser said.

"We are woefully unprepared to do that right now."

Avian flu normally affects birds and pigs but was found in humans in Hong Kong in 1997, leading to the mass destruction of the nation's 1.5 million chickens.

It has since been seen in several other Asian nations.

Dr Glasser said the World Health Organisation believed about 110 people had contracted the virus with half of the those affected dying.

Experts also fear that within a few years the virus will develop to the point where it could travel between humans, exposing the world to a potential catastrophe.

"Most people think it's not a question of will it happen but when," Dr Glasser said. "In a worst-case scenario you could imagine that 10-20 per cent of the people who get it could die from it.

"At the worst case this would be an unprecedented and inconceivably deadly virus."

Dr Glasser said developed nations, including Australia, had produced action plans and stockpiled anti-viral medications to cope with any break-out.

But the developing world had little capacity for obtaining medicine, highlighting the need for a major international push to stockpile drugs and develop rapid response teams to contain outbreaks.

"The critical period in terms of our response to this is really the next three years," he said.

"The penny is just dropping for some governments."

Dr Glasser said many people failed to understand the seriousness of the situation because they associated influenza with the illness they suffered each winter.

But avian flu posed a massive risk because so few people had been exposed to it and had developed resistance.

"What people don't realise is that these sorts of pandemics happen once a century and in this case people would not die from the complications as much as the virus itself," Dr Glasser said.

"It's about as horrific as you can imagine."

He said the 1918 pandemic had spread around the world in two to three years but that globalisation meant a bird flu pandemic could spread within a few weeks.

Because there was no human resistance, it could affect people of all age groups.

"It really is potentially the single most significant setback to development in 50 or 100 years," Dr Glasser said.

"Once it actually begins spreading there's not much you can do other than deal with the results which in developing countries would be really dreadful."

Hungary Set to Start Bird Flu Vaccine Human Trial

HUNGARY: August 24, 2005


BUDAPEST - Hungary will start human trials of a bird flu vaccine as soon as the country's pharmaceutical ethics committee approves the trials, Public Health Office spokesman Emese Ritook told state news agency MTI on Tuesday.


Ritook said animal testing had already been completed and that the human trial would start with 150 people, including Hungary's chief medical officer Laszlo Bujdoso.
Blood samples will be taken to prove the vaccine's effectiveness three weeks after immunisation, then again after three and six months, Ritook said.

Provided tests are successful, production of the vaccine will start if World Health Organisation registers virus transmission from human to human.

US health officials said earlier this month that a vaccine produced by France's Sanofi-Aventis had produced an immune response in humans. In July, US researchers said Roche AG's influenza drug Tamiflu suppresses the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus, which is dangerous to humans.

Hungarian health workers and the elderly will be the first to get the new vaccine, but after that it will be accessible to anyone, Ritook said.

Ritook said 450 doses of the vaccine have been produced so far, all ready for human testing.

Kazakhstan's agriculture ministry said on Tuesday that an outbreak of bird flu in seven villages was H5N1. There are concerns the outbreaks in Kazakhstan and Russia could spread to the European Union via migrating birds.

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

Scientists Race To Head Off Lethal Potential Of Avian Flu

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 23, 2005; Page A01

Robert G. Webster is watching his 40-year-old hunch about the origin of pandemic influenza play out before his eyes. It would be thrilling if it were not so terrifying.

Four decades ago, Webster was a young microbiologist from New Zealand on a brief sojourn in London. While he was there, he did an experiment that pretty much set the course of his scientific career. In just a few hours, he showed that the microbe that swept the globe in 1957 as "Asian flu" bore an unmistakable resemblance to strains of virus carried by certain birds in the years before.

Webster's observation was a surprise -- and a troubling one. It suggested an origin of the unusually virulent strains of influenza virus that appear two or three times each century. His hunch, that at least some of these pandemic strains were hybrids of bird and human flu viruses, was correct.

Since then, Rob Webster has become arguably the world's most important eye on animal influenza viruses. These days, he is deeply worried about what he's seeing.

Strains of influenza virus known as A/H5N1 have been spreading in wild and domestic birds across Southeast Asia and China since 1996. In recent weeks, the virus has apparently struck poultry in Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Since late 2003, about 100 million domesticated birds -- mostly chickens and ducks -- either have died of the virus or have been intentionally killed to keep the viruses from spreading. But what has Webster and other experts so worried are the 112 people who have been infected with the H5N1 "bird flu," more than half of whom have died. The fatality rate of 55 percent outstrips any human flu epidemic on record, including the epochal Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919 that killed at least 50 million people.

Why this new virus is so deadly is not entirely understood, although scientists have hints.

Influenza viruses invade cells lining the throat and windpipe, where they replicate and cause inflammation but are eventually suppressed by the immune system. In some cases, the microbe invades the lungs and leads to viral or bacterial pneumonia. Some H5N1 strains, however, have two features that make them even more dangerous.

Normally, the flu viruses can replicate only in the throat and lungs. With H5N1, however, the protein that triggers replication can be activated in many other organs, including the liver, intestines and brain. What is usually a respiratory infection can suddenly become a whole-body infection. Simultaneously, a second "defect" in the virus unleashes a storm of immune-system chemicals called cytokines. In normal amounts, cytokines help fight microbial invaders. In excessive amounts, they can cause lethal damage to the body's own tissues.

The trait H5N1 has not acquired is the ability to spread easily from person to person. The 112 human cases since late 2003 may turn out to be simply rare events in a bird epidemic that will eventually subside, as all epidemics do.

What is worrisome, though, is evidence pointing the other way.

Kiwis stockpile bird flu drugs

By EMILY WATT
21 August 2005


Anxious Kiwis are stockpiling the anti-viral drug Tamiflu to protect themselves against a lethal world bird flu epidemic which experts say is inevitable.
Doctors say many patients are collecting supplies of the drug for themselves and their families.

Auckland GP Dr Simon Cotton has ordered more than $2500-worth of Tamiflu - 40 packets - for himself, family, friends and colleagues.
He is convinced the epidemic will kill many New Zealanders.
"I don't think it's a question of if this will come, it's when. It could be tomorrow."

Little is known about how the virus will behave, but the Health Ministry says up to 35 per cent of New Zealanders - 1.4 million people - could be infected.
The disease has a 20 per cent mortality rate, so up to 280,000 could die.

The government has ordered 800,000 doses, enough to cover 20 per cent of the population. These will probably be used to treat health workers first.

Full Article

Japan hit by new bird flu case

08.22.2005, 06:43 AM

TOKYO (AFX) - The authorities said they have discovered a new case of bird flu at a chicken farm near here, prompting health officials to order the culling of some 100,000 chickens.

The farm is in Ishioka, 80 kilometers northeast of here, and keeps 1.11 mln chickens in 12 houses, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries said in a statement.

It was one of three farms which supply chickens to another farm which was found last Thursday to have been hit by bird flu.

The local health office is to kill all 100,000 chickens in the house where the virus of the H5 strain of bird flu was found.

Japan has been relatively free of bird flu, which has killed 61 people in Southeast Asia since 2003, with 13 cases reported so far, an official of the ministry said.

There were four outbreaks in Japan last year, the first cases in the country since 1925.

Deadly avian flu on the wing

By Mike Davis


The first bar-headed geese have already arrived at their wintering grounds near the Cauvery River in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Over the next 10 weeks, 100,000 more geese, gulls and cormorants will leave their summer home at Lake Qinghai in western China, headed for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, eventually, Australia.

An unknown number of these beautiful migrating birds will carry H5N1, the avian flu sub-type that has killed 61 people in Southeast Asia and which the World Health Organization (WHO) fears is on the verge of mutating into a pandemic form like that which killed 50 to 100 million people in the fall of 1918.

As the birds arrive in the wetlands of South Asia, they will excrete the virus into the water, where it risks spreading to migrating waterfowl from Europe, as well as to domestic poultry. In the worst-case scenario, this will bring avian flu to the doorstep of the dense slums of Dhaka, Kolkata, Karachi and Mumbai.

The avian flu outbreak at Lake Qinghai was first identified by Chinese wildlife officials at the end of April. Initially it was confined to a small islet in the huge salt lake, where geese suddenly began to act spasmodically, then to collapse and die. By mid-May it had spread through the lake's entire avian population, killing thousands of birds. An ornithologist called it "the biggest and most extensively mortal avian influenza event ever seen in wild birds".

Chinese scientists, meanwhile, were horrified by the virulence of the new strain: when mice were infected they died even quicker than when injected with "genotype Z", the fearsome H5N1 variant currently killing farmers and their children in Vietnam.

full article

Europe braces as bird flu spreads in Russia

By GRAEME SMITH

Saturday, August 20, 2005 Updated at 2:03 AM EDT

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Moscow — The bird flu that has raised fears of global pandemic has broken into the European continent, Russia confirmed yesterday, as neighbouring countries rushed to prepare their farmers, doctors, and even soldiers on border patrol for the spread of an infection moving rapidly westward from Asia.

Russia has been playing down concerns about avian influenza since it first detected the deadly H5N1 strain in Siberia last month. This week, however, as tests showed the virus has travelled thousands of kilometres across the country, Russian officials quietly invited experts from the United Nations to help.

“I have a green light to go to Moscow,” said Juan Lubroth, senior officer at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, an agency tracking the virus.

The UN team hopes to arrive within a couple of weeks. At least 13,000 birds have already died of the disease in Russia; earlier this week, authorities said they have culled another 130,000 in an attempt to stop the outbreak.

Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian federal service for consumer protection, posted a statement on its website yesterday confirming that bird flu has been detected in the Kalmyk Republic, a southern region on the Caspian Sea. Officials had previously suggested that deaths among wild birds and domestic geese at the region's nature reserves were caused by parasitic worms.

The fight against bird flu on Europe's eastern flank will gain importance in mid-September, experts say, because migrating waterfowl could carry the virus from Russia into Europe and beyond. One strain of the flu has already killed 61 people in Southeast Asia, largely farmers and others who were in close contact with birds. The World Health Organization has repeatedly voiced concern that mutations might produce a virus that spreads easily between humans, with the potential to kill millions.
In the short term, the arrival of the Asian bird flu in Europe could devastate the farm economy. When a similar strain spread among Dutch chickens in 2003, authorities destroyed more than 31 million birds.

“Until now, this disease has located only in Asia,” said Alexander Solokha, a waterfowl expert for Wetlands International in Moscow, which has been helping the Russian government monitor the disease. “But we can expect it will spread along the flyways, west toward the Black Sea.”

Colder weather will push the birds even further southwest to their winter nesting grounds, Mr. Solokha said, which could spread the disease to Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Italy, Spain, and North Africa.

Despite the scale of the problem, some of the things Mr. Lubroth intends to tell his Russian counterparts are simple. For instance: Don't shoot wild birds.

“The shotgun method isn't much good,” he said.
Local administrators of some Russian regions have suggested enlisting hunters for mass killings of waterfowl, because the wild birds can transmit the disease to livestock.

But experts say it's still unclear whether the disease has been carried by wild birds, shipments of poultry, or some other way across vast distances. Mr. Solokha warned that attacking flocks of birds would only scatter them and potentially spread the problem.
The FAO recommends focusing on prevention among domestic birds by isolating poultry with netting or enclosed barns.

Such measures would likely prove difficult to enforce on Russian family farms where chickens roam freely. Similar problems would face European countries where organic, free-range farming has grown popular, Mr. Lubroth said.

Renate Kuenast, Germany's agriculture minister, told reporters yesterday that Germany is ready to ban free-range poultry. And the government is reportedly considering new control measures for passengers arriving at airports from Russia.

The German authorities appear willing to wait before taking the precautions, but the Dutch Agriculture Ministry yesterday gave its commercial poultry industry just three days to shift their operations indoors, to prevent contact with wild birds.
Britain announced that doctors will receive 50-page technical guides next month to help them identify bird flu and contain outbreaks.

On Russia's western border, Ukrainian troops and customs officials have been instructed to watch for contraband poultry. The European Commission asked its member states last week to ban imports of feathers and live birds from Russia and Kazakhstan, but Ukraine has only blocked live chickens from infected regions.
While Europe scrambles to protect itself, Russia's largely state-controlled media have been skeptical about the threat. The RIA Novosti news agency published an analysis titled: “Bird flu in Russia — scaremongering

BIRD FLU CONFIRMED IN 40 RUSSIAN SETTLEMENTS, SUSPECTED IN 78

[August 20, 2005, 17:55:15]

Bird flu has been confirmed in 40 Russian settlements and suspected in another 78, the Agriculture Ministry's press service said citing the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phitosanitary infection on Friday.

In the Altai territory, the dangerous infection was confirmed in one hitherto suspected village. As of August 19, bird flu was detected and confirmed by laboratory tests in eight settlements located in five districts, PRIME-TASS said.

Laboratory tests are being carried out for another eight settlements in eight Altai districts.

In the Tyumen region, veterinary services culled all the poultry in the settlements hit by bird flu. In the Omsk region, bird flu was confirmed in six suspected settlements, including in two populated areas and on four lakes among waterfowl. Culling is underway in the affected areas. Results of bird flu tests are due in 32 Omsk region settlements.

In the Kurgan region, bird flu was confirmed in six settlements, and suspected in another 13.

World on alert as bird flu reaches the Urals

MARIA GOLOVNINA
IN MOSCOW


RUSSIA warned the world yesterday that migrating birds could export the bird flu virus to Europe and the Middle East within months.

The disease, previously reported in five remote areas of Siberia, appeared to be moving west after it hit the Chelyabinsk industrial region in the Ural mountains, which form the boundary between Asia and Europe. Officials said it was likely to spread further.

"Migrating birds may spread the virus to nearby countries, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Ukraine and Mediterranean countries, because bird migration routes from Siberia also go through those regions in autumn," said one.

Scientists fear that the fatal virus, which humans can catch but not yet pass on to others, will mutate and kill millions of people worldwide.

Russia Reports Bird Flu Dangerous to Humans Spreading Towards Europe

Created: 16.08.2005 11:50 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 11:50 MSK, 12 hours 50 minutes ago

MosNews

Russia, which has been striving to stop the spread of deadly bird flu across its territory, said an outbreak in Chelyabinsk was dangerous to humans, Reuters reported Tuesday.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu is behind the outbreak in Chelyabinsk, a city in the Ural mountains, the Emergencies Ministry said in a statement, adding that 497 birds had died over the past 24 hours. The strain is the same one that has killed dozens of people in Asia and many millions of poultry.

The bird flu was first reported in Russia’s Novosibirsk Region in July. In three weeks it spread over neighboring Tyumen, Omsk and Kurgan regions as well as Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Initial reports said that the disease was caused by the strain of the virus potentially dangerous to humans, but no one has been diagnosed with the disease in Russia so far

Bird Flu Spreads Westward in Russia

Created: 15.08.2005 19:32 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 19:32 MSK, 4 hours 11 minutes ago

Denis Bulanichev, Alina Chernoivanov

Gazeta.ru

Bird flu in Russia has reached the Chelyabinsk region from southern Siberia. This is the sixth region in the country where the AH5N1 strain of the virus has been discovered in domestic birds. And while it is potentially deadly for humans, no human cases have been registered yet.

On Monday, the Chelyabinsk region in the southern Urals became the sixth to join the contaminated zone. Veterinarians registered the outbreak in the settlement of Oktyabrskoye, where 60 birds died over the weekend, the region’s vice governor, Andrei Kosilov, announced on Monday. And experts have already identified the cause — testing the dead birds revealed the deadly strain. To avoid spread, local authorities decided to cull 400 domestic birds, including 270 chickens, 60 ducks, and 70 geese.

According to Kosilov’s announcement, the region surrounding the town has been quarantined. Experts have established a sanitation checkpoint and organized mass culling. The Oktyabrskoye region has over 25,000 birds. But not all of the birds will be culled, Kosilov said — only those infected or having contact with infected birds. “Veterinarians will closely monitor the infection among birds, and birds will only be destroyed after an infection is found.”

Russia’s Agricultural Directorate head Sergei Dankvert noted that the town is very close to a lake that borders the Kurgan region and Kazakhstan. These places have registered outbreaks of bird flu, and epidemiologists say that the virus was spread by wild migratory birds that spend their summers in these places.

The Novosibirsk region was the first place where infection was registered. The first deaths were noted in the town of Suzdalka on July 21, when about 200 chickens and geese died. On August 1, authorities in the Novosibirsk region announced a quarantine of 13 settlements in four districts. Since then, over 55,000 birds have been destroyed, said regional governor Viktor Tolokonsky.

If Novosibirsk bird farms had not registered a single case of bird flu, a small farm in Mamont, in the Altai region where the outbreak spread, discovered its birds were sick. Initially, the owner of the private farm tried to hide his outbreak from the authorities, and will now face criminal penalties.

According to the Emergency Ministry, meanwhile, over 10,000 domestic and wild birds died of bird flu in Russia since July 21, while hundreds of thousands of birds were culled.

By Monday, the outbreak continued to spread: three more residential areas in the Novosibirsk region were include into the areas contaminated with the virus. However, in two residential areas, medical monitoring has been stopped. According to the Consumer Products Directorate, bird loss has stopped in a majority of previously infected regions such as Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Tyumen.

As of August 14, no humans who came into contact with dead birds have contracted the virus, said the directorate.

Still, the story told by a Novosibirsk TV reporter, Maria Pashkova, sparked wide resonance. Pashkova told Gazeta.ru that she suffered a high fever and headache the day after shooting at a contaminated residential area. “I called the doctors, and after learning that I had been in a quarantined zone, they sent me to a state infectious diseases facility that is part of the Vektor Institute.”

Sergei Netesov of the Vektor Molecular Biology Institute told Gazeta.ru that this was standard procedure for everyone who could have come into contact with the virus. The results of Pashkova’s tests will be known on August 17, but now she says she is feeling fine. “I think it was just a cold,” she says.

The Altai region is also implementing protective measures for its population. And while local authorities say there is no need to announce a quarantine, medical personnel conduct daily checks in areas where people may have come into contact with sick birds. The regional administration has ordered all medical facilities to be prepared to treat anyone with symptoms of bird flu. “We are stocking up on anti-viral medication and the necessary medical equipment,” Igor Saldan of the Altai Regional Consumer Products Directorate was quoted as saying. Moreover, routine flu vaccines will begin early this year — in September. Such measures are taken to help prevent a cross mutation between the common flu and the bird flu — which could lead to a pandemic.

Scientists check for arrival of avian flu from Asia

Virus may kill 60,000 in California despite new drug, study says

By DAVID WHITNEY BEE
WASHINGTON BUREAU

Last Updated: August 14, 2005, 04:26:59 AM PDT


WASHINGTON — They know it's coming. Hospitals already are monitoring for its arrival with every patient who checks in. Now scientists are swabbing wild bird bottoms in California and elsewhere in a hunt for the first signs of the deadly virus.
What has scientists worried is not the fact that the avian flu virus H5N1 already has killed at least 60 people overseas. Or that it has spread from Southeast Asia to China and Russia.

What has them convinced about the diminishing odds of escaping a worldwide health catastrophe — one study estimates that fatalities in California could top 60,000 — is that wild birds overseas no longer seem to be dying.

That means the virus is mutating, and scientists fear it has now adapted so that it can survive the annual migration of wild birds from Asia to North America without killing its hosts.

"That's a real danger sign," said veterinarian Carol Cardona of the University of California at Davis.

Cardona is part of the growing army of scientists and health care professionals gearing up to fight what could become the first flu pandemic since 1918, when a Spanish flu virus — also believed to have been spread by birds — killed between 20 million and 40 million people around the world.

More Americans died in that outbreak than were killed in World War I. And already the projections are that the next pandemic, perhaps just months away, will kill similar numbers of people.

So far, the virus has not mutated or combined with other influenza viruses so that it can spread from human to human.

"The great fear is that we will see a version of H5N1 that will spread very easily from person to person," said David Daigle of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Migrating birds may bring flu

"Most experts believe it is not a question of if, but when," he said.

According to a recent report by the Trust for America's Health, the U.S. toll could surpass 540,000.

In California, the report said, deaths could top 60,000 and hospitalizations could exceed 273,000 — unfathomable given that number is four times the amount of hospital beds in the state, according to the California Hospital Association.

Ken August, spokesman for the California Department of Health Services, said that if the nightmare scenario develops, mass quarantine of infected patients and other mandatory steps to stop the virus' spread could be inevitable.

"We could face asking the public to take some extraordinary measures," August warned.

Already, he said, hospitals throughout the state have been asked to begin monitoring for patients reporting unexplained respiratory illness and who have traveled recently to Southeast Asia.

"What we're concerned about is the flu virus mutating into something that no one has experienced and that would cause severe illness and death," he said.

While scientists and health officials stress that there is no evidence of an Asian variety of the H5N1 virus in the United States now, it could arrive at almost any time with passengers unloading from an overseas flight from Thailand, China or Russia.

Or it could arrive on the wings of an infected bird.

UC Davis' Cardona is helping oversee in California a national effort to detect the virus' avian arrival.

This year, she said, about 2,000 nonmigratory wild birds will be checked to see if they have any signs of the Asian H5N1 virus. The nonmigratory birds are easier to locate and swab, she said, and they are likely to pick up the disease from waterfowl and other birds migrating down from Alaska on the Pacific Flyway.

The goal is to keep the virus from poultry farms in the Central Valley and Southern California before they become breeding grounds for a deadly form that can be transmitted from human to human.

"We all believe that wild birds are not likely to cause a pandemic without an intermediate host for the virus," she said. "And poultry are likely to be that host."

Already, she said, poultry growers and backyard farmers are being urged to keep the water and feed for their chickens and ducks protected from wild birds so that the virus can't be passed along.

The deadly strain of the H5N1 virus was first detected in Southeast Asia more than two years ago. Tens of millions of domestic ducks and chickens have been slaughtered and burned to stop its spread, but the virus quickly migrated.

More than 60 people who have come into contact with sick birds have died.

While there have been no reports of the virus being transmitted between people, British researchers reported finding the H5N1 virus in the spinal fluid of a young Vietnamese boy earlier this year, indicating that the virus is mutating to the point it can infect the human brain.

Researchers working on a drug to fight the virus have been surprised by its mutation.

Recently there have been reports from the National Institutes of Health that a drug known commercially as Tamiflu has shown promise in studies involving rats that it could suppress the spread of the virus.

"That's very encouraging," said August of the California Department of Health Services. "But to produce enough for all Americans and then to distribute it to all who need it would be an enormous challenge."

That point was highlighted by the Trust for America's Health report. It said that if the 5.3 million doses of Tamiflu in federal possession were distributed on the basis of population, only about 639,000 of California's 30 million people would get the medicine.

The report's conclusions are grim.

"Overall, U.S. pandemic preparedness is inadequate," it said. "Both the federal pandemic plan and various state pandemic plans are insufficient for a national response to a pandemic influenza."

California is better off than most states.

Two years ago, the trust praised California for the way it had spent $160 million it had received for bioterrorism preparedness, citing it as one of the top four states in terms of preparation.

"One of the benefits of our preparedness for bioterrorism isthat we have an improved network of laboratories, we've improved our system for identifying outbreaks and we've strengthened our communication between public health, law enforcement and public officials," August said.

"But we can never be fully prepared for a pandemic."

Swiss take further action over bird flu

Saturday 13.08.2005, CET 22:28

Switzerland is extending a ban on birds and poultry from Asian countries to Russia and Kazakhstan in a bid to prevent the spread of avian flu.

At the same time, the Federal Health Office says it wants to build a reserve of vaccine to protect up to 100,000 people should the flu begin passing to humans.

Bern is following European Union policy in extending its import ban, even if the measure is purely a formality.

The Federal Veterinary Office said in a statement on Friday that Switzerland does not import any birds or poultry from Russia or Kazakhstan that could introduce the virus into the country.

It also reminded travellers not to illegally bring back into Switzerland products including eggs, meat, non-treated feathers or birds from the 13 countries now on a list affected by the import ban.

Russian and Kazakh authorities last week admitted that avian flu had been discovered in several regions.

Migratory birds

The Russian authorities have said that migratory birds from southeast Asia could have brought the virus with them as they flew to Siberia for the summer.

A panel of Swiss government experts on Tuesday said the risk of the bird flu being brought into Switzerland was low.

And the Federal Health Office added on Friday that there was at present no risk to the Swiss population.

But the office reported it had launched a tender on Friday to buy enough vaccine to protect 100,000 people against the deadly H5N1 virus.

The office said it was a precautionary measure in case of an increase in the number of incidents of the flu passing from birds to humans.

Ornithologists

Matthias Kestenholz from the Swiss Institute of Ornithology told swissinfo earlier this week that if it was confirmed that the H5N1 strain was responsible for the outbreaks in Russia and Kazakhstan, the disease was then theoretically a step closer to arriving in Switzerland.

"There are two types of migratory water birds which fly from Siberia to Switzerland for the winter: the pochard and the tufted duck," said Kestenholz.

However, Kestenholz said that it was highly unlikely that these birds would be infected when landing on Swiss shores, given the aggressive nature of the disease.

"If they were sick when they left Siberia, it is highly unlikely they would be fit enough to fly nearly 4,000 kilometres to Switzerland," Kestenholz said.

Earlier this week, the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) announced that it was engaged in talks with Swiss pharmaceutical firm Roche about building a stockpile of the anti-bird flu drug Tamiflu.

WHO Director-General Lee Jong-woo said the intention was to create a reserve of at least one million doses. The WHO currently has 125,000 doses at its disposal.

Kazakhstan bans sale of live poultry in bird flu scare

Kazakhstan bans sale of live poultry in bird flu scare


Russia's bird flu still spreading

New US bird flu vaccine 'unrealistic'

12 August 2005

This week's announcement of a potential vaccine against the bird flu virus that many fear could kill millions in a global pandemic, was tempered by the news that it only appears to work at unfeasibly high doses.

The world's vaccine factories could simply not produce enough of it to prevent a pandemic, say flu experts.

Preliminary data suggests that people will need to be injected with 180 micrograms of the vaccine for it to be effective. This is 12 times the dose used to protect people from strains of ordinary flu.

Scientists say the findings show that they need to find ways to use the vaccine more sparingly and replace the chicken eggs currently used to produce it with more efficient systems.


Link to full Science news story

Journalist Hospitalized With Bird Flu Symptoms in Russia’s Siberia

Created: 12.08.2005 17:18 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:18 MSK, 4 hours 42 minutes ago


MosNews

A Russian journalist who has been covering the recent bird flu outbreak in Siberia has been taken to hospital with symptoms of this disease, the Interfax news agency reported on Friday.

Maria Pashkova, a reporter working for the state-owned broadcasting company Novosibirsk visited the districts of the Novosibirsk Region where the bird flu outbreak was reported. After the trip she was admitted to the Vektor virology and biotechnology center in Novosibirsk suburban town of Koltsovo.

The journalist played down the report of her illness saying that hospitalization was a normal procedure for all who felt ill after visiting these areas and contacting infected birds.

A local news agency said that doctors had already taken tests from the woman but no results were immediately available.

The bird flu was first reported in Russia’s Novosibirsk Region in July. In three weeks it spread over neighboring Tyumen Omsk and Kurgan regions as well as Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Initial reports said that the disease was caused by the strain of the virus potentially dangerous to humans, but no one has been diagnosed with the disease in Russia so far.

China reported bird flu cases in Tibet

Source: Reuters


By Sybille de La Hamaide

PARIS, Aug 10 (Reuters) - China has discovered a strain of bird flu, likely the one deadly to humans, at a farm in Tibet, making the western region the third to be hit in the country, the world animal health body OIE said on Wednesday.

"We just received the information that bird flu has been detected in Tibet," OIE director-general Bernard Vallat told Reuters.

He said the virus found was likely to be the H5N1 strain that has swept large parts of Asia, killing more than 50 people in the region. The disease also led to the death of 140 million birds in Asia at a cost running to billions of dollars.

"It's highly pathogenic so it will likely have the same aggressiveness as in the rest of Asia," Vallat said.

The Chinese authorities informed the Paris-based OIE that 133 infected birds had died in a farm close to the capital Lhasa, which had prompted them to cull an additional 2,600 birds in the surrounding area.

China did not say what type of bird had been infected but Vallat said it was likely to be chicken.

The news comes on the same day as confirmation that a bird flu outbreak in Kazakhstan was the deadly H5N1 strain and news that the disease had extended its reach in Russian Siberia and spread to Mongolia.

But Vallat said the Tibet outbreak probably came from another part of China. The Asian country already reported bird flu outbreaks in its western provinces of Xinjiang and Qinghai, which are adjacent to Tibet.

Some scientists have warned that avian flu, infectious in birds, does not spread easily among humans but it could mutate into a form better able to pass from animals to people, possibly triggering a global pandemic.

They say such a pandemic would likely start in Asia and could kill millions and result in devastating economic losses.

Vallat said the fact that bird flu had spread to Tibet was maybe because China had not applied bird vaccination in the entire country.

Mexico controls minor bird flu outbreak

This is moving fast now. According to this report it is 'completely put under control'--they have culled five million, that doesn't seem under control to me, it seems out of control.

Mexico city (VNA) - A small bird flu outbreak in Mexican central state of Queretaro has been completely put under control, according to the state's Agricultural Development Service (SEDA).

SEDA's director Hector Lugo affirmed that after finding many fowls in 18 big farms infected with the bird flu virus, local veterinarians have culled five million fowls that have high risk of infection, separated 1.7 million chickens and vaccinated 12 million others in the nearby farms.

The director on August 10 confirmed that Queretaro has completely contained the disease that was caused by the common virus, which is not as dangerous as H5N1.

Another bird flu outbreak occurred in the country's northwestern state of Durango in March, but caused minor problems as the state had taken preventive measures to control the disease.-

Bird Flu Virus Spreads in Russia

Bird Flu Virus Spreads in Russia
By Lisa McAdams
Moscow
11 August 2005

More than 10,000 domestic and wild birds have reportedly died as a result of a recent outbreak of bird flu in Russia. Neighboring Kazakhstan has also since confirmed an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus that can be spread to humans.

The number of birds dying from the flu virus in Russia has risen dramatically over the past 48 hours, but there are still no known cases of the disease spreading to humans.

Russia's Interfax news agency Thursday quotes an official at the Emergency Situations Ministry as saying the total number of birds that have died since the outbreak was first recorded in late July has jumped to 10,170.

Officials from various Russian ministries and departments are working in the affected areas of Siberia. Outbreaks have also been reported in Omsk and Kurgan, in central Russia.

This local woman in Omsk told Russian television the effects of the disease have been devastating on her flock.

The woman says her birds were completely blinded by the virus before dying.

Villagers in Kazakhstan, which shares a long border with Siberia, are confronting similar problems.

Kazakhstan's agricultural ministry has now confirmed that the virus found in birds near northern Kazakhstan's Pavlodar region and three other villages is of the same strain that can be transmitted to humans. But the ministry sought to play down the development, saying in a press release that the nation's poultry farms have not been affected.

Officials with the World Health Organization have said they expect the Russian outbreak to subside by the end of this month. But there has been no such projection for Kazakhstan, where the virus is just starting to take hold.

Meanwhile, the European Union has called for member states to ban imports of feathers and live birds from both Russia and Kazakhstan.

An outbreak of this same type of bird flu earlier in Southeast Asia killed more than 60 people.

New pig disease victim critical

By Liang Qiwen (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-08-10 05:34



GUANGZHOU: A man in South China's Guangdong Province is fighting for his life after being diagnosed with a fresh case of the pig-borne streptococcus suis infection.

"The man in his 40s contracted the bacteria through a wound on his hand when he was butchering pigs last Thursday," Yu Yedong, director of Guangdong Animal Epidemic Prevention Centre, told China Daily yesterday.

Reportedly from Yangjiang, the man is Guangdong's second reported infection since the start of the recent outbreak. The man was reported to be near death. "His situation is very bad now," Yu said.

Yu said the new case was different from the one in mid-July in Chao'an, as the current victim did not work in a legal slaughter factory but butchered two pigs, which had already died of unspecified diseases, at home without the permission of the agricultural department.

The man fell ill on Thursday night and was sent to a public hospital in Jiangcheng County, Yangjiang, on Friday.

The man's heart stopped on Saturday, Yu said, but he was revived.

The pigs butchered by the victim have already been sold to the market by his wife. Investigators from the provincial health and agricultural departments have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to trace the meat, Yu said.

"We do not know whether the pigs contracted streptococcus suis or not," Yu said. "But nobody has yet been found ill from eating the meat." The man's wife and his two daughters have not contracted the bacteria.

Bird flu epidemic not yet contained in Russia - official

The reports are conflicting each other almost every day it seems.

NOVOSIBIRSK. Aug 9 (Interfax-Siberia) - It is premature to say that the outburst of bird flu has been contained in the Russian regions where the virus has been registered, head of Rospotrebnadzor consumers' rights oversight authority Gennady Onishchenko told a conference in Novosibirsk on Tuesday.

"It will be possible to speak of containment only after the death of birds stops and also after migrating wild birds fly away for the winter," he said.

Onishchenko said efforts are being made to contain the epidemic and corresponding steps are being taken. "The area of the spread of the disease is limited to five regions but that does not mean that birds are not dying somewhere else," Onishchenko said.

Russian Bird Flu Epidemic to Disappear in 10-15 Days — WHO

This is great news, but I have a hard time believing it is the truth.

MosNews 10/08/2005 00:26

Bird flu epidemic in Russian Siberia is subsiding and should disappear in 10-15 days, an official with the World Health Organization (WHO) told Reuters on Tuesday.

“Things are quietening down,” said Oleg Kiselev, the head of a flu research institute operating under the WHO auspices. He said the epidemic “will vanish in 10-15 days. It won’t spread further because of changing weather conditions.”

“It’s never warm enough in Siberia in late August. The measures undertaken have helped localise the outbreak,” Kiselev said.

So far, no humans have been infected in the bird flu outbreak in Russia. The experts considered the situation as stable. Outbreaks among birds in in Russia and, later, in neighboring Kazakhstan have been reported since mid-July. On Monday, mass deaths among farm birds registered since July 10, largely stopped in the worst-affected, quarantined areas of the Novosibirsk region.

Russia is a major poultry meat importer. The European Union has decided to ban imports of chickens and other products from Russia and Kazakhstan, although in practice there is no trade in poultry between the two countries and the EU.

Bird flu vaccine requires huge doses; stretching strategies critical:

Monday, Aug 08, 2005


TORONTO (CP) - Enthusiasm over the news that U.S. researchers have proven a vaccine is effective against the H5N1 avian flu strain was tempered Monday with word that it took massive doses - roughly 12 times the normal amount - to produce a protective response in humans.

With global vaccine production capacity already falling far short of what would be needed in a flu pandemic, experts suggested it is critical to ramp up research into ways to produce the same response with smaller doses of antigen, the substance in a vaccine that activates the immune system.

"I think these results suggest the world is even less prepared than more prepared," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

"And unfortunately many policy makers might take this announcement as being 'We've hit the gold mine' - when in fact I would suggest we are having a hard time even finding water."


Full Article

Flu Pandemic: Deadly forecast

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

Bird flu has taken several serious runs at devastating humanity with an epidemic illness. The outbreaks began in Hong Kong in 1997, with a brief panic over six deaths.

Despite isolated human deaths in Asia since then, however, the virus has yet to acquire the ability to spread through people-to-people contact. Public health officials in Seattle and worldwide are watching nervously as new reports of the flu's spread among birds in Russia increase the chance that a mutation will transform the virus into the next threat of a human pandemic.

If it's not bird flu, experts say, some new influenza virus will inevitably create a new pandemic, many times more deadly than the annual flu outbreaks. It could be this year, five years from now or later. But time can be a friend, allowing for more preparation at every level. The preparation also helps with bioterrorism or other threats.

Public Health -- Seattle & King County is launching an effort to talk with major businesses about easing the health and economic impacts of a pandemic. In recent days, international scientific studies have suggested new strategies that might nip an avian flu outbreak in the bud.

A pandemic could strike down relatively young people filling critical work roles. A 1918 outbreak proved particularly deadly among people 20 to 40 years old. No vaccine would be available for at least six months, experts assume. And antibiotics would be less useful, since many deaths result from flu effects rather than bacterial infections. A knowledgeable group, Trust for America's Health, reports that even a moderately severe flu could kill a half-million U.S. residents.

After congressional criticism, the Bush administration is looking at buying more stockpiles of an anti-viral drug that has shown some effectiveness. But Trust for America's Health compared U.S. efforts unfavorably with those in many countries, particularly Canada and Britain. Washington state Health Secretary Mary Selecky recently testified to a House committee on the need to maintain federal support for state and local preparedness activities.

If a pandemic flu strikes soon, however, the effects will have to be faced on local levels. The city, region and state will have to make quick and critical decisions.

Chinese officer fired for pig disease cover-up

08 Aug 2005 05:41:05 GMT

Source: Reuters

BEIJING, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Four officials have been sacked for trying to cover up the trail of dead pigs early in an outbreak of a swine-borne disease that has killed 39 people in southwest China, Xinhua news agency said on Monday.

The officials, all from near Neijiang in Sichuan province, had fabricated reports and deceived inspectors and reporters tracing the spread of the Streptococcus suis bacteria, Xinhua said on its English Web site, www.chinaview.cn.

More than 200 people have contracted the disease in Sichuan from slaughtering, handling or eating infected swine.

Full Article

Virus Found in 2 More Regions

Monday, August 8, 2005. Issue 3225.

By Dmitry Solovyov and Aleksandras Budrys
Reuters

Bird flu has been officially confirmed in two more regions, and the disease appears to spreading in northern Kazakhstan, officials said Friday.

Health officials fear that a subtype of bird flu dangerous to humans may mutate into a lethal strain that could rival or exceed the Spanish flu pandemic that killed 20 million to 40 million people worldwide at the end of World War I.

The presence of the highly pathogenic H5N1 subtype that can cause disease in humans has so far been confirmed in only one region, Novosibirsk. But four other Siberian regions have been confirmed to have some sort of bird flu virus.

The Agriculture Ministry said Friday that the disease had been confirmed in wildfowl in two locations in the Kurgan region and in one in the Omsk region. Bird flu has already been confirmed in the Altai and Tyumen regions.

The ministry statement said the virus found in Kurgan and Omsk did not appear to be highly pathogenic.

H5N1 bird flu has killed more than 50 people in Asia since late 2003, mostly in Vietnam. Bird flu has also led to the death of 140 million birds at a cost running to billions of dollars.

Russia has culled over 10,000 domestic birds in the last few days to stop the virus from spreading, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

The ministry said in a statement that no new deaths had occurred among wildfowl and domestic poultry on Thursday in the Altai, Tyumen and Omsk regions.

However, 139 birds were found dead in the Novosibirsk region.

Senior veterinary officials in neighboring Kazakhstan have confirmed bird flu has broken out in the Pavlodar region, bordering Novosibirsk. Officials there said it was premature to say whether the Pavlodar outbreak was dangerous to humans.

The European Union will ban imports of chickens and other birds and poultry products from Russia and Kazakhstan to help prevent the spread of bird flu, the European Commission said Saturday.

Avian Flu Pandemic: Chinese Government's Answer "Make Villages Disappear!"

What is China doing to its villages? If this is true it's obviously very disturbing.

News Blackout in China and around the World

by Dr. Henry L. Niman

August 4, 2005
Recombinomics.com

Chinese Government's Answer To Containing H5N1 & Recombinants - "Make Villages Disappear!"

Three Villages Razed In Qinghai After H5N1 Bird Flu Riots? By Dr. Henry L. Niman, PhD8-3-5

According to the Qinghai Bulletin Board Service (BBS), the state of emergency imposed on the farming community and its surroundings in the Northwestern Qinghai City / Town of Yushu was lifted on the night of 28th July.

When natives living further from the area made a trip to the farming community, they discovered that it had "vanished" together with 3 of its surrounding villages. Only some ruins, blocks from collapsed walls, remained. Apparently, the farms and villages had been flattened and there were signs that they had been razed.

It is believed that some inhabitants from those 3 villages were workers in the farm. Around 200 people were estimated to have inhabited or worked in those 3 villages and the farm. There whereabouts are, as yet, unknown.

The above translation of a boxun report suggest that three villages were razed in response to unrest linked to a forced bird flu quarantine in Yushu in northwestern Qinghai in China. China has imposed news blackouts and arrested reporters in the past, so verifiable news from the area is difficult to obtain.

News outside of China however, points toward a virulent strain of H5N1 linked to Qinghai Lake has killed ducks and geese in several areas of southern Siberia in Russia as well as the adjacent region in Kazakhstan. There are now reports of five suspected cases of H5N1 in Kazakhstan linked to infected geese, suggesting many similar cases would be possible in Qingahi and Xinjiang provinces in China, where there have been three outbreaks linked to migratory birds and all involved dead geese.

Although it is possible that the ability to infect humans has been recently acquired, boxun reports in May and June described human fatalities in the Qinghai Lake region. In addition, several strains of H5N1 capable of infecting humans were also described.

The news blackout in China as well as additional suspect cases in neighboring Sichuan province which may be spreading further south to Yunnan province has suggested that a raging H5N1 pandemic in China is being covered-up.

'Many will die' in flu pandemic

EMERGENCY measures are being put in place to cope with a flu pandemic expected to kill "many people".

One in four people could fall ill when the pandemic - an outbreak with worldwide effects - strikes.

Dr Kate King, a consultant in communicable disease control with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Health Protection Unit, said it was a case of "when, not if" the pandemic arrived.

full story

Vietnam bans pig, pork import from neighborhood as epidemic rages

The Vietnamese government ordered Friday an immediate halt to import of pork and live pigs from countries in the region which are being ravaged by a fatal swine disease.

An emergency communication from the Prime Minister has instructed federal government agencies to work with provinces bordering the affected countries, including China, to crack down on smuggling of pork and pigs.

Animal health and market management agencies have been ordered to tightly screen the trade of pig and pork.

“If live pigs and pork products are found originating from those countries, they must be confiscated and destroyed immediately," the communication said. Besides, the importers involved would have to pay for destroying them.

The deadly pig-borne disease had so far infected 208 people in Sichuan province in southwest China, Chinese health authorities said Friday, adding the death toll was 38.

Experts say butchering and eating infected pork is the only way for humans to contract the disease.

Flu could infect half world's people in year

WHO in talks to stockpile antiviral drugs in case of global outbreak

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday August 4, 2005
The Guardian

An outbreak of flu in rural south-east Asia could spread around the globe in three months and infect half the world's population within a year, unless strict measures to contain it are introduced, scientists said yesterday.

The warning comes from researchers who used computer models to investigate what would happen if the avian flu virus, which is currently rife among poultry in areas of China, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, mutated into a form that spread easily among humans.

Scientists believe it is only a matter of time before the virus, known as H5N1, mutates to become more infectious to humans, possibly by swapping genes with the human flu virus.

Full Article

Scientists issue bird flu warning

The World Today - Thursday, 4 August , 2005 12:44:00
Reporter: Karen Barlow

ELEANOR HALL: Governments around the world have been given a grim warning today about the threat posed by the latest potential global pandemic.

Two sets of scientists have used computer modelling to show what could happen if the Avian Flu virus mutated into a deadly human strain.

The scientists have used different population bases, but have arrived at the same conclusion, that without effective controls, a mutated virus could travel around the world within three months, as Karen Barlow reports.

Britin warned over bird flu pandemic, 'impossible to contain' says expert

Britain would be "overwhelmed" if a deadly strain of pandemic bird flu reached its shores, a leading expert warned today.

Once the virus spread as far as the UK it would be impossible to contain, said Professor Neil Ferguson.

The only chance of averting a global disaster costing many millions of lives would be to snuff out the strain rapidly at its point of origin in south-east Asia.

full story

Multi-organ failure incrase mortality of pig-borne disease

CHENGDU, Aug. 4 (Xinhuanet) -- Short latent period and multi-organfailure are ultimate causes for the higher-than-expected mortality rate of the pig-borne disease in southwest China's Sichuan Province, a health specialist has said.

"Most patients suffered failures in the kidneys, livers, lungs and heart shortly after they were contracted and some of them died before timely treatment," said Chen Zhihai, head of the expert panel sent by Ministry of Health to the endemic-hit regions.

The latent period of the disease is so short that some patients died within 10 hours after infection, he said in an interview with Xinhua Thursday. "In one case, a man died two hours after slaughering a sick pig."

In comparison, it normally takes a week or two for ordinary bacterial infection to break out, he said.

"On the other hand, the disease was caused by Streptococcus suis II, the deadliest of all the 35 forms of pig-borne Streptococcus suis bacteria," he added.

Chen said antibiotics is effective in tackling the bacteria, but not after it has led to multi-organ failures -- which are largely to blame for the high morality rate of the disease.

"The mortality rate was particularly high in the early phase ofthe outbreak, as many patients took it for cold or flu," said Chen.

Earlier symptoms of the disease are similar to those of flu, with high fever, fatigue, nausea and vomiting, but many patients became comatose shortly afterwards and had bruises under their skin.

China is making all out efforts to curb the outbreak of the pig-borne disease and reduce its mortality and has stepped up research on the bacteria that rarely hit the country in the past.

A team of intensive care experts from Beijing are currently in Sichuan to provide emergency treatment, including antibiotic treatment, tracheotomy and venipuncture.

The Sichuan provincial government has allocated 10 million yuan(about 1.2 million US dollars) so far to ensure the timely treatment of the patients.

The endemic broke out in late June, first in Ziyang and Neijiang, and later spread to 10 cities including Jianyang and theprovincial capital Chengdu.

Ministry of Health disclosed the disease had claimed 38 lives in the province by mid-day
Wednesday, and the number of confirmed and suspected cases had risen to 165 and 41 respectively.

Pig Flu Disease in China Spreading

As suspected by many, the "pig flu" along with "bird flu" is worse in China than what they were first saying. Many villages are now affected (108 is the last count), and the army has been brought in for quarantine purposes. China's leadership has also vowed to "crack down" on local bureaucrats who don't report accurate findings

"China vowed on Monday to punish officials who falsify or delay reports on a deadly swine flu that has infected 198 people and killed 36, while Hong Kong's government adopted tough measures to protect against the disease."..more at AlertNet

Human-to Human Bird Flu Pandemic Expected 'in Very Near Future

A weapon for combating the bird flu virus must be developed as soon as possible in order to avoid a possible pandemic, the vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences Rem Petrov, a specialist in the area of theoretical and applied immunology, told ITAR-TASS today.

According to the scientist, "so far there have been no cases of the virus being transmitted from person to person. However, we already know that it can be transmitted from birds to pigs."

Could Kill Tens of Millions

According to research conducted by Russian scientists, in the very near future bird flu will start to be transmitted from human to human -- and, in this case, a pandemic will occur," Petrov stressed.

He said that according to initial predictions, a bird flu pandemic may begin as early as this year or next near.

"The whole world must be on alert," the scientist said, adding that "all services must prepare for this already very real threat.

"The danger is really very great," the scientist continued. "This virus is capable of living and reproducing itself in many different forms and this is why scientists are certain that it will be aggressive."

According to his information, a pandemic could kill tens of millions of people worldwide.

Full Story

Quarantine imposed on all poultry farms in Russia

MOSCOW, August 2 (RIA Novosti) - A quarantine has been introduced at all poultry farms in Russia after the bird flu virus was discovered in the Novosibirsk region (Siberia), the Agriculture Ministry said.

According to the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Supervision, research shows the bird disease was caused by the H5N1 virus and preliminarily spread by migrant birds from South East Asia. The bird flu was discovered in 14 settlements in five districts of the Novosibirsk region, in a village of the Altai Territory (southern Siberia), and in a village of the Tyumen region (West Siberia).

full story

Russia bird flu spreads, mass slaugher begins

Published: Wednesday, 3 August, 2005, 12:21 PM Doha Time

MOSCOW: Russia’s Siberian region of Novosibirsk said yesterday that it will slaughter 65,000 birds in 13 locations as more cases were confirmed of a strain of bird flu dangerous to humans.

“It has been decided to slaughter all hens, ducks, geese and turkeys at farms where the virus had been detected. The farms’ owners will be paid compensation for all the birds that are killed and provided with safe poultry meat and eggs at a discount price,” a Novosibirsk administration spokesman said.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu which can spread to humans has so far been officially confirmed in three Siberian regions – Novosibirsk, Altai and Tyumen, and is thought to have been brought to Russia by migrant birds from China.

full story

Mass production of vaccine against pig-borne epidemic starts

CHENGDU, Aug. 1 (Xinhuanet)

-- China Animal Husbandry Industry Co.Ltd. announced here that its subsidiary Chengdu medicine machinery company has produced 700,000 to 800,000 doses of vaccines as of Monday, the company sources said.

The vaccines will be used to prevent the pig-borne epidemic in southwest China's Sichuan Province, said the sources.

Chengdu medicine machinery company is the first enterprise which acquires the approval from the Ministry of Agriculture to produce the vaccine in Sichuan, said the company head Wu Yue.

All the vaccines will be produced in the workshops with the GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) standards and will be carefully tested before going to the market, Wu said.

The company got the bacterin from the Nanjing Agricultural University on July 26.

Guan Fu, supervisor of the Ministry of Agriculture, said the vaccines which have been produced will be strictly checked by the supervisors and the process will take ten days.

The latest statistics from the Ministry of Health said the fatal pig-borne epidemic left 36 people dead in Sichuan.

Bird Flu Has Spread, Vets Say

Wednesday, August 3, 2005
The Associated Press

Veterinary officials said Tuesday that an outbreak of the avian flu that can infect humans had spread from the Novosibirsk region to the Altai and Tyumen regions.

The outbreak began in the Novosibirsk region in early July and has killed thousands of domestic fowl. The veterinary service last week identified the virus as the H5N1 strain, which can fatally infect humans, but no human cases have been reported in Russia.

The same strain has been recorded in a village in the adjacent Altai region, and Yevgeny Nepoklonov, a deputy head of the nation's veterinary service, said on NTV television Tuesday that it had now also been found in a village in the Tyumen region, further west in Siberia.

Domestic fowl also died in the nearby Omsk region, but the strain there had not been determined yet.

"A quarantine has been imposed on the affected settlements, and necessary measures are being taken to contain the sources of infection," the veterinary service said in a statement.

The Emergency Situations Ministry said the outbreak already had killed 2,707 domestic fowl, including 325 since Sunday morning.

Authorities in all regions affected by the outbreak have tightened control over poultry farms, disinfecting their workers and checking fowl. The administration of Novosibirsk region has ordered the killing of 65,000 domestic fowl in all 14 villages affected.

Several regional administrations also have imposed bans on poultry sales across provincial borders.

Gennady Onishchenko, the country's chief epidemiologist, sought to assuage public fears during an inspection trip to the Novosibirsk region on Tuesday, saying the outbreak was being successfully contained.

The veterinary service said that the virus apparently had been brought by birds migrating from Southeast Asia.

'Pig disease' may be spreading between humans

CHINA - Vaccines to combat a deadly pig-borne disease were flown to south-western China on Sunday, where the spread of the rare illness has already killed 36 people and infected 198.

The unusually high numbers of people infected by the swine disease has led scientists to speculate that it may be being spread from human-to-human - or that another disease entirely is to blame.

Streptococcus suis type II, although relatively common in swine, spreads to humans extremely rarely, and the size and virulence of this current outbreak, in the province of Sichuan, has taken the World Health Organization by surprise.

The Chinese government responded on Sunday by airlifting the first batch of a vaccine for the infection – enough to treat 360,000 pigs – from the southern city of Guangzhou to the affected towns. The vaccine’s manufacturers say they will be producing enough vaccine to treat 10 million pigs in the coming days – but vaccines take three weeks to produce immunity in the pigs.

Source: newscientist.com
full story

Vietnam reports new bird flu patient

HANOI, Aug. 2 (Xinhuanet) -- Specimens from a 49-year-old woman from Vietnam's northern Ha Tay province have been tested positive to bird flu virus strain H5N1, according to local newspaper Labor on Tuesday.

The woman named Nguyen Thi Them from the Quoc Oai district needs respiratory assistance at the Institute of Tropical Diseasesin Hanoi capital city, although she has no longer had a temperature. Earlier, she received treatment at a provincial hospital for 3 days starting on July 27.

The woman had bought a chicken at a local market and cooked it. Local healthcare agencies have kept close surveillance on areas where she lives and on those who have close contact with her.

Late last week, local media reported two people, a 26-year-old woman from southern Ho Chi Minh City and a 24-year-old man from southern Tra Vinh province, died of bird flu. They exhibited the disease's symptoms after eating chicken.

To date, Vietnam's Health Ministry has yet to confirm the three latest human cases of bird flu infections. The ministry's Preventive Medicine Department, in mid-July, confirmed that a total of 60 local people from 23 localities had been infected with bird flu since late December 2004, of whom 19 died.

To deal with possible new outbreaks among poultry, Vietnam is vaccinating chickens and ducks in northern Nam Dinh province and southern Tien Giang province against bird flu viruses, including H5N1. It plans to vaccinate over 2.9 million fowls this month.