Avian Flu - What we need to know

China reports 17th human case

China has reported its 17th human case of the H5N1 strain of bird flu since November, in a 21-year-old security guard from the central city of Wuhan.

A WHO spokesperson said the man was confirmed to have the virus, but the source of his exposure was still under investigation.

He became ill on April 1 and was hospitalised in a critical condition with a high fever.

Source.

Vietnam finds new outbreaks near Chinese border

Vietnam has detected bird flu on three farms near the Chinese border, the second such finding in the past few days, an animal health official said on Saturday.

Health workers slaughtered 157 chickens and ducks after farmers said 30 birds died on March 19 on three farms in Cao Bang province, said Dang Quang Binh, head of the provincial Animal Health Department.

"We sent samples for testing and on March 25 the results showed H5 was found in poultry samples from the three farms," Binh told Reuters by telephone from Cao Bang, 270 km (167 miles) north of Hanoi.

He was referring to the H5 subtype avian flu virus.

No further tests were likely be done to confirm if the strain was H5N1, which has killed 42 people in Vietnam since late 2003.

Source. This story comes days after infected birds were found smuggled from China.

Bird flu found in poultry smuggled from China to Vietnam

Health authorities in Vietnam have discovered bird flu in poultry illegaly imported from China and are conducting tests to find out if it is the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus, officials said Thursday.

"We made test last week on 30 samples of smuggled poultry in northern Lang Son province," said Le Van Tao, deputy director of the Animal Health Institute at the agriculture ministry.

"Results have shown one of the samples was positive to the H5 virus of avian flu," he said.

Experts still had to determine whether it was the deadly H5N1 virus that has claimed 42 lives in the communist nation since December 2003.

Tests were also under way done on another 40 samples in neigbouring Quang Ninh province, which also borders China.

No new bird flu cases have been identified in Vietnam since December and the last human death was reported in November.

Source.

Vietnam update

In an impressive burst of action, Vietnam, once the epicenter for bird flu, has temporarily stamped out the disease: no people infected since November, and no poultry outbreaks since December.

The poor communist nation says it accomplished this feat by vaccinating millions of chickens and ducks, slaughtering millions more, by being honest with international health officials, and by educating its citizens.

There were even crackdowns on local delicacies, like duck blood pudding, believed to be the source of at least one death.

[...] Vietnam spent $18.9 million vaccinating 120 million birds last year and plans to immunize 160 million more birds, said Hoang Van Nam, deputy director of the Department of Animal Health. Eighty percent of the poultry sampled after vaccination had enough immunity to protect against the disease and none was found to be carrying the virus.

China claims to have vaccinated all of its 14 billion domestic birds, but it has continued to see outbreaks and human infections. Last week, Shanghai logged its first human bird flu death, bringing the human toll in China to at least 11, according to WHO.

Widespread immunization requires thousands of workers who must keep the vaccine chilled and return to farms to give booster shots three or four weeks after the first inoculation. A third injection is given four months later to poultry raised up to a year. But many birds have much shorter life spans, meaning the cycle constantly starts over.

Read more at CNN.

Another casualty in Cambodia, suspected case in China

Bird flu killed a 3-year-old girl in Cambodia. The virus may also have infected a 29-year-old woman who died in Shanghai, China's second most-populous city.

Samples from the girl tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza strain at the Pasteur Institute in Phnom Penh, the Health Ministry and World Health Organization said in a statement today. The WHO asked China's Health Ministry for details on the woman in Shanghai, including any test results and whether she had contact with fowl, said Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, a WHO spokeswoman.

``It's a suspected case and the first found in Shanghai,'' Song Guofan, a spokesman at the city's health bureau, said today.

Source.

New suspected case in China

The 32-year-old man fell ill after visiting a live poultry market several times to conduct research in southern Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong. He died last Thursday, the ninth person to die of bird flu in China.

"He is an urban resident, he had no contact with farms or any poultry from the villages. His only exposure is the wet markets, which has poultry which are supposedly safe for consumption and safe for the public," Hong Kong's health minister York Chow said.

"And Guangdong province is one of the best (in China) in terms of supervising the control of avian flu. Since last year, it has immunized all its poultry through vaccination," he told a news conference.

Guangdong has not reported any outbreaks of the H5N1 avian flu virus in birds over the past year, and the man's death has heightened fears among experts that there might be poultry that are infected by the virus but which are not sickened by it.

Source. In a story that keeps coming back, some WHO officials are wondering about undetected cases in the country:

"It's very conceivable that there are more cases," said Dr. Henk Bekedam, the WHO's representative for China.

"But we do not have the impression, at least from the central ministry, that they are hiding information from the outside world."

Rather, Dr. Bekedam said he believes China has a "capacity problem" in terms of its ability to conduct surveillance for infection in birds and detect all human cases, particularly those in which the virus triggers milder disease.

New suspected cases in China, Indonesia

A three-year-old boy from Indonesia's Central Java province has died of bird flu, a senior health official said on Saturday, citing the results of a local test.

If confirmed by a U.N.-recognized laboratory, the boy would be the country's 21st death from the H5N1 virus, which is now endemic in poultry in the world's fourth most populous nation.

Source.

A man who died in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong may have had the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, the Hong Kong government said.

The territory's Department of Health received notification of the 32-year-old man's death from China's Ministry of Health and Guangdong province health officials on Friday, the government said in a statement.

The man, who lived in Guangzhou city -- just across the border from Hong Kong -- developed fever and pneumonia on February 22 and died on March 2, the statement, released late Friday, said.

From CNN.

China reports two new human cases

China reported two new human cases of avian influenza, bringing to 14 the number of people in the country known to have been infected. France's government said wild birds have died of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus.

A 9-year-old girl in Zhejiang province and a 26-year-old farmer in Annhui province are infected with H5N1 strain of the virus, China's Ministry of Health said in a statement on its Web site dated Feb. 25. People having close contact with them haven't shown symptoms, the statement said.

``The virus is endemic in many parts of China, so it's not surprising to see new human cases in the country,'' said Alphaluck Bhatiasevi, the World Health Organization's spokeswoman in China. ``Where there's a poultry infection, there's a likelihood new human cases will occur.''

Source. In an uncharacteristic statement the Chinese ministry of agriculture also warned of a possible "massive bird flu outbreak" in the spring.

China's bird flu samples

China's efforts to maintain control over samples of avian flu taken on its soil, as well as the research done on them, have put it at odds with international health officials trying to defeat the disease.

The standoff pits a high-ranking veterinarian in China's Ministry of Agriculture named Jia Youling against international health authorities leading the fight against bird flu. Their conflict surfaced after wild birds began dying by the thousands last spring in a remote region of western China. At the ministry's headquarters in Beijing, officials from the World Health Organization and the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization asked Dr. Jia to share with them the samples of bird flu that scientists under his ministry had collected from the birds.

He didn't provide them. Instead, Dr. Jia -- a professorial-looking 58-year-old who had risen steadily through the ministry's ranks since he joined it in 1979 -- began to talk about a recent research paper he had noticed on avian flu. According to Julie Hall, the WHO's top communicable-disease expert in Beijing and a participant at the meeting, he had a complaint: Months earlier, a team led by American scientists published a paper in an academic journal using China's samples, but without crediting or consulting their Chinese counterparts. The occasion, Dr. Hall says, "was used to express their deeper concern about ensuring that Chinese scientists were duly recognized." Dr. Jia declined to comment, saying, "I don't want to mention those things because they are all in the past."

Since that meeting, China hasn't provided a single sample from its infected flocks, despite repeated requests by WHO amid the roughly 30 outbreaks the country has reported in the past 12 months.

That is from an article written by Nicholas Zamiska for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Revere reacts here.

The latest human infections

Late on Friday China confirmed its eighth H5N1 casualty. The victim was a 20 year old woman from the Hunan province. She was a chicken farmer. (Source)

In perhaps the most worrisome news of the weekend the Saturday Wall Street Journal news tracker claims "Nigerian officials suspect the country may have its first human case of H5N1." Reuters has a similar story:

"There are a few suspected cases ... We're trying to locate them but our sources can't provide us with addresses for now," said Abdulsalam Nasidi, who is in charge of the response to bird flu as a threat to humans at the federal Health Ministry.

He said epidemiologists were searching for two people feared to have contracted bird flu in the northern state of Kaduna, close to Sambawa Farms where one of the poultry samples was found that tested positive for H5N1.

Samples have already been taken from people who are ill in the areas affected by bird flu. Should tests in Nigerian laboratories indicate the presence of bird flu, the samples would be sent abroad for further testing, Nasidi said.

Finally, on Sunday Indonesia confirmed earlier suspicions that two women who passed away earlier this week were infected with the H5N1 virus.