Olivia Rondonuwu & Ed Davies | Jakarta | May 7

Reuters - Indonesia is trying to defend the interests of poorer nations by refusing to share bird flu samples with the West and is locked in a cultural misunderstanding over the issue, Jakarta's health minister said on Wednesday.

Siti Fadillah Supari also said in an interview that a U.S. naval medical lab based in Indonesia for research into tropical diseases was barely benefiting its host country and was not being transparent in its operations.

"Poor countries sent the virus to the WHO (World Health Organisation) on behalf of humanity. But it was commercialised by the WHO," Supari said in her offices in central Jakarta.

Officials in Indonesia, the country with the highest number of human bird flu victims, have said they want to ensure equal access to any vaccines that are made against bird flu.

But U.S. Health Secretary Michael Leavitt said last month after visiting Jakarta that Indonesia also wanted payments.

Category: Bird flu • Birds • Surveillance • biology
Posted on: March 28, 2008 6:07 AM, by revere
Effect Measure

Hard on the heels of my semi-facetious prediction that bird flu would return to Germany because Germany had declared itself bird flu free, the Swiss announced an infected wild duck on the shores of Lake Sempach. Since this duck didn't have a passport on him I am sure he never strayed over the nearby border with Germany. We don't know what kind of duck this was [see update, below], a question that is of surprising interest in light of a new paper.

Will Dunham | Washington | March 26

Reuters - Ducks, people and rice paddies are the primary forces driving outbreaks of avian influenza in Thailand and Vietnam, and the number of chickens is less pivotal, scientists said on Wednesday.

U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization experts and others looked at three waves of H5N1 bird flu in Thailand and Vietnam in 2004 and 2005. The virus has killed 236 people in 12 countries since 2003.

They used computer modeling to study how various factors were involved in the spread of the virus, including the numbers of ducks, geese and chickens, human population size, rice cultivation and local geography.

Even though Thailand and Vietnam addressed the outbreaks in different ways, the researchers found that the numbers of ducks and people, and the extent of rice cultivation were the most important contributing factors underpinning the outbreaks.

Washington | March 18

Reuters -

Southern China may have been the source for much of the spread of the H5N1 avian flu virus, researchers suggested on Tuesday.

A genetic analysis of the virus shows that strains that showed up in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia in 2002 and 2003 closely resemble a strain from poultry markets in China's Yunnan Province, the flu experts found.

Two viruses found in poultry in China's Hunan province in 2002 and 2003 were most closely related to viruses from Indonesia, they reported in the Journal of Virology.

"These results suggest a direct transmission link for H5N1 viruses between Yunnan and Vietnam and also between Hunan and Indonesia during 2002 and 2003," wrote the researchers, who included Guan Yi of the University of Hong Kong and Robert Webster of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

"Poultry trade may be responsible for virus introduction to Vietnam, while the transmission route from Hunan to Indonesia remains unclear," they wrote.

** FACTBOX-WHO figures for bird flu cases in humans
** Vietnam military to test bird flu vaccine on humans
** Bird flu in Indonesia could mutate into human form: UN agency

Mark Forbe | Jakarta | February 21

SMH - THE United States has rejected the Indonesian Health Minister's claims that it is using bird flu samples to produce biological weapons and World Health Organisation officials have condemned allegations of conspiring to profit from bird flu vaccines. The Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is understood to have ordered the minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, to recall copies of her book on avian influenza, which alleges the US and the WHO are conspiring against developing countries by seizing control of bird flu samples.

WHO officials said they were dismayed by some of the claims and urged Dr Supari to do more to control bird flu's spread and end her refusal to share virus samples - which is hampering attempts to find a cure.

At a news conference yesterday Dr Yudhoyono said Indonesia was willing to resume sharing bird flu virus samples if a fair and equitable agreement was reached.

Kate Spinner | Sarasota | Dec 28

Sarasota Herald-Tribune - Duck hunters, including those prowling the Everglades this winter, are helping scientists nationwide guard against a bird flu pandemic.

Before taking home their ducks, hunters in much of Florida offer them to wildlife inspectors so the birds can be checked for influenza.

The research is intended to help understand how bird flu spreads, so that dangerous flu strains can be swiftly found and eradicated.

"The main objective is early detection or prevention," said Thomas DeLiberto, national wildlife disease coordinator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "It's a way to get a heads-up on a potential problem."

Scientists are focusing on ducks because the birds can harbor and spread influenza viruses without showing any signs of illness.

Riyadh | Nov 21

AFP - Saudi Arabia's agriculture ministry said on Wednesday that more than 3.5 million birds have been culled or are in the process of being destroyed following an outbreak of bird flu.

"More than 3.5 million birds have been or are being culled since the first infection (with the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu) was detected" on November 12, said a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.

The ministry said new cases of bird flu had been detected in farms west and south of Riyadh.

Effect Measure

Posted on: November 11, 2007 4:15 PM, by revere

Time to return to a theme we have sounded on numerous occasions in the past three years. In a recent post we called for a renewed investment in our public health and social service infrastructure as the best strategy. The object is to harden local communities and make them more resilient to all kinds of shocks, not just a pandemic. We should have added, however, that this means local preparation can't be too local: only looking after ourselves and our families. Of course families should prepare, to the best of their ability, and having some reasonable stockpile will stand them in good stead whether it is a pandemic, a flood, a hurricane or a blizzard. But the more important point is that making a community more resilient requires structures that allow us to help each other, not just protect ourselves.

London | October 7

UPI - A new strain of the bird flu virus spreading around the world is more infectious to humans, a study lead by a U.S. researcher has found.

Led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the new study found the H5N1 virus has apparently mutated into a new strain that increases the risk of a human pandemic due to its increased level of communicability, The Independent said Saturday.

Kawaoka said the new strain does not represent a fully pandemic strain of the virus, but warned the mutated virus has been found in both Europe and Africa.

"The viruses circulating in Europe and Africa all have this mutation," the doctor said. "So they are the ones that are closer to human-like flu."

Maggie Fox | Washington | September 27

Reuters - The H5N1 bird flu virus can pass through a pregnant woman's placenta to infect the fetus, researchers reported on Thursday.

They also found evidence of what doctors had long suspected -- that the virus not only affects the lungs, but passes throughout the body into the gastrointestinal tract, the brain, liver and blood cells.

"The work helps us to understand H5N1's high fatality rate, as well as serving as model for global collaboration in the field of emerging infectious diseases," said Dr. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York, who directed the study.

Lipkin and a team at Peking University in Beijing studied tissue taken from two people killed by H5N1 in China -- a 24-year-old pregnant woman and a 35-year-old man.

Tan Ee Lyn | Hong Kong | September 23

Reuters - Researchers in Singapore have created a handheld device that can detect the H5N1 bird flu virus from throat swab samples in under 30 minutes, raising hopes it will lead to rapid detection and containment of the virus.

Conventional laboratory tests take around 4 hours, and require machines to first isolate and amplify the virus before it is tested.

Writing in the latest issue of Nature Medicine, the scientists said the new device would allow decentralised testing of the H5N1 virus, especially in countries that lack basic public health resources.

H5N1, a disease found mostly in birds, is endemic in many parts of Asia and experts have warned for years that it could spark a pandemic, killing millions of people, if it learns to jump from person to person.

Washington | August 28

Reuters - A mathematical analysis has confirmed that H5N1 avian influenza spread from person to person in Indonesia in April, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

They said they had developed a tool to run quick tests on disease outbreaks to see if dangerous epidemics or pandemics may be developing.

Health officials around the world agree that a pandemic of influenza is overdue, and they are most worried by the H5N1 strain of avian influenza that has been spreading through flocks from Asia to Africa.

It rarely passes to humans, but since 2003 it has infected 322 people and killed 195 of them.

August 15

WHO - The present advice is applicable for the current situation with sporadic A(H5N1) virus human infection. As more data become available or if the disease patterns change, this advice will be modified as appropriate

Kathy Marks | August 14

The Independent - The death of a young woman from bird flu on the Indonesian island of Bali has raised fears among British holidaymakers, giving visitors another reason to stay away and dealing another blow to the tourism industry.

Bali has suffered two terrorist attacks in recent years, with more than 200 people killed in nightclub bombings in 2002. The tourism industry was starting to recover when two restaurants were blown up in 2005. Twenty people died, including five foreigners.

Now Bali has recorded its first bird-flu death, with a 29-year-old woman dying in hospital in the capital, Denpasar, on Sunday. Doctors are trying to establish whether her two-year-old daughter, who died recently after playing with chickens, also had the virus.

August 1

Nature - Avian flu: situation update

This month we give top billing to research and development in vaccine technology. Better understanding of how the immune system responds to different vaccine formulations, including a variety of new adjuvants, are paving the way for the creation of vaccines with more defined action and fewer side effects. Meanwhile the approval in Europe of cell-culture based influenza vaccines promises to speed up the manufacture of sufficient quantities of vaccine to meet future demand - particularly in the event of a pandemic.

These developments are not a moment too soon in the face of the continuing threat posed by H5N1 avian flu, which has caused new human cases in Indonesia, Vietnam and Egypt, and has been reported in wild birds in France and Germany. The total number of human H5N1 cases world wide is now 318, with 192 deaths, as of 11 July 2007, according to the WHO.

Hamberg | July 9

Reuters - German authorities culled about 1,200 farm and pet birds over the weekend after a pet goose tested positive for the lethal strain of bird flu, a government spokesman said on Monday.

The slaughtering programme had now been completed in an exclusion zone around Wickersdorf in Thueringen in east Germany, a Thueringen state government spokesman said.

A pet goose in a home for mentally handicapped people had tested positive for the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu and all farm and pet birds in a three-km exclusion zone were culled as a precautionary measure over the weekend, he said.

Kuala Lumpur | June 6

AFP - An isolated new outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has been detected among poultry in a village on the outskirts of the Malaysian capital, officials said Wednesday.

Kamarudin Mohammed Isa, head of the disease control section at the Department of Veterinary Services, said the virus was confirmed late Tuesday night in chickens in the Sungei Buluh area of Selangor state.

"We will cull birds within a one kilometre (0.6 mile) radius from the index cases," he said, noting that authorities expected to start killing about 2,000 chickens in the village and surrounding area later Wednesday.

The veterinary department was alerted Sunday by the owner of the infected chickens after about 60 of his birds died, said Kamarudin.

Surveillance teams are being sent to surrounding areas to check for more virus outbreaks but none so far has been detected, he said.

Alison Young | Atlanta | April 27

AJC - Facing a tangled bureaucracy and a lack of qualified staff, nearly half of the overseas jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are vacant despite an urgent need to guard against foreign health threats. Many of the jobs will remain unfilled for another year, according to an internal CDC memo obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"This is a critical time for global health," wrote Dr. Stephen Blount, director of the CDC's Coordinating Office for Global Health, in an April 13 memo to CDC Director Julie Gerberding. The potential of an influenza pandemic, the current HIV/AIDS pandemic and the threat of a bioterrorist attack from abroad "fuels the urgency to make overseas assignments in a timely manner," he wrote.

Only 166 of the CDC's 304 overseas positions in 53 countries are filled, according to the memo. At least 85 positions likely will remain unfilled until 2008, Blount said. Among the causes he cited: Delays at a federal human resource center in Atlanta and an additional bureaucratic layer that requires CDC foreign postings be approved by a senior political appointee's office in Washington.

CDC job postings include openings in China and Indonesia — locations where outbreaks of the H5N1 avian influenza virus have caused significant concern.

CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said global health is a top priority, that the agency is doing everything it can to deploy staff and that progress is being made.

Donald G McNeil Jr | March 27

NYT - Just exactly what is the bird flu virus doing?

The virus, H5N1, which was first isolated in humans in 1997, has not started a pandemic in a full decade of trying, so a few flu experts think it never will.

But the mainstream view is less optimistic. Viruses mutate constantly, many experts point out. And when one has already acquired the ability to jump species, occasionally spread from human to human and kill 60 percent of the people who catch it, it is far too early to dismiss it.

So even though the human death toll from H5N1 is still below 200, scientists around the world are racing to study the ways in which it might mutate to spread easily among humans.

Christopher Doering | Washington | March 14

Reuters - It is unlikely that a sick bird would be able to carry the deadly H5N1 avian influenza virus into the United States through the Pacific and Atlantic flyways, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

'The distance may be too long for a (sick) bird to get that far,' Steve Kappes, deputy administrator at the U.S. Agriculture Department's Agricultural Research Service, told reporters at a briefing on bird flu.

A 7-year study of more than 8,200 wild bird samples in Alaska -- a key region where Asian and North American birds meet in the summer -- found all cases of bird flu that were detected originated in North America.

February 28

New Scientist - The first potential bird flu vaccine for humans to help prevent a widespread outbreak in the US won support from US experts on Tuesday as an interim measure until better versions come along.

The experimental vaccine, made by Sanofi-Aventis, would be the only US-approved vaccine for the H5N1 influenza virus in case of a pandemic if the Food and Drug Administration later approves it.

While no US cases of the virus have been reported, a rising number of outbreaks in birds and humans in other countries have FDA and other federal agencies concerned.

Jeremy Laurance & Colin Brown | Posted February 10

The Independent - The avian flu virus that led to the culling of 160,000 birds on a Bernard Matthews turkey farm may have entered the human food supply, Government food safety experts admitted yesterday.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) said it was investigating the possibility as part of a wider inquiry into the outbreak on the farm at Holton in Suffolk. There was no threat to human health, the FSA said.

The most likely cause of the outbreak is now believed to be frozen poultry pieces imported from Hungary, which may have been contaminated with the virus, to a processing plant next to the Suffolk farm.

UPDATE Feb 13:
Britain admits bird flu could have entered food chain -
British scientists approved on Monday the re-opening of a slaughterhouse on a site hit by an outbreak of virulent bird flu, but admitted the virus could have already entered the human food chain.

"There is no threat to human health from properly cooked turkey and other meat," Miliband told BBC News 24 after an afternoon of talks with experts and officials from Hungary, a suspected source of the outbreak.

Helen Branswell | February 10

Canada.com - Nearly 90 per cent of the people who’ve been diagnosed so far with H5N1 avian flu were under age 40, a new analysis from the World Health Organization shows.

And two British scientists suggest that as yet unexplained phenomenon could be a clue that widespread immunity to infection with this virus may exist in people aged 35 and older.

In a letter to the March issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, Matthew Smallman-Raynor of the University of Nottingham and Andrew Cliff of the University of Cambridge note that the age distribution of H5N1 human cases is "consistent with a biological model of geographically widespread immunity to avian influenza A (H5N1) in persons born before 1969."

Jo Revill | February 8

Observer.co.uk - A consignment of dead turkeys from the Bernard Matthews' plant in Hungary, where there have been recent outbreaks of bird flu, could be the source of the disease's outbreak in Britain last week, The Observer can reveal.

The firm's Suffolk plant now lies at the centre of a major investigation by government officials who no longer believe that Britain's first outbreak of bird flu was spread by wild birds.

Tan Ee Lyn | Hong Kong | February 8

Reuters - Health experts and aid agencies condemned Indonesia on Thursday for refusing to share H5N1 bird flu samples with foreign laboratories but conceded that the developing country has a valid point to make.

Life-saving medicines from HIV antiretrovirals to heart disease drugs are often inaccessible to developing countries because of restrictive patent laws and high costs. These same nations now increasingly worry that vaccines and drugs to fight the H5N1 virus would similarly be out of reach in the event of an influenza pandemic.

On Wednesday, Indonesia declared it would only share its H5N1 bird flu samples with those who agreed not to use them for commercial reasons. Its officials insisted it was unfair for foreign vaccine makers to use these samples, design vaccines, patent them and then sell the "discovery" back to the country.

* WHO: Indonesia undermines global flu protection
* Baxter Defends Vaccine Agreement
* Avoid stray cats, U.S. Embassy in Indonesia warns, citing bird flu
* W. Java has new bird flu patient