ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending November 7th, 2005

Singapore has a "significant" stockpile of an anti-viral drug in preparation for a deadly bird flu outbreak and hoped to have enough for one million people next year.

` Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan said "major pieces" of a response plan were in place for a potential global bird flu epidemic, but stressed international cooperation remained key to fighting such a calamity.

The anti-viral drug called Tamiflu is being stockpiled around the world to counter a feared influenza pandemic. With the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus recently discovered in Europe, demand for Tamiflu is expected to surge, Khaw told parliament.

"You can expect huge demand to grow and unfortunately there is only one supplier. There is a global shortage and every country has been advised to do some stockpiling," he said.

` "Today we are building up progressively. We started quite early so that was helpful," he said.

Singapore would have enough of the drug by next year for one million of its total population of more than four million people, he said.

Health experts say the ideal ratio is for countries to have enough of the drug for one quarter of their population. Tamiflu can stop flu if given quickly when symptoms develop...

"A Hundred Million People Killed by Bird Flu." Is that a headline we will see in the next few years or is it a fantasy? The world is asking; but there is no way to resolve the question analytically. So let's have a look at what we know and don't know. I'll keep score along the way.

We know that in 1918 there was an epidemic of monumental proportions: perhaps 20 to 50 million people killed, societies devastated. We learned recently that it was caused by an influenza virus that ordinarily infects only birds but mutated sufficiently to jump directly to humans, spread rapidly and kill many. This was in direct contrast to the two most recent global pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, which were caused by human flu viruses that only had some bird flu characteristics. So, score one for the pessimists who think we are in for the worst: This has happened before.

The virus from 1918 -- which was recovered both from stored paraffin-embedded sections and from a body buried in the permafrost of Alaska -- has a relatively small number of changes from a consensus bird flu genome. But for those changes to aggregate into one genome must be a rare event. Balancing this rarity, viruses multiply extensively ...

The U.S. plan for tackling a possible pandemic of avian flu will include better disease reporting as well as stockpiles of vaccines and drugs, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said on Thursday.

But it will be important for state and local authorities to flesh out strategies to mesh with the long-awaited U.S. plan, which President George W. Bush will announce "soon," Leavitt said.

Worried that time was running out to pass legislation to fund any agenda, the U.S. Senate approved nearly $8 billion to help the government stockpile vaccines and drugs.

The H5N1 avian influenza is still primarily a bird disease, but it has infected 121 people and killed 62.

World health leaders have said little could be done if such a pandemic strikes this year. Governments are scrambling to stockpile Roche AG's and Gilead's Tamiflu, one of only two drugs that can treat it.

Evidence suggests some individuals are trying to hoard it. Health care information collector Verispan said more than 67,000 U.S. Tamiflu prescriptions were dispensed for the week ending October 21 -- quadruple the demand from the same week last year...

Roche suspended Tamiflu shipments to the United States on Thursday ...

China has reported its third major outbreak of bird flu in two weeks. Officials said 545 chickens and ducks died of the virus in a village in the central Hunan province, and almost 2,500 had been killed as a precaution. Earlier outbreaks hit Inner Mongolia and Anhui provinces, but so far China has seen no human bird flu deaths.

Meanwhile, a conference of health ministers in Canada has called for more research to find a vaccine to protect people against bird flu. The US Secretary of Health, Michael Leavitt, told the Ottawa conference that politicians had to find a balance between informing and inflaming.

Some countries, including Canada, had supported a Mexican proposal to increase manufacturing capacity both for anti-viral drugs and any future vaccine, reports the BBC's Lee Carter.

This could be achieved by transferring manufacturing to countries such as Mexico, Brazil or India, where production could be increased while costs could be kept down...

The dangerous H5N1 strain of bird flu that has killed more than 60 people in Asia, has now been found in Croatia, the European Union has announced.

"The Commission has been informed by the European Union reference laboratory ... that the virus isolated in wild birds in Croatia is indeed the H5N1 virus," EU Commission spokesman Philip Tod said.

Croatian authorities said they slaughtered all domestic poultry in four villages near a Nasice pond where two of 13 swans found dead tested positive for bird flu. The pond is next to the Zdenci park and all the infected swans were believed to have been from the same flock. The virus had earlier been detected in birds in Romania, Russia and Turkey, raising fears it could spread to the rest of Europe.

On Tuesday, the EU said it would ban the importation of exotic birds and impose stricter rules on the private ownership of parrots and other pet birds.

On Wednesday, Britain's Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett revealed that a second parrot had probably died of the lethal strain of the disease while in quarantine in the UK. (Full story)

In Germany, officials said that preliminary tests on wild geese found dead there came back positive for bird flu. And even though the fowl died of poisoning -- not influenza -- further tests would be carried to see whether they carried H5N1...

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...