Posted on 05/09/2005 10:18:08 AM PDT by Dog Gone
Some folks suggested that we begin a thread similar to the Marsburg Surveillance Project for monitoring developments regarding Avian Flu.
The purpose is to have an extended thread where those interested can post articles and comments as this story unfolds.
If we're lucky, the story and this thread will fade away.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- Chinese officials maintain that a mysterious disease in pigs that has also infected and killed humans is an outbreak of swine flu, but the World Health Organization has recommended that further testing be conducted to identify the pathogen more precisely, and at least one U.S. scientist thinks it is possible a strain of Ebola virus could be involved.
The disease, which has occurred predominately in China's Sichuan province, has infected 206 people, of which 38 have died and another 18 are critically ill.
The Chinese Ministry of Health has said the disease is swine flu, which is not actually a flu but an illness caused by the bacteria Streptococcus suis. This disease, however, generally does not cause more than a few cases of human illness and it usually does not cause death in people.
"I don't think it's the bacteria," Henry Niman, a molecular biologist, told United Press International. "The bacteria usually doesn't infect humans and when it does it usually isn't fatal," said Niman, who is president of Recombonomics, a firm in Pittsburgh, Pa., that studies molecular evolution and the emergence of new diseases.
Niman thinks it is likely the outbreak is due to a virulent form of the avian flu strain H5N1 that has struck southeast Asia and killed more than 50 people.
"It's hard to tell what it is without further testing," Niman said.
So far, Chinese authorities have been reluctant to allow outside parties access to samples from patients.
Another possibility is Ebola, a deadly virus that kills 50 percent to 90 percent of those it infects, Niman said. He bases this on a report put out by a Chinese Web site Boxun.com, which claimed to be an interview with a Chinese physician who helped investigate the Sichuan outbreak.
The physician, identified only as Dr. Wang, said a strain of Ebola virus had been detected in samples from several patients in the Sichuan outbreak. This would be unusual, because Ebola has not been reported outside of Africa, but Wang said Chinese officials had attempted to prevent any information getting out about Ebola and the fact that the disease has occurred in China is a national secret.
On Monday, the Epoch Times reported, "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has prohibited news coverage, and has forbidden the use of the words 'Ebola virus' in reports, instead requiring the use of alternate wording."
Chinese officials previously denied rumors in late March that an Ebola outbreak had occurred in Guangdong Province. The pig disease outbreak did not begin until June.
The first human case associated with the pig disease occurred June 24, but Chinese officials did not make this known until late July, and reporters have been prohibited from entering the Sichuan region.
Wang said in the interview with the publication that swine flu may play a role in the Sichuan situation, but "it isn't the main cause of the outbreak." The doctor also said bubonic plague had been detected in some samples while others tested positive for three diseases: Ebola, plague and swine flu.
"I believe that this is basically a bloodborne virus with the Ebola and bubonic plague as its main constituents," Wang said.
Whether China may have been developing Ebola as a biological weapon is uncertain, but the U.S. State Department said as recently as 2002 it was possible China was maintaining a biological-weapons program.
In addition, Ken Alibek, the former deputy chief of the Soviet biological-weapons program who now resides in the United States, previously said Soviet officials had detected a biological-weapons facility in China. Alibek also said two epidemics of hemorrhagic fever --a class that includes Ebola-- occurred in that area in the late 1980's that Soviet analysts presumed to be due to an accidental release from a lab where Chinese scientists were weaponizing viral diseases.
The WHO issued a summary of its analysis of the pig-disease outbreak Wednesday, but the possibility of Ebola was not cited. WHO officials noted the symptoms reported in humans are "unusual" and recommended "diagnostic testing to further characterize the causative agent."
Most cases have occurred in adult male farmers who had close contact with diseases or dead pigs, and symptoms have included high fever, fatigue and vomiting. This is followed by meningitis, bleeding under the skin and coma in some cases.
Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said the agency had not been privy to any samples from China and did not know if Ebola could be involved.
CDC spokesman Dave Daigle told UPI the agency has not participated in investigating the pig disease because it has not been invited to do so by China or the WHO.
"We don't know" if Ebola is involved, Daigle said. "We haven't had anything to test and we don't have anybody there on the ground so it's difficult to comment on."
Daigle noted that some CDC scientists "are wondering whether it might be (Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever)." This is a viral disease that can have a fatality rate as high as 30 percent.
If the outbreak is due to a strain of bird flu, its still vital to get samples for testing, Niman said. This is because those will be needed to manufacture a vaccine in case this flu strain spreads.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health are investigating a vaccine that might prevent infection with the avian flu that is based on a 2004 sample from Vietnam.
"The problem is if this is H5N1 in China, that's probably a bigger threat than the strain out of Vietnam, because it's moving so rapidly and its more fatal," Niman said. The NIH vaccine might not work against the China strain, he added.
Daigle said the flu strain does not appear to have changed much since 2004, but he acknowledged the CDC has not obtained samples from China yet and the samples scientists have tested so far have been from Vietnam and Thailand."
Daigle said the flu strain does not appear to have changed much since 2004, but he acknowledged the CDC has not obtained samples from China yet and the samples scientists have tested so far have been from Vietnam and Thailand.
He also mentioned he lives in a cave, and doesn't get out much.
How do they measure that reliably? Infection could have occurred at any time unless the patient was being studied in clinical sterile conditions
Just what kind of bug is this?"
All consistent with strep suis serotype 2, even the sudden mortality after chronic organ failure, (suggest septicemia)
So far we have:
1.) an as yet unidentified VHF
2.) at least 2 avian influenza strains 3.) Strep suis serotype 2 4.) Recombinant and as yet unidentified pathogen presenting VHF and influenza clinical symptoms and high mortality.
Flu viruses can swap many genes rapidly to make new resistant strains, US researchers have found.
Scientists previously believed that gene swapping progressed gradually from season to season.
The National Institutes of Health team found instead, influenza A exchanged several genes at once, causing sudden and major changes to the virus.
The findings in PLOS Biology suggest strains could vary widely each season, making it potentially harder to treat.
Sudden mutations
They also increase concerns about bird flu mutating to spread readily between humans. Each year, experts must predict which strains will be most common and design new vaccines to fight them. Dr. David Lipman and colleagues looked at strains of influenza A that had circulated between 1999 and 2004 in New York.
These strains had given rise to the so-called Fujian strain H3N2 that caused a troublesome outbreak in the 2003-2004 flu season because the vaccine made that winter was a poor match for the virus. Dr Lipman's team found wide variations in the 156 strains that they analysed. Some of the strains had at least four gene swaps that had occurred in a short time period.
"The genetic diversity of influenza A virus is therefore not as restricted as previously suggested," said the researchers.
This suggests that scientists need to study circulating flu viruses more carefully because important mutations can occur suddenly and without warning, they said.
I think it's a given that the world's population will be unprotected during the first six months to a year of an avian flu outbreak.
Yep. And it could easily take longer.
For a meaningful vaccine to be developed, produced, distributed, and administered that quickly would require immense resources, and success would not be guaranteed even then.
Even if we are able to develop and produce a sufficiently effective vaccine, the organizational skills needed to distribute and administer the vaccine are missing in much of the world.
http://nytimes.com/2005/08/07/health/07vaccine.html?ei=5094&en=2ce7397eb72918ff&hp=&ex=1123387200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
'WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 - Government scientists say they have successfully tested in people a vaccine that they believe can protect against the strain of avian influenza that is spreading in birds through Asia and Russia.
Health officials have been racing to develop a vaccine because they worry that if that strain mutated and combined with a human influenza virus to create a new virus, it could spread rapidly through the world. (The vaccine cannot lead to such a situation because it is made from killed virus.)
Tens of millions of birds have died from infection with the virus and culling to prevent the spread of the virus. About 100 people have been infected, and about 50 have died from this strain of the avian influenza virus, called A(H5N1). So far there has been no sustained human-to-human transmission, but that is what health officials fear, because it could cause a pandemic. And that fear has driven the intense research to develop a vaccine.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, said that while the vaccine that has undergone preliminary tests could be used on an emergency basis if a pandemic developed, it would still be several months before that vaccine is tested further and, if licensed, offered to the public.
"It's good news," Dr. Fauci said. "We have a vaccine."
...........
Click through and read the whole thing. If it pans out, it's very good news, indeed.
It sure sounds promising.............mark for later full read.
Do we have that much time before it arrives here?
My guess is that it won't be available this year's flu season, but might be ready for next year's. Until then, keep your fingers crossed.
Wow! Great news indeed! (Hope there isn't thimerosol in it...)
Very good news!
Here's hoping the variant of H5N1 that finally breaks out is close enough to the variant they used for this vaccine for the vaccine to give meaningful protection. Even limited protection is MUCH better than nothing at all.
Nothing to see here, move along. The Government has it all under control......Go back to sleep..........
BWAAAHHHAHHHHAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you believe that line of crap, you deserve it.
The sequences used for this "vaccine" are so outdated that it is useless. But if it makes everyone "feel better" that's great. Same goes with Tamiflu.
According to Chinese sources (BBS users who are becoming instant targets of the authorities), farmers who have processed pigs with the new strain of this crap died within 2 hours of processing pigs. Symptoms identical to those who died in 1918 - once the avian flu emerged FROM SWINE.
Sichuan and Qinghai are still under full military control. (Not that there is much new to martial law in Qinghai - between the gulag and the nuclear weapons production.)
And NO, Dog Gone, NONE of this information comes from Recombinomics.
Wow, a flu that kills within two hours from infection? And what is your source for that?
Thanks for the ping.
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