Posted on 05/09/2005 10:18:08 AM PDT by Dog Gone
Additional points that may be helpful - this vaccine - for the current avian flu - is not really experimental as much as it is in clinical trials. There is a big difference between the two. And finally I think it takes some pretty large antigenic changes to make a vaccine completely ineffective. This one looks very good to me. Give me 50% crossover and I believe the survival rate will skyrocket for this bug.
The vaccine has been in clinical trials. It appears to be effective against H5N1. But it has some major drawbacks. It requires several doses given several weeks apart. It is not in commercial development for the public, it is being produced and stockpiled for the government. Please refer back in this thread around 1200 or so and to Mother Abigails recent post in the last day or two.
Daily Bird Flu News Updates:
To read the full reports go to: http://www.thepoultrysite.com/LatestNews/?AREA=LatestNews&Display=6187
The Associated Press - 20th October 2005
China, Russia report new cases of bird flu
MOSCOW — Russian authorities detected a deadly strain of bird flu south of Moscow on Wednesday, and China reported a fresh outbreak in its northern grasslands — signs the deadly virus was spreading across Siberia to the Mediterranean along the pathways of migratory birds.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization warned of a marked increase in chances that bird flu would move to the Middle East and Africa — and hit countries poorly equipped to deal with an outbreak.
It has another cluster of what looks like H2H transmission. It is still too early to be confirmed, but until they track down how it got to the infant it is suspect in my opinion. New outbreaks are happening it seems everywhere. Birds in migration as the seasons change. It truly is widespread.
Thanks for bringing over the photo. I hope it doesn't get FR in trouble for having it posted here as full credit is given.
It is hard to think that we could see similiar scenes here in the US. The damage that would be done economically to our poultry industry is incredible. With the CDC already getting close to 500,000 calls a day from citizens, an outbreak would have severe economic ramifications on the industry, even without H2H transmission.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/174282/1/.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1505576/posts
Fresh outbreaks fuel global bird flu jitters Russia and China confirmed new outbreaks)
Channelnewsasia ^ | 10-19-05
Posted on 10/19/2005 8:52:45 PM EDT by I'll be your Huckleberry
BRUSSELS : Russia and China confirmed new outbreaks of potentially lethal avian influenza Wednesday, fuelling concerns of a global flu pandemic as Europe scrambled to contain the virus on its southeastern flank.
Russia's agriculture ministry said the virulent H5N1 virus - already detected in Siberia in the summer - had been detected in the province of Tula, west of the Ural mountains, apparently borne by wild ducks. In an immediate response, the European Union - which suffered a new blow as a fresh case of the lethal version of the virus was found in Romania - announced plans to extend a ban on Russian bird imports.
Europe's jitters about bird flu were triggered by the confirmation last week that Turkey and Romania have cases of the H5N1 strain of the virus, which has killed more than 60 people in Asia.
The big fear among experts is that H5N1 may mutate, acquiring genes from the human influenza virus that would make it highly infectious as well as lethal - possibly killing millions worldwide as the influenza pandemic of 1918 did.
"Experts tell us that a human influenza pandemic is a real possibility, which could happen at any time in the coming years," said EU health commissioner Markos Kyprianou. "We need to plan for this."
In Moscow, authorities confirmed that the virus in Tula was the H5N1 type, which was found in Siberia.
"We have confirmation from the laboratory that it is the H5N1 form" of bird flu, Nikolai Vlasov, deputy head of the ministry's veterinary control department, told AFP.
The announcement marks the the first time the virus has arrived west of the Urals in Russia. Russia has culled hundreds of thousands of fowl and imposed numerous quarantines in a bid to wipe out the virus.
In Beijing meanwhile authorities announced China's first reported outbreak of bird flu in more than two months, saying the disease had killed 2,600 birds, mostly chickens, on a farm in its northern Inner Mongolia region.
The national bird flu laboratory confirmed that an epidemic on a farm near the Inner Mongolian capital of Hohhot was the H5N1 strain, the Xinhua news agency reported.
The brief Xinhua report said the ministry of agriculture had immediately dispatched teams to ensure necessary quarantine and disinfection measures were undertaken.
"Currently, the outbreak has been brought efficiently under control," the agency said. "No new outbreaks have been discovered."
Back on Europe's borders, Romanian and Turkish authorities continued to battle to contain the outbreaks.
In Romania, authorities confirmed that tests have confirmed the presence of new cases of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, after it was initially detected at the weekend.
But the focus of more immediate concern turned to Greece, where authorities were awaiting the results of tests on a suspected case found on the tiny Aegean island of Oinousses on Monday.
Health Minister Nikitas Kaklamanis arrived on the islet bearing a consignment of 20 vaccines for the local health centre, and words of reassurance about the prospects of an avian flu pandemic.
"I am confident that the samples will be proven negative," said Kaklamanis.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/173704/1/.html
PARIS : With a potentially lethal bird flu virus causing worldwide anxiety as it spreads from Asia to Europe, the world's airlines have gone on special alert, while cautioning against over-reaction.
Air traffic suffered a serious blow from a previous epidemic, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), two years ago which led to a drop in business.
SARS has left 700 people dead and cost 30 billion dollars in economic damage around the world since it broke out in 2003.
So far there has been no similar panicked reaction among air travellers to the threat of bird flu.
"To date we have not noticed any reduction in reservations for flights to areas designated as dangerous," said Jean-Cyril Spinetta, head of Air France-KLM, speaking last Friday.
He recalled that SARS did not cause any deaths in Europe and said he hoped health authorities would manage the present situation more calmly than during the SARS scare.
But one Paris-based analyst warned: "If the epidemic is confirmed we could see a reduction in traffic to the affected geographical areas, as in previous health crises."
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that the spread of the virus is a matter of concern because it increases the possibility of further human victims.
While avian influenza primarily affects birds, the H5N1 strain has killed more than 60 people in Southeast Asia since 2003.
However the WHO says the virus does not easily transmit itself from poultry to humans.
Yet with so many imponderables over transmission to humans and person-to-person contamination risk, airlines do not wish to be caught off-guard.
The industry has not forgotten the effects of the SARS scare which caused a 20-30 percent drop in sales in the Asia-Pacific region at the height of the crisis.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA), to which 265 airlines representing 94 percent of world air traffic belong, has summoned experts to monitor the situation.
"Following the SARS episode, we have prepared a practical guide of things to do in the event of a crisis,"said an IATA spokesman.
"We are very aware of the role we have to play in the event of a health alert," he added.
"But for the moment there is nothing to indicate that we have to apply the measures. The WHO has not warned against flying to to the affected countries, only to avoid areas where poultry are bred."
Leaflets are being distributed in French airports to passengers bound for, or arriving from, affected countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand where cases have been found of the virus being transmitted from poultry to humans.
Cabin staff of Air France say they have been advised to get flu shots.
But staff have not been issued with any special equipment for dealing with eventual outbreaks, unlike the SARS scare, when they were supplied with special gloves.
Chicken has not disappeared from the in-flight meals on offer because there is no risk of the virus in cooked chicken. The virus dies at 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit), experts say.
For carriers, the main thing is not to alarm passengers unnecessarily and so avoid fears of bird flu damaging trade.
When the SARS scare struck, it caused problems for a sector already in bad trouble following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.
"At the time there was downturn in business," said one analyst: "Today demand is high."
The bird flu strain that killed in Asia was confirmed Saturday to have arrived on mainland Europe for the first time, following tests on birds in Romania, adding urgency to crisis measures.
The big fear among experts is that H5N1 may mutate, acquiring genes from the human influenza virus that would make it highly infectious as well as lethal -- possibly killing millions worldwide as the influenza pandemic of 1918 did.
- AFP /ct
Nothing here yet, but the geese haven't moved through the US yet.
As to the vaccine, it is at best partially effective. We just don't know what the H2H strain will look like in the end. These things are amazingly specific, and a little rearrangement will reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Nothing here yet, but the geese haven't moved through the US yet.
As to the vaccine, it is at best partially effective. We just don't know what the H2H strain will look like in the end. These things are amazingly specific, and a little rearrangement will reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Here's TCS's latest in bird flu coverage:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/102005C.html
The Andromeda Strategy
James Pinkerton
How much of a threat is the avian flu? We don't really know. The future is like that: it's unpredictable in its specifics. But the future is completely predictable at a more general level. Bad things happen. The good times no longer roll. Night must fall. That's a truth as old as Aesop; nothing will ever repeal the need to be vigilant and to be prepared. And right now, we are not prepared, for the current epidemic, or for the epidemic next time.
When the prospect of disaster looms small on the horizon, when it is no bigger than a fist on the periphery of our sightlines, it's easy to be overconfident, even smug. After all, our recent history is full of doomy media sensations that never amounted to much. Remember global cooling? Or swine flu? Or Y2K? Even the recent SARS breakout proved to be dangerous but not devastating.
Or conversely, and perhaps even more dangerously, the prospect of dread can make us cynical and fatalistic; we're all going to die anyway, so what's the big deal -- why not just ride it out? If our number is up, so goes such thinking, our number is up. Indeed, such nihilism is a pathogen that can't be contained by science, because it burrows into the human soul; there such nothingness rests, throwing its lulling nightshade over action, turning it into inaction. And thus the glory of humanity -- our capacity to change our circumstance through hard work and hard thought -- is extinguished.
So once again, it could be that the bird flu is the Next Big Nothing. But since we know that history has a way of repeating itself, it's a cinch that we have calamitous epidemics in our future, as we did in our past. From the Black Death of the 14th century to the Spanish Flu of the 20th century, we can see a long and dolorous epidemiological chain. And in the future, we can see more such epidemics. Perhaps it will be like The Andromeda Strain, in some future century as yet undetermined. Or perhaps it will be the bird flu, after all -- which means that disaster draws near.
With those historically informed thoughts in mind, let's consider a strategy for dealing with the next big danger, whenever it comes. That strategy might be summed up in four M's: Monitor, Manage, Manufacture, and Mobilize.
As we shall see, bits and pieces of this strategy are in place. That's the good news. The bad news is that the missing pieces -- most obviously, a comprehensive and long-term plan for producing more life-saving drugs -- stare at us like the hollow eyes of a skull.
As for Monitoring, there's a lot of that going on now. We can all watch the grim progression of the avian flu, as it advances from Asia into the edges of Europe, toppling dominoes of complacency as it edges closer.
Sir Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer of the United Kingdom, warned recently that if a new flu strain hit his country, 50,000 would die. He added that a death toll 15 times that great was "not impossible."
And Klaus Stoehr, director of the World Health Organization's influenza program, observed, "The virus has the potential to change and mutate and thus spark a terrible pandemic." Once again, uncertainty; as Stoehr continued, "We don't know whether a pandemic will break out in the coming weeks, months or only in years. But there's no question that if such a pandemic occurs we'll be looking at hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths worldwide."
In the meantime, as we wait for perspective on what might come, we can monitor the past, too; we can look back, most urgently, to the killer Spanish Flu. Here's a letter dated September 29, 1918, written from the US Army's Camp Devens, Mass. World War One was raging in Europe, but American doughboys faced greater danger at home, far from the Kaiser's bullets:
"These men start with what appears to be an ordinary attack of LaGrippe or Influenza, and when brought to the Hosp. they very rapidly develop the most viscous [sic] type of Pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the Mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the Cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day, and still keeping it up."
But monitoring is mostly passive -- not good enough by itself. If all we do is watch and wait, and then do nothing, we might as well just have a party, like the one Edgar Allen Poe described in "The Masque of the Red Death". Here's a spoiler for the time-pressed: Poe's macabre tale does not have a happy ending.
So next we turn to that most American of virtues: Managing. In the wake of the management snafus of Katrina, President Bush was asked about the avian flu threat at his October 4 press conference; he offered a thoughtful answer which shows, at least, that no hapless Michael Browns will be in charge of a Viral Big One. Yet once again, we don't know the future; we don't know whether the US government's response will be equal to the challenge. But some distant early warning indicators are not so promising; one of Uncle Sam's scenarios envisions shortages of food, medicine and electricity, followed by mass riots and the ultimate death of 1.9 million Americans.
In other words, as we stare into the tiny grains of the flu virus, we could be looking at Katrina multiplied by a thousand. This is the best we can do? The richest country in the world? Clearly, what we have seen over the past few decades hasn't been management, but rather malpractice.
But even before we get to the management blame game, we should be looking toward the manufacture of a cure. Unfortunately a cure doesn't exist -- a future action item if there ever was one, which we will come back to later. For now, we do have an anti-viral medicine, called Tamiflu, but we don't have enough. Indeed, at present, so parlous is our condition that even if we wanted to start manufacturing more right away, it would still take years to build up an adequate stockpile.
What's more, as Waldemar Ingdahl has noted here at TCS, since 1970, the number of companies producing vaccines has fallen by 80 percent. Which is to say, while the need has been going north, the supply has been going south.
What explains this wrong-way trend? One reason is that the government has practiced a kind of malign neglect toward vaccines and toward the innovative side of the pharmaceutical industry. Consider the fate of Merck. The New Jersey-based company is currently being clobbered by costly Vioxx lawsuits, based on junk science, as the federal government watches passively. Yet even so, Merck has persevered on a vaccine for the human papilloma virus, which accounts for perhaps 70 percent of the world's cervical cancers. It would be a tragic shame if Merck were knocked out of the innovation box by big lawsuits, before its vaccine, Gardasil, ever reaches the women who need it. What national interest would that serve? We need to rethink our approach to manufacturing, because at present, US government mismanagement -- tolerance for predatory lawsuits -- is undercutting the productive and lifesaving fundaments of the pharmaceutical industry.
Indeed, motivated by a strange mix of desperation and calculation, many governments around the world are considering compounding past mismanagement with still more mismanagement. Here's how: Hans Hogerzeil, acting director of the department of essential drugs and medicines policy at the World Health Organization, demanded recently that Roche, the maker of Tamiflu, cut its price and waive its patent rights, so that anybody, anywhere, could make the drug. Hogerzeil's comments stand in sharp contrast to those of his boss, Lee Jong-wook, who, mindful of the enormous investment needed to make medicines, has said that it is bad policy to weaken drug patents, since they are the cornerstone of production. But of course, it's Hogerzeil's flamboyantly anti-corporate populism that grabs the attention of the controversy-crazed world media.
If any of this legal-medical jousting sounds familiar, it should. Because the same Hogerzeil and the same WHO had the same bright idea about AIDS drugs. Working closely with NGO activists, the world's public health-ocracy cooked up a scheme to "pre-qualify" copycat AIDS drugs, manufactured in India, onto the market. But "pre-qualification" proved to be a synonym of "non-quality." So great was the danger of these pseudo-drugs that they had to be withdrawn from the marketplace. It was a humiliating for the neo-Naderite "H Team" of genericists, but evidently not so humiliating that the H-ers aren't up to the same trick again.
So what to do? Roche made mistakes. It obviously underestimated the demand for Tamiflu and/or failed to sound the epidemiological alarm bell. But at the same time that Roche was falling down on the manufacturing side, the governments of the world were failing to monitor and manage.
Now there's only one thing to do: manufacture more. Roche is frantically trying to expand capacity for Tamiflu. Is that a good enough plan? It's hard to know, but Tyler Cowen of George Mason University has an idea: why not offer a prize to Roche if it successfully ramps up production? Why not? After all, incentives work; prizes work.
Moreover, Roche has even indicated that it is willing to contract out its patent to qualified drug manufacturers, but not to the Indian generic-makers, such as Ranbaxy and Cipla. Yet if the flu flaps its deadly wings closer to humans, the pressure to override Roche and turn the whole flu-vaccine project over to the Indians will only intensify.
If that happens, not only will Tamiflu production be jeopardized, but the entire future of the pharmaceutical industry will be undercut. If it costs close to a billion dollars to make a drug, and if future profits are non-existent -- well, it doesn't take much management expertise to see that future discovering and manufacturing will be non-existent, too.
Obviously these sorts of concerns will keep coming to the fore. We can continue to think of the problem as a matter for monitoring, managing, and manufacturing, but something is missing -- the sense of urgency that should come from a truly grave threat. And so to the fourth M: Mobilization. If we now understand that this is an urgent priority for America, we should act accordingly. We've mobilized in the past, and it's time to do so again.
I have written elsewhere that we need to think of natural disasters as a kind of war, and that we need to call out the military when needed -- because if it's a matter of life and death, we should use all our resources.
But our greatest resource is our collective will to solve problems -- to apply the lessons of the past to the threats of the future. We have been caught unawares many times before -- the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, Pearl Harbor, 9-11, and now Katrina. In each instance, our system failed us. But our past record suggests that we have the capacity to institute new mechanisms and safeguards to prevent repeat disasters. And while the great chronicler Edward Gibbon might have been right when he wrote that history is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind," we should continue to act as if America is different -- can be made different. So when we see a headline in The Indianapolis Star -- "Flu pandemic will happen eventually, experts say/Some form of the virus will sweep the world and take a high toll, but it may not be avian" -- we should view those words as an injunction to action, not as a death sentence.
We don't know what we face in the future. But we can be reasonably sure that the sorry saga of natural diseases will soon enough be supplemented by new chapters of unnatural epidemics, inked inadvertently in industrial accidents, or written purposefully by malevolent scientist-terrorists. The specter of new "superbugs" -- imagined by science-fiction writers today, created in laboratories tomorrow -- haunts our normal revelry, like Poe's Red Death.
Thus the absolute necessity of the Four M's -- the need for constant monitoring, managing, manufacturing, and mobilizing. If we implement these Ms, we will be as equipped as we can be for the Andromeda-level threats that are sure to come. And if we don't, well, then we will suffer and die as we have in the Gibbonesque past.
A TCS Special Report on bird flu just went live. Visit for coverage, facts and information:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/birdflu/
Turn up your sound for interesting soundbites from world leaders.
Try THIS :
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/10200504/H5N1_Taiwan.html
1. China smuggling out infected chickens;
2. China saying it has preventive vaccines.
Can you say : "Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm ...." ?
I thought you could !
Roche to allow generic versions of Tamiflu --
Drug maker agrees to license antiviral medication to other companies
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9763074/
I imagine it will be quite a while before they begin cranking it out...
As do most vaccines. It is called generating a secondary response, which is hopefully IGG and much longer lasting. In most cases the initial response, IGM, is protective.
It is not in commercial development for the public, it is being produced and stockpiled for the government.
All vaccines are subject to government control as witnessed to when we had the flu vaccine shortage and the government stepped in and assigned or reassigned the vaccines to health care providers.
The European and North American migrating birds are two different populations. If it comes here it will come through human transmission, not from birds.
"...not from birds."
probably not - although i think the Arctic Tern runs a course up the eastern U.S. seaboard and down the European/Africa coast on its migration?
And what about bird imports - or bird products. Can a dead and processed bird carry the flu?
I think it is the slaughtering and cleaning that is of highest risk. Once meat has been cooked, I don't think it can spread the flu virus.
|
Confirmed Human Cases of Avian Influenza A (H5N1) in Recent Waves of Disease |
||||||
|
Country |
12/3/03–3/10/04 |
7/19/04–10/8/04 |
12/16/04–present |
TOTAL SINCE 12/3/03 |
||
|
Cases (Deaths) |
Cases (Deaths) |
Cases (Deaths) |
Cases (Deaths) |
|||
|
Official* |
Unofficial† |
Official* |
Unofficial† |
|||
|
Vietnam |
23 (16) |
4 (4) |
64 (21) |
68 (23) |
91 (41) |
95 (43) |
|
Thailand |
12 (8) |
5 (4) |
1 (1) |
1 (1) |
18 (13) |
18 (13) |
|
Cambodia |
0 (0) |
0 (0) |
4 (4)‡ |
4 (4)‡ |
4 (4)‡ |
4 (4)‡ |
|
Indonesia |
0 (0) |
0 (0) |
5 (3) |
9 (6) |
5 (3) |
9 (6) |
|
Total |
35 (24) |
9 (8) |
74 (29) |
82 (34) |
118 (61) |
126 (66) |
Ping to post 1864, 1879...
"Interestingly enough, this update shows only one additional case - and none in Indonesia"
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