ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending October 30th, 2005

A 48-year-old Thai man has become the 67th person known to have been killed by a bird flu virus that has been moving steadily from Asia into Europe since re-emerging in South Korea in 2003, officials said on Thursday.

Concern about the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu centres on scientists' fears that it may mutate into a form that passes easily among humans, sparking a pandemic that may kill millions.

Possible clusters of bird flu among members of one family in Indonesia have raised concern among health experts that this feared mutation may already be happening.

"With the increase of clusters, the possibility has to be thoroughly examined that the virus might have changed and could possibly spread from human to human," Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari was quoted as saying by the state news agency.

A father and son are being treated at a Jakarta hospital for symptoms of the virus but the diagnosis has not been confirmed.

All the human deaths from avian flu have so far been in Asia but the H5N1 strain, carried by migrating birds, was detected this month in birds in Russia, Turkey and Romania. Further tests are being carried out in Europe on a bird from Greece.

In Brussels, the European Union adopted fresh measures to fight the virus, banning live birds from markets or exhibitions without permission and urging states to keep wild flocks away from poultry feed.

The European Commission said in a statement a committee of EU ..

As bird culls to control probable new outbreaks of avian flu started on farms in Russia and Macedonia on Wednesday, United Nations officials here warned that their far larger concern was that the virus was on its way to East Africa, where the disease could be nearly impossible to control.

As bird flu has jumped this year from Southeast Asia to China, Russia, Kazakhstan and - more recently - into the Balkan region of Europe, scientists have become somewhat belatedly convinced that wild migratory birds are one of the main carriers of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza.

Although there is widespread anxiety about the arrival of bird flu in Europe - European Union health ministers will convene a special session on Thursday to discuss the problem - the next stops on bird migratory paths are not in Western Europe, but in the Middle East, North Africa and East Africa, United Nations officials here say.

Countries and farmers in these parts of the world, particularly in East Africa, are completely unprepared, lacking the money and the scientific infrastructure to control outbreaks of the virus, the United Nations officials said.

"One of our major concerns is now the potential spread of avian influenza through migratory birds to north and eastern Africa," said Dr. Joseph Domenech, chief veterinary officer at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which monitors the flu's spread in animals...

A bird flu pandemic will hit Britain - but not necessarily this winter, the chief medical officer has said. Sir Liam Donaldson said a deadly outbreak would come when a strain of bird flu mutated with human flu.

He told the BBC's Sunday AM show it would probably kill about 50,000 people in the UK, but the epicentre of any new strain was likely to be in East Asia.

The UK has so far stockpiled 2.5m doses of anti-viral drugs - and may restrict travel if there is an outbreak.

On Saturday, UK tests confirmed a case in Romania of a strain of bird flu which is potentially deadly to humans, sparking fears avian flu could spread to the UK through migrating birds.

The estimate we are working to in the number of deaths is around 50,000 excess deaths from flu A pandemic would occur if this strain of bird flu mutated with human flu - which spreads very easily - to create a new strain. He said it was "less likely" that any new flu strain would come this year...

The feared avian influenza virus is showing signs it can evade the drug considered the first line of defense against bird flu, researchers said on Friday.

They found so-called resistant strains in a Vietnamese girl who recovered from a bird flu infection after being treated with Tamiflu. They also found evidence she was directly infected by her brother and not by chickens, a rare case of human-to-human transmission of the virus.

When bacteria and viruses develop resistance to a drug, it means higher doses of the drug are needed to eradicate or control an infection. Ultimately it means the drug will stop working.

This has happened with many antibiotics, starting with penicillin, and is common among AIDS drugs.

The finding illustrates the need to find and use other drugs to treat influenza and to work quickly to develop a vaccine, the researchers said.

"I don't think we need to panic based on this finding," Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

But the report, to be published in the journal Nature next week, is bad news for doctors around the world who already have precious little in the arsenal against bird flu should it become a human disease.

"This is the first line of defense," Kawaoka said. "It is the drug many countries are stockpiling, and the plan is to rely heavily on it."

The H5N1 strain of avian influenza is considered by health experts to be the biggest single disease threat to the world...

During the past several years, an especially virulent strain of avian flu has ravaged flocks of domesticated poultry in Asia and spread to migratory birds. Fortunately, only rarely has it been transmitted from bird to human, and probably not at all between humans ⦠yet. But flu virus mutates readily, and virologists expect that sooner or later it will acquire the ability to spread from person to person.

This is potentially catastrophic. The avian flu strain H5N1 already has two of the three characteristics needed to cause a pandemic: It can (1) jump from bird to human and (2) produce an often fatal illness; more than 60 deaths have been attributed to H5N1. If additional genetic evolution makes the virus highly transmissible among humans -- the third characteristic of a pandemic strain -- a worldwide outbreak could become reality. (The operative term here is highly transmissible; a flu virus that spreads as readily as the common cold would spell real trouble, but one that spreads less readily would be more manageable.)

H5N1 is an extraordinarily deadly variant: The mortality rate for persons infected with the existing H5N1 appears to be around 50%, whereas the garden-variety annual flu kills less than 1%. This gives us plenty to worry about. The acquisition of the genetic change(s) needed to become transmissible from human to human is stochastic -- i.e., essentially random, therefore unpredictable...

The bird flu crisis moved a step closer to Britain's shores yesterday as the country's most senior medical adviser demanded that all doctors draw up emergency plans to distribute 14 million doses of drugs to combat the disease.

As the deadly virus entered Europe for the first time with confirmed cases in Romania, Sir Liam Donaldson said that all of Britain's 34,000 GPs would be told to prepare for a massive influx of patients if a bird flu pandemic hit the country.

Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, who advises the government, will tell every practice in the country to gear up for the 'inevitable' event. He said that doctors will be needed to hand out more than 14 million doses of antiviral drugs and ensure home visits for patients to free hospital beds and minimise deaths.

'This is public health enemy number one,' Donaldson told The Observer. 'It is at the top of our priority list and it is a when, not whether.' He said the world was now long overdue a flu pandemic and his team was working with the assumption that it would hit one in four Britons, killing 53,000 people. 'That is the most likely scenario,' he said.

His order for GPs to get ready for more patients and a larger workload will come on Thursday, when he will also reveal Britain's updated emergency plans...