[ThanhPhero]

One of my correspondents in Viet Nam said in an email yesterday that something called SOT XUAT HUYET is afflicting many people in the country. That translates as hemorrage fever. Viet Nam has never had something like that before and coupled with the reports coming from China, I'd say this Chinese disease problem is truly ominous.

[Dog Gone]

I'd rather keep this thread focused on bird flu and have someone open a hemorragic fever thread if it seems warranted. But I don't own the thread, so it will go where it will go.

[xVIer]

WOW! Thanks for posting that bit of info...really bad news though. Everyone needs to see post 1174... I am STUNNED! What do y'all make of it?

[Voteamerica]

In 1918, pathologists were intimately familiar with the condition of lungs of victims of bacterial pneumonia at autopsy. But the viral pneumonias caused by the influenza pandemic were so violent that many investigators said the only lungs they had seen that resembled them were from victims of poison gas.

http://www.nap.edu/books/0309095042/html/61.html

Camp Devens was a nightmare of rasping blue death.

Lines of men clutching blankets stood outside the hospital in the rain. Inside, cots overflowed into hallways and onto porches. Many patients had the deadly hue of cyanosis, a blue so deep that many observers misjudged this for the return of “black death.” In the morgue, Welch and Cole had to step over and around piles of corpses to observe an autopsy.

Cole later recalled: “When the chest was opened and the blue swollen lungs were removed and opened, and Dr. Welch saw the wet, foamy surfaces with real consolidation, he turned and said, ‘This must be some new kind of infection or plague,’ and he was quite excited and obviously very nervous... It was not surprising that the rest of us were disturbed, but it shocked me to find that the situation, momentarily at least, was too much even for Dr. Welch.”

The physicians quickly recovered their equilibrium. Welch called in an expert from Harvard to perform autopsies. He ordered a Rockefeller lab scientist to drop everything and make a vaccine. He told the army to order camp hospitals expanded and to impose quarantine measures.

It was too little, too late. Flu victims were contagious for several days before showing symptoms, and soldiers had been flowing in and out of Devens daily, as had civilian staff and volunteers. The influenza virus soon appeared in Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York and in New Orleans.

Most victims recovered, and their experience generally was a more intense version of the expected weeklong course of fever, aches, chills and nausea. But a substantial minority endured much worse. They were utterly incapacitated by exhaustion, able to summon up the energy only to cry out constantly in the face of excruciating earaches and headaches.

As the disease progressed and pneumonia set in, they began to bleed profusely—from the nose, the ear and the mouth. Some still recovered. Hopkins physician Harvey Cushing was one such case. But if cyanosis appeared, physicians treated patients as terminal. Autopsies would show a disease that ravaged almost every internal organ.

http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/Mag_Fall04/prologues/

[txhurl]

OMG.

[Oorang]

70% of Water Fowl In Mekong Delta H5N1 Bird Flu Positive

Recombinomics Commentary
August 3, 2005

Up to 70 percent of waterfowls in Vietnam's southern Mekong delta have been tested positive to bird flu virus strain H5N1, local newspaper Labor reported Wednesday.

Local veterinary agencies culled 4,620 poultry, mainly ducks and chickens, after they detected small outbreaks of bird flu in capital city Hanoi and the three southern localities of Can Tho, Ben Tre and Dong Thap last month, the country's National Steering Committee on Anti-Bird Flu was quoted as saying in the report.

The comments above are similar to an earlier report indicating 71% of ducks in the Mekong Delta were H5N1 positive. That earlier survey sampler all 11 provinces. This latest report indicates H5N1 is endemic to southern Vietnam. In the south, virtually all confirmed H5N1 confirmed human cases have been fatal, including the two last week. In contrast the fatality rate has fallen to less than 10% in the north, where another recovering patient was reported this week.

These rates could dramatically change, as birds begin to migrate back to Vietnam. The Qinghai lake outbreak involve a lethal H5N1 that was Amantadine sensitive, but had the PB2 E627K polymorphism, which had never been seen previously in avian H5N1. A related H5N1 is racing across southern Russia and about to spread through Europe.

These new sequences can recombine with other flu sequences, especially in southeast Asia and probably China, where H5N1 has become endemic.

It is likely that these new sequences will cause new problems in the upcoming weeks.

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/08030502/H5N1_Mekong_70.html