ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending June 27th, 2005

Indonesia has confirmed its first case of bird flu in humans.

A farm worker in South Sulawesi has tested positive for the H5N1 strain of the virus, although he has shown no outward symptoms of the disease. In the past 18 months at least 53 people across Asia are known to have died of bird flu - all of them in Cambodia, Vietnam or Thailand. Millions of chickens and ducks have been slaughtered in an effort to control the spread of the disease.

Indonesia's agriculture ministry has reported sporadic H5N1 outbreaks in birds in various parts of the country, including Sulawesi, in the first three months of this year. Just last month the authorities confirmed the first case of the virus in pigs. Health officials say the farm worker's case came to light during routine testing of people who had worked with infected poultry...

Chinese farmers, acting with the approval and encouragement of government officials, have tried to suppress major bird flu outbreaks among chickens with an antiviral drug meant for humans, animal health experts said. International researchers now conclude that this is why the drug will no longer protect people in case of a worldwide bird flu epidemic.

China's use of the drug amantadine, which violated international livestock guidelines, was widespread years before China acknowledged any infection of its poultry, according to pharmaceutical company executives and veterinarians.

A health worker vaccinates a chicken against bird flu at a Chinese farm in late May. Chinese farmers also have used an anti-viral made for humans on chickens. Since January 2004, avian influenza has spread across nine East Asian countries, devastating poultry flocks and killing at least 54 people in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, but none in China. World Health Organization officials warned the virus could easily undergo genetic changes to create a strain capable of killing tens of millions of people worldwide.

Although China did not report an avian influenza outbreak until February 2004..

Two reported new outbreaks of avian flu among birds in western China have raised fears that the virus is being spread widely by migrating birds and mutating rapidly.

The regional director for the World Health Organization, Dr. Shigeru Omi, told reporters in Beijing yesterday that the two recent outbreaks in remote areas in which hundreds of birds died were worrisome because they involved migratory waterfowl and domestic geese, birds that until now had been fairly resistant to the disease.

More than 13,000 geese were destroyed in Tacheng, in the Xinjiang autonomous region, after about 500 died of H5N1 avian flu, China's Agriculture Ministry reported.

Poultry markets were closed and roadblocks set up in the area, the official Xinhua news agency said.

In late May, the government reported that hundreds of bar-headed geese, gulls, ducks and cormorants had been found dead on an island in a salt lake in the Qinghai region that lies on an important migratory route.

Previously, the H5N1 flu had been lethal to domestic chicken flocks, but veterinary officials had believed that geese and wild birds carried the disease without dying of it.

"The best thing I can say is to keep our vigilance high," Reuters quoted Dr. Omi as saying...

The United States still has no licensed vaccine to prevent avian flu and has nowhere near enough drugs on hand to treat the sick if there is an epidemic, experts told Congress Thursday.

Hospitals have too little capacity to deal with the huge numbers of people who would become sick and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department does not even have a plan for dealing with an epidemic, the experts said.

"Although many levels of government are paying increased attention to the problem, the United States remains woefully unprepared for an influenza pandemic that could kill millions of Americans," said Dr. Andrew Pavia, chairman of the Infectious Disease Society of America's Pandemic Influenza Task Force.

Clearly, we need a much larger supply of drugs and vaccine to control a flu pandemic. We need to build up U.S. manufacturing capacity so that we are not dependent on other countries to meet ...

lineup of leading infectious disease experts warned Wednesday that the world is unprepared for the health and economic consequences of an outbreak of pandemic influenza that could spring from a lethal strain of bird flu now ravaging poultry flocks in Southeast Asia.

In commentaries published in the British science journal Nature, doctors used some of the strongest language yet to suggest that the bird flu virus known as H5N1 could mutate into a form easily transmitted among people, creating a strain capable of killing millions.

"This virus has the potential to trigger the next pandemic, which, judging from history, is well overdue,'' wrote Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. "Clearly, there is much to be accomplished, and time is of the essence.'' Flu pandemics are global outbreaks of virulent influenza caused by a viral strain so different from those of prior years that the human population has no natural resistance to it.

The 1918 Spanish flu was such a pandemic, and it killed an estimated 20 million to 100 million people around the globe. The H5N1 virus has worried flu experts since 1997, when it first appeared in the Hong Kong chicken markets as a lethal virus dubbed bird Ebola..