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U.S. Starts Human Tests of Avian Flu Vaccine
Wed Mar 23, 2005 06:37 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. health officials said on Wednesday they have started human tests of a vaccine against avian flu, which experts believe could kill tens of millions of people if it becomes easily passed from person to person.
The vaccine, made by Sanofi Pasteur, will be tested in 450 healthy adults in Rochester, New York; Baltimore and Los Angeles, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said.
"While there have been relatively few cases worldwide of H5N1 avian influenza infection in humans, the public health community is concerned that the virus will develop the capability of efficiently spreading from human to human and thus create a risk for a worldwide pandemic," NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a statement.
"The initiation of this vaccine trial marks a key advance in our efforts to prepare to respond to an avian flu pandemic."
The vaccine is made from an inactivated H5N1 avian flu virus isolated in 2004. The Phase I study is meant to test the vaccine's safety -- not whether it protects against the infection that has wiped out millions of birds in Asia and killed dozens of people in Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia since the end of 2003...
Agreed---at least it's a start---pandemics strike more fear in my heart than terrorism.Kathianne said:I hope we won't need it, but glad they are working on it.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=7989323
N Korea admits bird flu amid food shortages
By Song Jung-a in Seoul
Published: March 27 2005 14:32 | Last updated: March 27 2005 14:32
North Korea on Sunday admitted that bird flu had broken out in the capital Pyongyang and that it culled hundreds of thousands of chickens to contain the deadly virus.
It was the first time the secretive communist state confirmed an outbreak of the disease, which has swept through large parts of Asia, killing 48 humans and millions of birds since late 2003.
The outbreak is expected to see a vast culling of poultry, aggravating the impoverished states food situation.
The country has relied on external food aid to feed its 23m people for more than a decade, after its state farm system collapsed in mid-1990s due to mismanagement and the loss of subsidies from the former Soviet Union.
The World Food Program also made a fresh appeal on Sunday for food donations for North Korea, warning that dwindling food supplies were forcing Pyongyang to cut off aid to children and the elderly in the isolated country.
Bird flu has recently broken out at a few chicken farms including the Hadang chicken farm, the Norths official Korean Central News Agency quoted quarantine officials as saying.
Hadang is one of Pyongyangs five biggest chicken farms.
Hundreds of thousands of infected chickens have been burned before their burial at the relevant chicken farms, the report went on to say.
No infection among chicken breeders had been found, it added.
North Korea had previously declared itself free of the disease, although South Koreas Yonhap News reported last week that thousands of chickens had died at the Hadang farm, prompting the World Health Organisation to ask the reclusive North for confirmation.
The KCNA said North Koreas quarantine official have been trying to prevent the spread of the disease to other poultry farms, although it remained unclear if the virus spotted in North Korea was the H5N1 strain, which has been known to migrate to humans from birds.
The WHO reported more than 69 cases of the H5N1 strain of bird flu infecting humans since late 2003. The virus has killed 34 Vietnamese, 12 Thais and two Cambodians so far. South Korea confirmed 19 cases of the H5N1 strain at poultry farms between December 2003 and March 2004, but no infection in humans has been reported in the country.
North Korea Must Tell the Truth About Bird Flu
The government on Monday said it would provide North Korea with medical and technical aid and quarantine equipment in combating its latest bird flu outbreak, but asked Pyongyang to provide accurate information about the damage done.
What is known thus far is only a report by the state-run Korea Central News Agency that with the outbreak of avian influenza in two or three chicken farms near Pyongyang, hundreds and thousands of birds have been buried or burned. There are 135 confirmed bird flu strains, and the methods of diagnosing and combating them differ from strain to strain. If the wrong drugs are used, it fosters resistance. Depending on how far the flu has spread, disinfection methods and the scope of the slaughter vary. South Korea cannot offer medicine and equipment at random.
Avian influenza has broken out at massive chicken farms near Pyongyang directly managed by the authorities. Many experts think chances are high that the flu has spread to a many other areas where quarantine and sanitary conditions are poor. North Korea admitted the outbreak as late as Sunday; the outbreak was rumored among experts here for over a month.
Since we have suffered nationwide bird flu outbreaks, we do have experience of combating it. In Asia, Korea and Japan have the technology for diagnosing the deadly disease. But if we are to provide adequate technology, facilities and equipment, North Korea must give us accurate information about bird flu strains, the process by which it is spreading and the preventive measures taken so far. Only then will we be able to help effectively.
Since this is not a migration season for birds, experts say, chances are slim of the bird flu in the North spreading to the South. But we should not become complacent. In only three months after our first avian flu broke out in December 2003, we had to slaughter as many as 5.2 million birds. Thorough precautions must be taken with the people, goods and vehicles traveling to the North. In the restricted area along the de-militarized zone, blissfully free from people, there live many resident birds that fly to and fro between the two Koreas.
President authorizes influenza quarantine
Published April 2, 2005
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Bush signed an executive order yesterday authorizing the government to impose a quarantine to deal with any outbreak of a particularly lethal variation of influenza now found in Southeast Asia.
The order is intended to deal with a type of influenza commonly referred to as bird flu. Since January 2004, an estimated 69 persons, primarily in Vietnam, have contracted the disease. But Dr. Keiji Fukuda, a flu expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said he suspects there are more cases.
The fatality rate among those reported to have the disease is about 70 percent.
Health officials around the world are trying to monitor the virus closely because some flu pandemics are believed to have originated with birds.
Mr. Bush's order was described as a standby precaution, adding pandemic influenza to the government's list of communicable diseases for which a quarantine is authorized. It gives the government legal authority to detain or isolate a passenger arriving in the United States to prevent an infection from spreading.
The authority would be used only if the passenger posed a threat to public health and refused to cooperate with a voluntary request, the Health and Human Services Department said.
The quarantine list was amended in 2003 to include SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, which killed nearly 800 people in 2003. Other diseases on the list are cholera, diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, yellow fever and viral hemorrhagic fevers.
Quarantine and isolation were last used during the SARS outbreak in 2003.
Thai Binh Haiphong and Quang Ninh H5N1 Clusters
Recombinomics Commentary
April 6, 2005
The clusters of bird flu in northern Vietnam have merged and now cover the northeastern coastline of Vietnam adjacent to Haiphong Harbor.
The three provinces, Thai Binh, Haiphong, and Quang Ninh have the three largest clusters in terms of members admitted on the same day (Haiphong), longest transmission chain including two health care workers (Thai Binh), and first heath care worker fatality (Quang Ninh).
There is clear human-to-human transmission going on in this region, which led to the executive order on April 1 in the US authorizing bird flu quarantine.
Quang Ninh is adjacent to China, and the four cases at the Vietnam-Sweden hospital are ringing alarm bells loudly.
The flu pandemic of 2005 has clearly begun.
April 13, 2005
Avian Influenza
Perhaps we should all be worrying about Avian influenza (Im never quite sure whether we should put an apostrophe on flu. Is it flu? or flu? Too much Lynn Truss obviously). As Instapundit put it recently theres quite a lot of official notice being taken. The US has in place the legal structure for a quarantine, the CDC is alerted, stockpiles of Tamiflu (at least partially effective in treatment) are being built. Then The Guardian reports today:
Avian flu - caught directly from birds, and which kills in seven cases out of 10 - could suddenly sweep through the human population, killing 70 million people according to World Health Organisation estimates, a Nobel laureate warned yesterday.
....
"If it comes, it will probably come out of somewhere like south-east Asia and it will probably come very fast," he said. "It is highly lethal in birds, and in humans, when they catch it, it is something like 70% lethal. So it is very dangerous."
....
Governments had begun to stockpile an antiviral called Tamiflu, which was effective if taken early enough. "But if we got a real outbreak ... with massive numbers of cases there would probably be enough Tamiflu to protect key medical professionals, perhaps politicians ... it is whether there is enough of it around," he said.
That sounds to me like it might be worth buying a few vials of Tamiflu to stick in the fridge. But what really scares the **** out of me is this:
"We may duck the bullet. We may be lucky. But I think it is a reasonably high probability, because you have a lot of human flu," Prof Doherty said. "We will always have flu epidemics. Once the thing hits, we would deal with it extraordinarily well."
I would gladly listen to someone who tells me Im wrong but I take that to mean, reading between the lines, a Nobel Laureate in Medicine, stating that it is not whether but when it will happen, that a re-run of the Spanish flu (whether this current Avian version or another) is virtually certain at some point in the future. Ouch.
