Posts tagged pandemic

Details of a genetically altered strain of the deadly avian flu virus are “a grave concern” to public safety and should be kept under wraps, a federal advisory board declared Tuesday.

In a letter released by the journals Science and Nature, the 23-member National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity said the data behind a new strain of the virus can be used to help prepare for a possible future outbreak. But the board recommended the researchers’ findings be published without “methods or details” that could be used by terrorists to produce a biological weapon.

“This is an unprecedented recommendation for work in the life sciences, and our analysis was conducted with careful consideration both of the potential benefits of publication and of the potential harm that could occur from such a precedent,” the panel wrote. “Our concern is that publishing these experiments in detail would provide information to some person, organization or government that would help them to develop similar mammal-adapted influenza A/H5N1 viruses for harmful purposes.”

The letter restates concerns first raised in December, after reports that scientists in Wisconsin and the Netherlands each created a strain of the influenza virus that is both highly lethal and easily transmitted between ferrets — the animals that most closely mimic the human response to the flu.

A paper by the Dutch researchers was to be published in the journal Science, while the University of Wisconsin study was to be published in the journal Nature. Both journals have already agreed to postpone publication. But airing detailed results “represent(s) a grave concern for global biosecurity, biosafety, and public health,” the NSABB concluded.

“Although scientists pride themselves on the creation of scientific literature that defines careful methodology that would allow other scientists to replicate experiments, we do not believe that widespread dissemination of the methodology in this case is a responsible action,” they wrote.

But researchers involved in the bird-flu studies say censoring their papers would make it harder for scientists to share information while doing little to deter potential terrorists.

“The logic in this work is sufficiently obvious that virologists could perform experiments similar to ours even if our method is not published,” the Dutch team wrote in Science last week.

Scientists and public health officials have long feared that the Asian bird flu virus, which now rarely infects people, could become a human-to-human disease. The flu has killed about 60% of the people who have contracted it since its discovery in 1997.

(Source: CNN)

MEXICO CITY (BNO NEWS) — An ongoing swine flu outbreak in Mexico has left at least 29 people dead and nearly 1,500 others infected, health officials confirmed on Saturday. Thousands more are also ill as the country faces several types of flu this season.

Since the start of the ongoing winter season, at least 7,069 people have reported suffering from symptoms similar to those of swine flu. Lab tests are still underway and have so far confirmed 1,456 cases of the disease, which is officially known as A/H1N1.

According to Mexico’s Health Ministry (SSA), at least twenty-nine people have died of swine flu so far this season. While no health emergency has been declared, officials expect the death toll will rise in the coming weeks as Mexico also faces A/H3N2 and B influenza.

The H1N1 influenza virus emerged in the Mexican state of Veracruz in April 2009 and quickly spread around the world, causing the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a global flu pandemic in June 2009. At least 18,000 people have died of the disease since, although the actual number is believed to be far higher.

In August 2010, the WHO declared that the swine flu pandemic was over. “In the post-pandemic period, influenza disease activity will have returned to levels normally seen for seasonal influenza,” the WHO said at the time. “It is expected that the pandemic virus will behave as a seasonal influenza A virus.”

(Source: theintelhub.com)

AT least 10,000 ducks will have to be destroyed to contain an outbreak of bird flu at two Victorian farms.

The virus found in birds on the two properties is a low pathogenic avian influenza (LPAI) and not the deadlier form of the virus that spread through Asia, threatening humans and leading to a mass cull of poultry.

Dr Andrew Cameron, the state’s chief veterinary officer, says there is no risk to the community, but authorities had to act quickly to quarantine the two properties run by a company north of Melbourne to remove any chance the virus could spread.

“This is all about making sure that the virus doesn’t one day in the future evolve and mutate into a more serious form,” he said.

The source of the latest outbreak has not been confirmed, but officials believe the virus could have been introduced from wild waterfowl known to harbour influenza viruses.

The Department of Primary Industries will work with the farm owner to dispose of all the ducks and disinfect the farms, he said.

The discovery of the virus came from routine testing that is conducted regularly in the hopes of catching outbreaks before they get out of hand.

Bird flu, also known as avian influenza or AI, is a contagious disease that affects all kinds of poultry.

Dr Cameron said transmission of the virus from birds to humans is very uncommon and this recent outbreak was the first time this particular subtype of the virus had been found in Australian poultry.

“It is a rare event, and we want to absolutely make sure it stays that way,” he said.

Control of the disease is taking place under a nationally agreed framework which involves industry, the Commonwealth and all state and territory governments.

An incident management team has been assembled and is tracking all movements to and from the infected farms and surrounding areas.

The two farms are about 25km apart in an area north of Melbourne, but officials are keeping the exact location private.

Three previous Australian outbreaks of avian influenza in Victoria - the most recent in 1992 - have been successfully eradicated.

(Source: news.com.au)

A man in south-west China who contracted the bird flu virus died on Sunday, health authorities said, the second human death from the virulent disease in the country in just under a month.

The news comes after neighbouring Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia also reported deaths from avian influenza, and after chickens tested positive for the H5N1 virus in Hong Kong, prompting a mass cull of birds.

The latest Chinese victim fell ill on January 6 and was admitted to hospital in Guiyang - capital of Guizhou province - where his condition rapidly deteriorated, the provincial health department said in a statement.

Tests on the patient before he died confirmed he had contracted the H5N1 virus, it added.

“So far, 71 people who had close contact with the victim have not developed abnormal symptoms,” the health department said.

He is the second man to die from bird flu in China in less than a month, after a bus driver in the southern province of Guangdong passed away from the disease on December 31.

The latest death brings to 28 the number of people in China who have died from the disease - which is fatal in humans in about 60 per cent of cases - since 2003, out of 42 reported human cases.

The Hong Kong Department of Health said in a statement on Sunday it had been notified of the case by the mainland’s health authorities, which said the patient was 39 years old.

Authorities from Hong Kong and the mainland have been working closely together since three chickens in the Chinese territory tested positive for the H5N1 virus in mid-December.

Most human infections are the result of direct contact with infected birds, and the virus does not pass easily among humans.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says it has never identified a “sustained human-to-human spread” of the virus since it re-emerged in 2003.

But according to the Hong Kong health department, the Guizhou province victim, who has not been named, had not reported any obvious exposure to poultry before the onset of symptoms.

Aside from China, Vietnam on Thursday reported its first human death from the virus in nearly two years, and the disease also claimed the life of a toddler in Cambodia.

Indonesia, meanwhile, on Friday reported its second human death from bird flu this year when a five-year-old girl who recently lost her relative to the deadly virus also passed away.

China is considered one of the nations most at risk of bird flu epidemics because it has the world’s biggest poultry population and many chickens in rural areas are kept close to humans.

But the Guizhou health department sought to ease concerns on Sunday, saying bird flu was “preventable, controllable and treatable”.

AFP

(Source: abc.net.au)

Over the past 48 hours, news has broken in India of the existence of at least 12 patients infected with tuberculosis that has become resistant to all the drugs used against the disease. Physicians in Mumbai are calling the strain TDR, for Totally Drug-Resistant. In other words, it is untreatable as far as they know.

News of some of the cases was published Dec. 21 in an ahead-of-print letter to the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which just about everyone missed, including me. (But not, thankfully, the hyper-alert global-health blogger Crawford Kilian, to whom I hat-tip.) That letter describes the discovery and treatment of four cases of TDR-TB since last October. On Saturday, the Times of India disclosed that there are actually 12 known cases just in one hospital, the P. D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre; in the article, Hinduja’s Dr. Amita Athawale admits, “The cases we clinically isolate are just the tip of the iceberg.” And as a followup, the Hindustan Times reported yesterday that most hospitals in the city — by extension, most Indian cities — don’t have the facilities to identify the TDR strain, making it more likely that unrecognized cases can go on to infect others.

Why this is bad news: TB is already one of the world’s worst killers, up there with malaria and HIV/AIDS, accounting for 9.4 million cases and 1.7 million deaths in 2009, according to the WHO. At the best of times, TB treatment is difficult, requiring at least 6 months of pill combinations that have unpleasant side effects and must be taken long after the patient begins to feel well.

Because of the mismatch between treatment and symptoms, people often don’t take their full course of drugs — and from that (and some other factors I’ll talk about in a minute) we get multi-drug resistant and extensively drug-resistant, MDR and XDR, TB. MDR is resistant to the first-choice drugs, requiring that patients instead be treated with a larger cocktail of “second-line” agents, which are less effective, have more side effects, and take much longer to effect a cure, sometimes 2 years or more. XDR is resistant to the three first-line drugs and several of the nine or so drugs usually recognized as being second choice.

As of last spring, according to the WHO, there were about 440,000 cases of MDR-TB per year, accounting for 150,000 deaths, and 25,000 cases of XDR. At the time, the WHO predicted there would be 2 million MDR or XDR cases in the word by 2012.

That was before TDR-TB.

The first cases, as it turns out, were not these Indian ones, but an equally under-reported cluster of 15 patients in Iran in 2009. They were embedded in a larger outbreak of 146 cases of MDR-TB, and what most worried the physicians who saw them was that the drug resistance was occurring in immigrants and cross-border migrants as well as Iranians: Half of the patients were Iranian, and the rest Afghan, Azerbaijani and Iraqi. The Iranian team raised the possibility at the time that rates of TDR were higher than they knew, especially in border areas where there would be little diagnostic capacity or even basic medical care.

The Indian cases disclosed before Christmas demonstrate what happens when TB patients don’t get good medical care. The letter to CID describes the course of four of the 12 patients; all four saw two to four doctors during their illness, and at least three got multiple, partial courses of the wrong antibiotics. The authors say this is not unusual:

The vast majority of these unfortunate patients seek care from private physicians in a desperate attempt to find a cure for their tuberculosis. This sector of private-sector physicians in India is among the largest in the world and these physicians are unregulated both in terms of prescribing practice and qualifications. A study that we conducted in Mumbai showed that only 5 of 106 private practitioners practicing in a crowded area called Dharavi could prescribe a correct prescription for a hypothetical patient with MDR tuberculosis. The majority of prescriptions were inappropriate and would only have served to further amplify resistance, converting MDR tuberculosis to XDR tuberculosis and TDR tuberculosis.

As their comment suggests, the other TB challenge is diagnosis, especially of resistant strains, and here again the news is not good. The WHO said last spring that only two-thirds of countries with resistant TB epidemics have the lab capacity to detect the resistant strains. As a result, only one MDR patient out of every 10 even gets into treatment, and when they do, cure rates range from 82 percent down to 25 percent. That’s for MDR. None of the TDR patients have been recorded cured, and at least one of the known Indian patients has died.

Meanwhile, health authorities estimate that one patient with active TB can infect up to 15 others. And thus resistant TB spreads: XDR-TB was first identified just in 2006, and it has since been found in 69 countries around the world.

(Source: Wired)

A man in southern China has died of bird flu a week after being admitted to hospital with a fever, state media reports.

The 39-year-old bus driver from Guangdong province contracted the first human case of bird flu in China in 18 months.

The man from Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, developed symptoms last week and was admitted to a hospital on Christmas Day because of severe pneumonia, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The report added the man died in the early afternoon on Saturday (local time), after having tested positive for the H5N1 virus.

Guangdong’s official newspaper, the Southern Daily, said 120 people who had contact with the man had developed no signs of sickness.

About 10 days ago Hong Kong culled 17,000 chickens at a wholesale poultry market and suspended all imports of live chickens from mainland China for 21 days after a dead chicken there tested positive for the H5N1 virus.

The virus is normally found in birds but can jump to people who do not have immunity to it.

Researchers worry it could mutate into a form that would spread around the world and kill millions.

In recent years, the virus has become active in various parts of the world, mainly in east Asia, during the cooler months.

Authorities in China are worried about the spread of infectious diseases around this time when millions of Chinese travel in crowded buses and trains across the country to go home to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

The current strain of H5N1 is highly pathogenic, kills most species of birds and up to 60 per cent of the people it infects.

Since 2003, it has infected 573 people around the world, killing 336.

The virus also kills migratory birds but species that manage to survive can carry and disperse the virus to new, uninfected locations.

It transmits less easily between people but there have been clusters of infections in people in Indonesia and Thailand in the past.

Reuters/AFP

(Source: abc.net.au)

Fear of terrorism as university prepares to publish key details

A deadly strain of bird flu with the potential to infect and kill millions of people has been created in a laboratory by European scientists – who now want to publish full details of how they did it.

(Source: independent.co.uk)

The suppression of breakthrough research into deadly bird flu strains has been labelled scientific censorship by some, but others say it is a necessary step to prevent a possible biological attack.

Last month researchers in the Netherlands discovered that the H5N1 influenza virus, or bird flu, could develop into a dangerous virus that can spread between humans.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu is fatal in 60 per cent of human cases but only 350 people have so far died from the disease largely because it cannot be spread by sneezing or coughing.

But by using ferrets in a lab, the researchers proved it was possible to change H5N1 into an aerosol-transmissible virus that can be easily spread rapidly through the air.

The genetic mutations could trigger deadly epidemics in humans, and the scientists behind the research have now agreed to remove key details of their work from publication.

The research - known as the Erasmus study - alarmed the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), a US government science committee.

It argued the information could be used by terrorists to orchestrate a biological attack using the virus.

The virologists were planning to publish their research in the respected journals Science and Nature.

But they have now agreed to redact their manuscripts at the request of the NSABB.

Dr Philip Cambell, Nature’s editor-in-chief, describes the NSABB’s recommendations as unprecedented.

“It is essential for public health that the full details of any scientific analysis of flu viruses be available to researchers,” he said in a statement.

He says authorities are trying to work out how appropriate access to the scientific methods and data can be granted within the scenario recommended by the NSABB.

Censorship

But there are concerns now that science is being censored.

Professor Wendy Barclay, the chair of Influenza Virology at Imperial College in London, says the Erasmus study should be reviewed and shared.

“It’s a very worrying idea that the information may be restricted to those that qualify in some way to be allowed to share it,” she said in a statement.

“Who will qualify? How will this be decided? In the end, is the likelihood of misuse outweighed by the danger of beginning a big brother society?

“I’m not convinced that withholding scientific know-how will prevent the highly unlikely scenario of misuse of information, but I am worried that it may stunt our progress towards the improved control of this infectious disease.”

‘Major mistake’

Peter Collignon, a Professor of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at the Australian National University, says the study should not have been conducted in the first place.

“Yes this is censorship, but by allowing this material to be out in the general public I think you’re putting public health at higher risk rather than lower risk,” he said.

“If you’ve actually taken a virus like the influenza virus… if you genetically engineer that and engineer mutations that then make it readily transmissible from… potentially from person to person, that is a huge problem given that the millions of people who’ve died in 1918 as a result of the Spanish flu.

“So to allow that material to be published that may be used by somebody with less than honourable intents, to use it to engineer something, I think is a major mistake.

“But what is even more a major mistake was that this research was allowed to go ahead in the first place.”

Scary

He says there should be an international convention on the use of aggressive viruses.

“I think if you’re taking a virus we have now and making it even more aggressive or more lethal and more easily spread, I do think you need an international convention or group of countries that regulate that so that just one country can’t use it against the others,” he said.

“And to me you really have to justify doing it and have to do this in the utmost secure facilities.”

The Erasmus study was commissioned by the American National Institutes of Health.

The Dutch research team was led by Ron Fouchier at Rotterdam’s Erasmus Medical Centre. The researchers received a permit to conduct the study from the Dutch government.

NSABB chair Paul Keim, a microbial geneticist, told Science magazine’s Science Insider report last month that he had huge concerns about the potential havoc the man-made virus could unleash.

“I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one,” Mr Keim said.

“I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.”

(Source: abc.net.au)

Hong Kong has culled 17,000 chickens and suspended live poultry imports for 21 days after three birds tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu virus.

Health chief York Chow announced the measures after a dead chicken at the city’s main wholesale market and two wild birds tested positive for the virus, which can be fatal to humans.

Authorities raised the bird flu alert level to “serious” and suspended live imports while they trace the origin of the infected chicken, meaning major disruptions to poultry supplies over the busy Christmas period.

“It is unfortunate that an avian influenza case is detected before the Winter Solstice, necessitating a halt to the supply of live chickens,” Mr Chow said.

“I understand that it will cause inconvenience to the public and the poultry trade will also encounter losses.”

All chickens at the Wholesale Poultry Market were slaughtered and extra inspections were ordered at chicken farms and hospitals.

Authorities confirmed on Tuesday that an oriental magpie robin found dead in a secondary school at the weekend had tested positive for H5N1, the second such case in a week.

Another secondary school was ordered to close for a day for disinfection last Friday after a dead black-headed gull was found with the virus.

A school clerk who picked up the bird was taken to hospital with her son, who had developed flu-like symptoms, but both were cleared later.

Hong Kong was the site of the world’s first major outbreak of bird flu among humans in 1997 when six people died. Millions of birds were culled.

The virus, which does not pass easily from human to human, has killed around 350 people worldwide, with Indonesia the worst-hit country. Most human infections are the result of direct contact with infected birds.

In people it can cause fever, coughing, a sore throat, pneumonia, respiratory disease and, in about 60 per cent of cases, death.

Scientists fear H5N1 will mutate into a form readily transmissible between humans with the potential to cause millions of deaths.

Hong Kong is particularly nervous about infectious diseases after an outbreak of deadly respiratory disease SARS in 2003 killed 300 people in the city and a further 500 worldwide.

AFP

(Source: abc.net.au)

Researchers in the Netherlands studying bird flu or avian influenza (H5N1) have reportedly developed a strain of the virus that’s just as lethal as the original virus.

According to the New Scientist magazine, research on the bird flu virus has resulted in the highly contagious strain that has some scientists worried about the possible development of a bioweapon.

Media reports say the US biosecurity committee is deciding whether the crucial research is too dangerous to publish since it might allow the H5N1 to cause a lethal human pandemic.

The research was initially submitted to the journal Science, but has now been passed to the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB).

“The benefits of publishing this work do not outweigh the dangers of showing others how to replicate it,” Thomas Ingelsby of the Center for Biosecurity was quoted as saying.

According to the US Department of Health & Human Services, the H5N1 kills more than half the people it infects, but cannot be readily passed from person to person.

It has so far infected more than 500 people in more than a dozen countries.

“The potential for escape of that virus is staggering,” says D A Henderson of the Center for Biosecurity.

“A catastrophe would result” if a highly contagious virus with a 50 per cent kill rate got loose.

The NSABB does not have the power to prevent publication of scientific findings, but it can request that journals not publish certain studies.

(Source: Yahoo!)