Free Republic

BANGKOK, Thailand (CP) - Bird flu has killed three house cats in Thailand, officials said Friday, a development the World Health Organization described as "very dangerous" because of pets' close contact with people. A UN agency cautioned the reports need more scientific analysis. Thai veterinarians urged residents to stay away from their cats if their neighbourhoods are also home to chickens, which together with ducks have been the main victims of bird flu as it swept through Asia killing millions of birds and 22 people. Meanwhile, after a report that a milder strain of bird flu virus, known as H7,...

IT was a frightening time. A southern city had already been hit hard. Further north, checkpoints were hastily set up at border crossings where travellers were forced to undergo examinations and quarantine. Incoming ships were quarantined for four days. Local travel was restricted. Then schools and churches were closed and public meetings banned. Finally, as health authorities rushed to develop a vaccine, residents were ordered to don face masks. Unfortunately, people kept dying from a highly contagious and virulent new disease. SARS? The Hong Kong flu? A look into the future of the bird flu sweeping Asia should it develop...

TORONTO (CP) - A leading public health figure took aim at the media and the World Health Organization on Monday, saying inflamed reporting on the potential of the avian influenza outbreak to trigger a human flu pandemic is "gratuitously scaring" the public. Dr. Richard Schabas, former chief medical officer for Ontario, said the public is not getting an accurate idea of the threat - or lack thereof - posed by the bird flu outbreak from international public health agencies, pundits and reporters. "We have some public health agencies - and I particularly identify the World Health Organization - and I...

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday sought to cool fears of a bird flu pandemic following news of a possible first case of human transmission of the virus that is sweeping Asia. The United Nations health agency believes at least two Vietnamese, one of whom died last month, may have caught the virus from another member of their family rather than directly from poultry. But the head of the WHO's Global Influenza Program, Klaus Stohr, said person-to-person transmission should be no surprise because it had occurred in limited numbers in apparently similar avian flu outbreaks, notably in Hong Kong...

THREE things worry virologist Dr Bryan Eaton about the avian flu ravaging Asia. First, the virus appears to have bolted "and shows no signs of stopping". And while it's one thing to clean it out of commercial chicken farms, it's an "immense challenge" to eradicate it from the untold numbers of rural communities now infected. Second, Eaton fears reports of wild water-bird kills suggest the villain of the piece – the H5N1 strain – might be gaining virulence. Wild waterfowl normally suffer few ill-effects from influenza. And, third, the disease's few human victims have mainly been children. Eaton worries it...

China has detected suspected bird flu in three more provinces, amid fears the virus has been under-reported. Officials were investigating cases in China's largest city of Shanghai and also in Anhui and Guangdong provinces, the state-run Xinhua news agency said. China has also confirmed outbreaks of bird flu in two central provinces, Hunan and Hubei, Xinhua said. China said no humans had been infected and poultry was being culled in all the affected areas. AVIAN FLU ALERT First jumped "species barrier" from bird to human in 1997 In humans, symptoms include fever, sore throat, and cough Types which threaten humans...

BANGKOK (Reuters) - The bird flu rampaging through Asia has made the dreaded leap into China and impoverished Laos after a second Thai boy died of the disease and countries tightened defences against a potential SARS-like epidemic. The rapid spread of the virus -- which has now erupted in 10 Asian countries and killed eight people -- prompted the World Health Organisation and two other international organisations to ask for money and expertise to fight an all-out war against it. "This is a serious global threat to human health," said WHO chief Lee Jong-Wook. "We must begin this hard, costly...

Indonesia has become the latest country to admit that a massive outbreak of bird flu has been ravaging its chicken farms for months. The disease has now led to the death of many millions of birds across south-east Asia, and at least seven people. The scale of the epidemic is unprecedented, says Klaus Stöhr, a senior virologist at the World Health Organization. "Never in history have we seen such outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza over such a wide area, simultaneously," he told New Scientist. Stöhr warns that if a person becomes infected simultaneously with both bird and ordinary human...

Pakistan was today added to the list of nations affected by a lethal new strain of bird flu spreading across Asia. The country said that it had detected a form of the virus in its chickens, with the news coming as a six-year-old Thai boy became the seventh confirmed bird flu fatality. The child, who died in a Bangkok hospital last night, was Thailand's first confirmed death from the virus. He had been infected while playing with chickens in his home village. Six people have so far died from bird flu in Vietnam, and Thai officials are also trying to...

A VACCINE for the bird flu rampaging through Asia is more than six months away, a World Health Organisation spokesman predicted today. Faced with accusations that he covered up the outbreak, Thailand's prime minister said his government had suspected that bird flu had struck his nation a ``couple of weeks'' ago. But he didn't tell the public because he feared mass panic. Vietnam and Thailand are the only countries this year where humans have caught the avian flu, with six confirmed deaths in Vietnam and one suspected fatality in Thailand. The virus has affected millions of chickens in six Asian...

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia has confirmed an outbreak of avian influenza among chickens but has no evidence so far that the disease has spread to humans, a senior official of the agriculture ministry says. "It's been confirmed avian influenza exists, but no human cases so far," animal health director Tri Satya Putri Naipospos told reporters. Indonesia had previously insisted it was free of the influenza and blamed the deaths of thousands of chickens on parts of East Java and the tourist centre of Bali in the past three months on Newcastle disease, a virus that is harmless to humans and...

New tests have turned up a disturbing problem with the avian influenza virus that is spreading in Asia: the strain appears resistant to one of the two main classes of drugs used to fight influenza viruses, a World Health Organization official said yesterday. Meanwhile, the strain, A(H5N1), has been detected among birds in a sixth Asian country, Cambodia, and two more human cases have been diagnosed in a new area of Vietnam, the official, Dr. Klaus Stöhr, said. Both Vietnamese cases were in children in Ho Chi Minh City, bringing to seven the total in that country. Six have been...

ASIAN countries - Vietnam, especially, but also South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan - are battling the spread of avian or bird flu among their poultry. Despite its denials, mainland China - probably Fujian province - may also have some cases, as tests on ducks smuggled into Taiwan in December have shown. Thailand, the world's largest poultry exporter, admitted this week it has some cases. It had probably been covering up an outbreak from November. Meanwhile, the Singapore authorities are testing poultry and eggs randomly at all points of entry. Slaughter houses and the two million birds in local farms are...

Public health experts around the world are wary about what could transpire from the ongoing spread of bird flu in many parts of Asia. The origins of the infection are still unknown for certain cases, including one detected in a chicken farm in Japan. If the virus mutated into a human influenza virus, it could wreak worldwide havoc, experts said. "This can no longer be called mere influenza. The symptoms are like those of hemorrhagic fever," said Masato Tashiro, head of the Department of Virology III of the National Institute of Infectious Disease. Before he attended a meeting of a...

China is refusing to disclose the origins of a lethal "bird flu" virus that could make SARS look like "a puff of smoke", according to angry scientists and World Health Organisation officials. They fear that the country's Guangdong province, from where the SARS virus began to spread last winter, could be the source of the flu, which has killed at least 13 people, most of them children, in Vietnam, South Korea and Japan in recent weeks. The Chinese authorities deny that the country harbours the virus, even though it has been discovered in poultry meat exported to its neighbours. An...

When a handful of people in Vietnam recently began dying of a flu spread by birds, it set off alarm bells in the offices of infectious-disease specialists around the world. Could this be the start of a global flu pandemic, just like the one that swept the planet after the First World War, killing between 20 million and 40 million people? Experts have long assumed that the next major killer flu would start in animals, such as chickens or pigs, and then jump to humans. Our immune systems would be ill-equipped to fend off a bug that is dramatically different...

HONG KONG, Jan. 11 — Health officials said today that they had been notified of a third suspected case of severe acute respiratory syndrome in China's adjacent Guangdong Province, and they expressed growing worry over the weekend about the possibility of another outbreak here. The latest patient is a 35-year-old man with no recent history of travel to Hong Kong and no apparent contact with wild animals — the suspected source of some cases — said Dr. Thomas Tsang, a community medicine consultant for the Hong Kong Department of Health. Dr. Tsang said that while Guangdong officials had notified Hong...

Poultry farms affected in three provinces; no humans infected so far Agriculture officials confirmed another case of deadly bird flu yesterday and investigated suspected cases far from the initial outbreak area, fanning concerns the virus has infected the poultry industry nationwide. Meanwhile, Kim Moon-sik, chief of the National Institute of Health, said the virus does not appear to be contagious to humans since no symptoms have been reported in the normal incubation period. To prevent the spread, officials are killing chickens and ducks at an increasing rate. More than 600,000 of the birds have died or have been designated for...

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has activated its emergency operations centre to deal with a widespread flu outbreak that is being called an epidemic, even though it does not technically meet that definition. Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it is too soon to determine how severe this flu season will be. But with 42 children already succumbing to the flu this season, Gerberding said the outbreak could be considered an epidemic. Gerberding also said that while this season has seen "typical" flu patterns, it started earlier than normal, leading to...

TAIPEI – Health authorities in Taiwan were yesterday scrambling to track down five foreign passengers on a flight taken by a man later diagnosed with the deadly SARS virus. Centre for Disease Control deputy director Shih Wen-yi said 13 Taiwanese who had sat near the 44-year-old researcher on a flight from Singapore had been told to monitor themselves closely for signs of fever. But five foreigners also occupying seats near the SARS-positive patient – three US nationals, one Japanese and one Singaporean – had so far not been contacted, Mr Shih said. "The whereabouts of the five foreigners is difficult...