Avian Flu - What we need to know

Sweden, Denmark report H5 cases in birds

Sweden recorded its first case of the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain on Wednesday, saying European laboratory tests confirm two birds found dead in the southeast were infected with the virus.

Danish authorities said they too had found a wild bird infected with an aggressive strain of bird flu, but it was not immediately whether it was the deadly H5N1 strain.

If confirmed as H5N1, it would be the first case of the virus in Denmark.

Source.

Bird flu returns to India

The authorities in the western Indian state of Maharashtra say they have identified four cases of the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain.

Tests on poultry from the state's Jalgaon district have returned positive results, the local administrative head, Vijay Singhal, told the BBC.

Over 70,000 chickens in the region are to be slaughtered, officials say.

Hundreds of thousands of birds were destroyed in Maharashtra after India's first bird flu outbreak last month.

The virus later spread to some poultry farms in the neighbouring Gujarat state.

There have still been no reported cases of the virus in humans in India - 95 samples collected from people with flu-like symptoms last month tested negative for bird flu.

Source.

Robert Webster: 50/50 chance we will see H2H mutation

There are "about even odds at this time for the virus to learn how to transmit human to human," he told ABC's "World News Tonight." Webster, the Rosemary Thomas Chair at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., is credited with being the first scientist to find the link between human flu and bird flu.

Webster and his team of sceintists are working to find a way to beat the virus if it morphs. He has even been dubbed the "Flu Hunter."

[...] "I personally believe it will happen and make personal preparations," Webster said.

He has even stored a three-month supply of food and water at his home to prepare for an outbreak.

"Society just can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. And I think we have to face that possibility," Webster said. "I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role."

From ABC News, with thanks to HyeYoon. Here is a link to Dr. Webster's home page.

Bird flu kills three in Azerbaijan

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday that it believed test results showing three people in Azerbaijan had died of bird flu were reliable, but it awaited final confirmation from a British laboratory.

Azerbaijan's Health Ministry said late on Monday that three people who died earlier this month had been infected with bird flu in the former Soviet state's first human cases.

The results came from a mobile laboratory brought into Azerbaijan from the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit in Cairo, WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said. The tests were positive for H5 avian flu, but the exact strain of the virus was not yet known.

[...] The United Nations health agency hoped that the samples would leave the capital Baku on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The infected people were thought to be members of a family from the Salyan region, in southern Azerbaijan near the Caspian Sea coast, who were admitted to hospital early in March with suspected bird flu. Four of them died.

Azeri officials said a further six people from the same area who were in hospital with suspected bird flu were not infected.

Relatives told local media that the infected family kept poultry in their house, a common practice in rural Azerbaijan.

Source.

Afghanistan detects first avian flu cases

The H5 strain of bird flu has been found at two sites in Afghanistan and there's fear that tests could prove it to be the deadly H5N1 virus, a UN agency warned on Monday.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said five swab samples from backyard poultry farms in the capital Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad tested positive on Monday for H5, and that tests were under way to discern the virus subtype.

"There's a high risk that the virus detected is H5N1, but other possibilities remain at this time. The poultry method at the farms where the virus has been detected was backyard poultry," an FAO statement issued in Kabul said.

Source, with a bit more here.

Bird flu in Afghanistan, Myanmar and Cameroon

An H5 subtype of the avian influenza virus was reported in birds in Afghanistan and Myanmar, Joseph Domenech, chief veterinary officer with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, said today. The H5N1 strain was reported over the weekend in a farmed duck in northern Cameroon.

``The disease is spreading because of trade, but originally most probably because of wild'' migratory birds, Domenech said by phone from Rome. ``We hope to know the cause later, but now we have to support the countries as much possible'' in controlling the movement of infected birds, he said.

Source.

The WHO's bird flu sample sharing policy

Even as the World Health Organization presses China and other countries to share bird-flu data for the public good, the WHO itself runs a database limited to a select group of scientists and containing a massive trove of data -- some 2,300 genetic sequences of the virus, around a third of the world's known sequences, according to two people familiar with the database's contents. Any one of those sequences could hold clues to an effective human vaccine or drugs that could kill the virus, or help scientists determine how great a threat it poses.

Now, a lone Italian researcher has cast a harsh spotlight on the WHO's system, suggesting that it places academic pride over public health – and snubbing it by posting prized bird-flu data in plain view.

Ilaria Capua, a 39-year-old Italian veterinarian working on avian influenza in a government lab, last month received a sample of the virus in the mail from Nigerian health authorities. The virus had just attacked birds in Nigeria, the first confirmed case of the disease in Africa. The sample was something of a prize, a chance to study a specimen and explore how it spread from its stronghold in Asia.

Within days of isolating the virus, Dr. Capua says, she got an offer from a senior scientist at the WHO in Geneva, whom she declined to name, to enter her finding in the closed system. She could submit the virus's genetic information, or sequence, to the database. In exchange, she would be given the password to the WHO's massive stash of data. A spokesman for the WHO confirmed that the offer was made.

Instead, Dr. Capua posted the gene sequence in a public database accessible on the Internet. She also sent a letter on Feb. 16 to around 50 of her colleagues urging them to do the same with their bird-flu samples.

"If I had agreed" to the WHO's request, she said in an interview, "it would have been another secret sequence."

The WHO, normally an outspoken advocate of transparency, says it limits access to the database so scientists and governments will share bird-flu data they might otherwise hoard to further their own research. Scientists with access to the system can collaborate with each other but must agree not to publish results without prior consultation. Michael Perdue, a leading scientist at the WHO in Geneva, says the system has proven to be a useful compromise, because some sharing is better than none.

The quote is from a WSJ article by Nicholas Zamiska published today. Here is his earlier story on China's samples.

Why is bird flu targeting the young?

Here is a good recent article.  One theory:

"On average, you'll get influenza once every five or 10 years, so kids are less likely to have antibodies from prior exposure," he said. "Adults will have had experiences with different influenza viruses."It still doesn't explain the disproportionate number of people in their 20s and 30s who have succumbed to the disease. One theory is that some people have immunity to the N1 antigen of the bird flu virus developed from the H1N1 Spanish flu. That virus was still circulating in a milder form until 1957 and also re-emerged as a milder strain in 1977.

11 suspected H5N1 cases in Azerbaijan

Eleven suspected human cases of the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu virus, three of them fatal, are under investigation in Azerbaijan, the World Health Organisation said Thursday.

Maria Cheng, spokeswoman for the UN health agency, told АFР that the suspected victims, including eight members of a single family, all came from the same village near the Azerbaijani capital Baku.

"It is possible that they caught H5N1, because we already know that poultry were hit by the virus in neighbouring areas," said Cheng.

Flocks belonging to the patients had also been infected, but experts had yet to identify by what, she added.

Samples from the suspected human victims were being sent to a WHO-accredited laboratory in London to establish whether they had the H5N1 virus, Cheng said.

The results could be available in 24 hours or within two weeks, depending on the sample quality, she noted.

On Sunday, Azerbaijani authorities said they were investigating whether the deaths of two young children in the republic were caused by bird flu.

The two children were part of a family whose six members had been hospitalised with suspected pneumonia.

Source.

Indonesia confirms 22nd casualty

Bird flu has killed its 22nd human victim in Indonesia, a 12-year-old girl, according to tests by the World Health Organisation's Hong Kong laboratory, an Indonesian health ministry official said on Friday. "We have confirmation from the Hong Kong lab that Hanif, a 12-year-old girl from Boyolali in Central Java, died of bird flu. We now have 30 cases, with 22 of them dead," said Hariadi Wibisono, director-general of control of animal-borne disease at the health ministry.

Source. Earlier today a 3 year old boy was also confirmed to have died of bird flu.