ZKEA

Biological Warfare : Biological Terrorism : Emerging Diseases

Archived News
Week ending November 13th, 2005

Bang! Inside an improvised duck blind - her parked car - Grace Y. Lee presses a switch, and her gun blasts a square of light volleyball net over the dirt road she is watching. A technician examines a healthy egg before injecting it with a sample from a wild bird. If the egg dies, an infection is present. One of the two magpies she has baited into range with cornbread, cheese-flavored rice snacks and dog food is snagged, flopping furiously around.

"We mostly catch the young ones," Ms. Lee said. "These birds are too smart to be caught again. We get them once,k and they don't shop here anymore." With the country waiting nervously for avian flu to arrive, catching wild birds is no hobby. It has become part of a national early detection effort, and Ms. Lee, a researcher at the University of California here, is a sentry on the country's epidemiological ramparts.

She is one of hundreds of ornithologists, veterinarians, amateur bird-watchers, park rangers and others being recruited by the National Wildlife Health Center to join a surveillance effort along the major American migratory flyways. They will test wild birds caught in nets; birds shot by hunters on public lands, who must check in with game wardens; and corpses from large bird die-offs in public parks or on beaches.

The plan also calls for sampling bodies of water for the influenza virus, which is shed in bird feces. And it is designating some ducks and geese - like those in backyard flocks or living year-round in park ponds - as "sentinels" to be captured, tested, released and periodically retested...

resident Bush has announced his emergency plan for "Pandemic Influenza Preparations and Response" -- with a price tag of $7.1 billion. Having learned a lesson from Hurricane Katrina, where spot-on predictive scientific models of bursting levees and disastrous flooding were ignored, the White House -- to its credit -- now takes the threat of a global influenza pandemic quite seriously. But exactly how good is epidemic prediction? Worth a $7 billion bet?

Why the concern? From the study of prior pandemics -- such as occurred in 1918, 1957 and 1968 -- it is certain that global pandemics originate when bird influenza viruses or bird-derived influenza virus genes enter humans and adapt to become human-to-human transmissible. Influenza viruses routinely infect waterfowl; the vastness of the global reservoir of influenza viruses in wild ducks and shorebirds is astonishing. At any given time, as many as 10% to 20% of otherwise healthy waterfowl may be infected with one or more of the major avian influenza types. (Influenza virus types are named according to the proteins on their surfaces: The H, or Hemagglutinin protein, allows the virus to attach to and enter a cell, where it replicates, and the N, or Neuraminidase protein, is necessary for the newly replicated virus particles to exit and escape from a cell. There are at least 15 known H types and nine known N types, which can be present together in any combination.)

Every day, millions of billions of virus particles are silently replicating, swapping genes, mutating and evolving ...

A 19-year-old woman died of bird flu in Indonesia and an 8-year-old boy from her family was hospitalized with the virus, officials said Saturday. With concerns about a possible human bird flu pandemic rising around the globe, the World Bank said it was finalizing plans to provide up to $500 million to help poor countries fight the disease. New cases of the virus in birds were reported in China and Vietnam this week. The woman, from the town of Tangerang on the outskirts of the Indonesia capital Jakarta, was believed to have contracted the virus from infected dead chickens in her neighborhood, said Hariadi Wibisono, a Ministry of Health official. Her death brings the number of people killed by the disease in Indonesia to five, he said.

Wibisono said a Hong Kong laboratory confirmed both victims had bird flu, but it was not immediately clear how the young boy contracted the disease.

Since late 2003, the virulent and lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu has ravaged poultry stocks and jumped from birds to humans, killing at least 62 people in Southeast Asia. Most of the human deaths have been linked to close contact with infected birds. But experts fear the virus could mutate into a form easily passed among humans and possibly spark a worldwide pandemic.

The latest outbreak in China -- the fourth in three weeks -- killed 8,940 chickens on Oct. 26 in Liaoning province's Badaohao ...

President Bush announced Tuesday that he would ask Congress for $7.1 billion in emergency funding to prepare the country for a possible flu pandemic.

In a speech at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Bush said that there had not been an outbreak in the United States or the rest of the world, but stressed that health officials must be ready.

"A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire," Bush said. "If caught early, it might be extinguished with limited damage; if allowed to smolder undetected, it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it."

Bush said that health officials were concerned about the avian flu, which has spread to birds in 16 countries, infected 121 people and killed 62, according to the World Health Organization.

That strain -- known as the H5N1 -- does not spread easily from person to person, but health experts said they fear that it could mutate. "If the virus were to develop the capacity for sustained human-to-human transmission, it could spread quickly across the globe," Bush said. (Transcript)

The administration's plan provides funding for early detection, containment and treatment of an outbreak.

It also calls for improving the process of creating flu vaccines and stockpiling antiviral drugs...

Poultry sales in China's biggest cities have plummeted by 80% as anxiety over a bird flu epidemic has reached new heights in the Far East. In Vietnam, two people who died after developing bird-flu-type symptoms were buried before their illnesses could be identified in a further sign that panic is taking hold.

Although there is no evidence that humans can catch the virus through properly cooked poultry, sales at Shanghai and Beijing's biggest poultry market have plunged, sending merchants into despair.

"My income has been cut in half since the bird flu panic started," said merchant Xu Min. Health officials say the main cause of human infections is direct contact with poultry in slaughtering and butchering, or surfaces contaminated by their droppings. In Vietnam yesterday, officials announced that the cause of the deaths of the two bird-flu suspects might never be known because no samples were taken before they were buried.

A 14-year-old girl died in central Quang Binh province on October 23 and a 26-year-old man died in the same province on Thursday, said Nguyen Duc Hanh, a doctor at the hospital where they were treated.

Hanh said both had typical bird flu symptoms, including high fever, breathing difficulties and a rapid lung infection. Mai Xuan Su, a provincial health official, said the cases were not reported to the province until after the patients had died and no samples were taken.

"It is worrisome if health care workers are not alert and taking specimens if they suspect an influenza-type illness," said Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organisation representative in Vietnam.

In Indonesia, university officials said hundreds of students were ready to begin house-to-house checks of backyard chickens for bird flu as part of a "military-like" door-to-door campaign launched by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation.

The campaign hopes to recruit up to 1,000 volunteers to look for infected chickens in the densely populated island of Java, which is the source of most of Indonesia's human bird flu infections so far, and neighbouring Sulawesi and Sumatra islands. Bird flu has killed four people in Indonesia so far this year, and at least 62 people across Asia since 2003...