Avian Flu Preparedness

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Tyson said preliminary tests on the flock indicated the presence of antibodies for H7N3, a less virulent strain of the virus.

Routine blood tests conducted Friday found the possible exposure, said Jon Fitch, director of the state's Livestock and Poultry Commission. Further tests done by the state and the U.S. Department of Agriculture found the birds did not have active infections.

Fitch said the company immediately began disposing of the birds.

"There is absolutely no human health threat," Fitch said.

Fitch said state officials decided against announcing the infection to the general public because the birds tested positive for exposure to the H7N3 strain of the virus. The strain that ravaged Asian poultry stocks in late 2003 was H5N1 bird flu virus. That version of the virus has killed 240 people worldwide and scientists worry it could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people.

However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said a 2004 outbreak of H7N3 at a poultry plant in British Columbia, Canada, did sicken two workers there. The CDC said the two workers recovered after treatment with the antiviral medication.

Gary Mickelson, a spokesman for Springdale-based Tyson, said the hens showed no signs of sickness before their pre-slaughter blood tests. He said the exposed birds all came from a contractor.

"As a preventive measure, Tyson is also stepping up its surveillance of avian influenza in the area," Mickelson said in a statement.

Matt DeCample, a spokesman for Gov. Mike Beebe, said the governor was alerted about the tests Monday.

Farms within a 6.2-mile radius of the contractor in West Fork will have their poultry checked for the bird flu strain, Fitch said. Only one farm falls within that range.

"That's one of the fortunate things, that there are no farms really close," Fitch said.

The 15,000 hens will be killed by carbon-dioxide gas and buried at the farm to avoid spreading the disease, Fitch said.

So far, he said officials have a working theory about how the virus spread to the hens.

"The speculation at this point in time was that a large group of Canadian geese made home on a pond very near this facility," Fitch said. "Our speculation is someone stepped into some of those droppings and carried it into the poultry house."

Fitch said it was the first outbreak of a bird-flu strain in Arkansas, which mandates bird-flu testing of all flocks bound for slaughter. In this case, Fitch said the birds were tested Friday before a planned killing and processing Sunday night.

He acknowledged there may have been a need to make a public announcement about the cases because many have fears about bird flu.

"In retrospect, maybe we should have," Fitch said.

# posted by TFLB @ 7:43 AM

Labels: bird flu

# posted by TFLB @ 10:19 AM

Bird flu: 200 deaths and counting

Category: Bird flu
Posted on: September 12, 2007 7:16 AM, by revere

The war in Iraq has been going on in earnest since March of 2003, which is about how long the war on bird flu has been going on. Yes, there were some preliminary skirmishes in the bird flu war in 1997, but it wasn't until it burst out of southern China with a vengeance that full scale hostilities started. In both wars there have been a lot of innocent bystanders. In neither are seeing a lot of progress, despite claims to the contrary. The war in Iraq, at least, is susceptible to human control. The war against H5N1 doesn't seem to be. The number of human casualties in the bird flu war is dwarfed by the carnage in Iraq, but so is the expenditure to fight it. In the bird flu war the potential remains for something much worse. Meanwhile, it keeps bubbling away in the manner of low intensity conflicts everywhere. This week it hit the melancholy milestone of 200 deaths with the demise of a 33 year old Indonesian man. Indonesia has now become the epicenter of avian influenza in the world.

If you think bird flu has gone away because it is no longer on the front page, just take a look at the epidemic curve over the last four years:

This year is the rightmost set of bars. It looks slightly better than last year but that is not the right way to think about this. Case fatality ratio (the curve) hasn't budged in the last year and a half. The H5N1 situation is definitely not getting better. It is displaying the typical pattern of an endemic disease that tends to fluctuate moderately from year to year. Last year was a mild West Nile virus season in the US but this year is shaping up to be the worst yet. That is typical of endemic infectious diseases. With H5N1, this year is better than last year but worse than the year before. But not by much in either case. This disease is out there an bubbling away, just as before. It isn't gone and despite some Herculean efforts we haven't made much of a dent in it, if we have made any.

The best we can hope for is that it will just keep bubbling away at this intensity. But infectious diseases often don't care what we hope for. They making sudden and unexpected bursts, just as H5N1 did in 2003 when it burst out of southern China to southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

# posted by TFLB @ 12:11 PM

The H5N1 virus began hitting Asian poultry stocks in 2003

South Korean quarantine officials are to slaughter 236,000 poultry after an outbreak of the H5N1 form of bird flu at a chicken farm.

The outbreak occurred at a farm in Iksan, about 250km (155 miles) south of Seoul, earlier this week.

Test results confirmed the outbreak was caused by a type of H5N1 virus, the country's agriculture ministry said. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6184114.stm

# posted by TFLB @ 1:09 PM

Nabarro: 5-10 more years on "high alert"

# posted by TFLB @ 6:57 PM

Masks essential

# posted by TFLB @ 6:52 PM

Israel: Four people die after receiving flu vaccinations

This is the kind of story that, as a 65-year-old who always gets his flu shot, I don't like to report. Via Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper: " Four people die after receiving flu vaccinations in 2 separate clinics. Excerpt:

Four people have died after receiving flu vaccinations, it was announced Sunday.

The Leumi health maintenance organization informed the Health Ministry of three victims among its subscribers, and the Meuhedet HMO announced that one of its subscribers had also died.

In response, the Health Ministry has instructed health facilities to immediately stop providing the vaccinations.

# posted by TFLB @ 12:08 AM

How prevalent it is will depend on how the strain mutates, said Sharon Medcalf, associate director of the Center for Biopreparedness Education in Omaha.

"Most of our experts are saying it's not a matter of if, but when," she said during a program at Broadway United Methodist Church. "But I'm an optimist. We don't know what that mutation is going to produce."

Eventually, the virulent H5N1 strain will be carried into North America and the United States - probably by migratory birds, Medcalf said.

"We anticipate seeing H5N1 coming down when birds come back during migration this fall or this winter," she said.

# posted by TFLB @ 8:59 AM

H5N1 replicates more strongly than common flu

HONG KONG (Reuters) - The H5N1 bird flu virus replicates far more aggressively in people than common human flu viruses, a study of patients in Vietnam has found, offering further insight as to why the virus is so deadly.

The study, in the latest issue of Nature Medicine, also found that the virus had got into the blood stream of many of the human victims it killed, which means the virus could have spread to other parts of the body.

# posted by TFLB @ 8:57 AM

Identification of H5N1 mutation warning signs was taking too long and the next human-flu pandemic could be upon us before we knew, the expert said.

Assoc Prof Prasert Auewarakul monitors the H5N1 virus and viral pathogenesis in humans at Siriraj Hospital medical school.

He said detecting changes in the highly pathogenic virus and heading off a global pandemic had to be achieved in days, not weeks.

"We should be able to do it in days, not weeks," he said adding that in a worst-case scenario the disease could change so suddenly it could be too late.

In some cases the incomplete collection of virus samples had made mutation detection more difficult.

# posted by TFLB @ 3:25 PM

SHENZHEN, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) -- Traditional Chinese medicines have contributed a lot to the recovery of China's latest bird flu patient, said a Chinese medical expert on Saturday.

The patient, surnamed Jiang, 31, was discharged on August 2 from the Donghu Hospital after being treated here for about 50 days, in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province.

During the early period of Jiang's treatment, doctors used a kind of soup made by ginseng, a medicinal herb, to clear toxic heat in his body, said Zhou Boping, head of the hospital.

Hirudo, a medicine in China, was also used to activate blood circulation against stasis in the second phase, said Zhou.

Other Chinese medicines such as Cordyceps Sinesis, a Chinese caterpillar fungus, were also used to promote the function of lungs, according to Zhou.

The use of traditional Chinese medicines worked well along with other forms of treatment, said Zhou, also head of the medical team of experts for treating Jiang.

# posted by TFLB @ 1:25 PM

MONDAY, July 31 (HealthDay News) -- A bird flu pandemic might not be imminent, as many health experts have feared, U.S. researchers now say.

When government researchers tried to combine the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu with a common strain of flu that infects humans, they were unable to produce a strain that could be transmitted easily.

Health officials across the globe have worried that the bird flu virus that has killed 134 people worldwide might mutate, possibly in tandem with a more common flu virus, unleashing a new type of flu virus that could prove even more deadly because people's immune systems would not be able to fend off the disease.

The U.S. research, conducted with ferrets, offers some hope that a bird flu pandemic may not strike in the foreseeable future, if at all. But, the scientists cautioned, the genetics of flu viruses are unpredictable, and this study was based on one combination of viruses, when more than 50 possible combinations exist.

# posted by TFLB @ 10:49 AM

"Our experiences with the virus during the last six months in Turkey, Iraq and now in Indonesia should give even the most ardent supporters of containment cause to realize why, while such an approach is an ideal, it also is a fantasy."

Osterholm has been skeptical since the modelling studies were published last summer that the optimistic outcome predicted by the work could be achieved outside of the hard drives of the computers on which they were devised.

"This was never about wanting to contain the virus. It's about the reality of what happens in everyday life," Osterholm said Saturday from Minneapolis, where he is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

# posted by TFLB @ 10:48 AM

Foreign Minister Kantathi Suphamongkhon was correct when he told the Bangkok meeting's participants that it was important to translate what has been discussed and achieved on paper into a concrete plan, because too often decisions made at this level never make it to the grassroots like they should.

Mr Kantathi also said that theorists tend to agree that avian influenza is now moving towards its fourth phase, that of human-to-human infection, and if it does, the threat of a pandemic would become real.

# posted by TFLB @ 7:33 AM

New Orleans superdome type mayhem would be much more wide spread than the mostly calm inner city scenes portrayed in the film. I suppose that political correctness prevents the producers and writers from dealing with what most American feel in their hearts will happen “when the lights go out” and the cops don’t show for work.

It will not be a pretty picture and we all know this. Had that picture been accurately portrayed the movie “Fatal Contact: Bird Flu In America” would have indeed caused a near fatal case of nation wide panic. Gun sales would triple over the next few months and many people would sell out and move to the country.

# posted by TFLB @ 11:50 PM

WHO update on Indonesia

# posted by TFLB @ 2:26 PM

In a worst-case scenario, Rutherford said, a pandemic would mimic any other natural disaster, only with a protracted time of suffering and recovery.

"Stores might be closed. Gas stations might be closed. If everyone's sick, who will restock the ATM machines with cash? You might not be able to buy stuff like you can now," Rutherford said.

Even borrowing necessary supplies from neighbors might not be an option, he said. Who's going to open their door in the middle of a deadly epidemic?

"If bird flu crosses over to humans, there will be a lot of people sick," Rutherford said. "As the public health measures start to ratchet up, events will be canceled and services closed, and people are going to start staying in their houses. Nothing like that has ever really happened before."

# posted by TFLB @ 12:01 AM

Even so, a human pandemic caused by A(H5N1) is by no means inevitable. Many researchers doubt it will ever happen. The virus does not infect people easily, and those who do contract it almost never spread it to other humans. Bird flu is what the name implies: mostly an avian disease. It has infected tens of millions of birds but fewer than 200 people, and nearly all of them have caught it from birds.

But when A(H5N1) does get into people, it can be deadly. It has killed more than half of its known human victimsan extraordinarily high rate. Equally alarming is that many who died were healthy, not the frail or sickly types of patients usually thought to be at risk of death from influenza.

# posted by TFLB @ 2:09 AM

Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy talks about the flu bug that could bring the world to its knees.

The 1918 virus jumped right from birds to people. There was no combining with other viruses. One of the problems we've had is, if you look at the 1918 virus and this one, they're in essence kissing cousins. Genetically, these things look very similar. Frank Obenauer and colleagues just published a paper the last week of January in Science, and they actually have gone back and looked at the full genetic codes for 169 avian virus genomes, dating way back. They looked at 2,169 distinct avian virus genes. There were two viruses that showed a protein tag at the end of one of the nonstructural genes that actually looks to help cause the cytokine storm that makes this a unique illness.* And guess which two viruses they were: 1918 H1N1, and the current H5N1.

Then, when you look at the Turkey virus—that thing mutated. This is the case of the young girl in Turkey who died from her infection, and so did her uncle. We definitely have clusters where it's not just bird contact [spreading the virus]. The uncle's only exposure to this virus was riding in the ambulance with her from hospital one to hospital two. He became ill three days later and died. Her virus has now been fully sequenced, and there were three mutations that occurred in that virus, between the bird version and hers. One was the substitution of a glutamic acid with lysine at the 223-hemagglutinin position. That is what changes it from a bird-receptor virus to a human-receptor virus. The second thing was two other substitutions that served to make it look more and more like a human virus." Ed's note: click link to read more. "H5N1 is the most powerful influenza virus we've seen in modern human history."

# posted by TFLB @ 7:05 PM

• A serious 'avian flu' outbreak could erupt in waves over weeks or even months, with some waves appearing to be mild only to be followed by others that are much more severe. Even after a particular wave appears to subside, follow-up waves could develop after safeguards are relaxed. As a result, business continuity plans that address discrete events that might affect organizations for limited time periods may prove inadequate for the longer-term impact of an 'avian flu' outbreak.
• During an 'avian flu' outbreak, organizations may have to deal with unprecedented absenteeism for weeks at a time, from illness, family demands or fear of contagion. Personnel absences may become so widespread that existing succession plans may prove inadequate to have sufficient personnel available to maintain even critical operations.
• An 'avian flu' outbreak is likely to simultaneously affect multiple regions of the country and the globe. As a result, the backup facilities that have been established by many financial organizations - even remote sites hundreds of miles distant from primary facilities - may be just as affected by the outbreak as the primary locations they are intended to back up.
• Disruptions could spread to other key infrastructures, such as power, transportation, telecommunications, water systems - even police, fire, and emergency medical services. Moreover, basic retail services might also be disrupted. These types of problems might make it very difficult for employees to function effectively at work. Further, since corporate business continuity strategies often rely heavily on the availability of public sector emergency service providers, disruptions in these services from high absenteeism could present significant challenges to corporate plans.

# posted by TFLB @ 2:54 PM