Bird flu outbreak in China

[waltky]

Bird flu outbreak in China spreading...

China: Four more infected with H7N9 bird flu
3 April 2013 - A further four cases of a bird flu virus not previously seen in humans have been reported by authorities in China.

Three women aged 32, 45 and 48, and an 83-year-old man were diagnosed between 19 and 21 March and are critically ill. There have now been seven confirmed cases of the H7N9 virus, the World Health Organization said. Two people have died. But the WHO says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. However more than 160 people who have had contact with the individuals are being closely monitored.

So far, none has developed symptoms. The latest cases were seen in the Jiangsu province while the earlier cases were in the Shanghai and Anhui provinces. Two contacts of one of the Shanghai cases who developed symptoms are being retrospectively investigated. One died and the other recovered, but as yet there has been no laboratory confirmation of whether they were infected with H7N9.

H7N9 is a form of bird flu

Hygiene measures

The Chinese government has increased disease surveillance, infection prevention and control and communication between human and animal health and industry sectors. It has advised the population to maintain good personal hygiene, including frequent hand-washing and avoiding direct contact with sick or dead animals. The WHO is not recommending any travel or trade restrictions.

Dr John McCauley, Director of WHO Collaborating Centre on Influenza at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research, said: "The virus belongs to the A(H7N9) sub-type, a sub-type that has not previously infected humans, and has emerged from the reservoir of avian influenza viruses. "It is not known how the virus was transmitted. "By identifying the source of infection, measures can be taken to reduce human exposure. "The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating whether there has been any human-to-human transmission." Tests suggest the virus could be treated with the anti-influenza drugs Tamiflu and Relenza.

BBC News - China: Four more infected with H7N9 bird flu

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Scientists Race to Assess New Bird Flu's Pandemic Risk
April 03, 2013 — Genetic sequence data on a deadly strain of bird flu previously unknown in people show the virus has already acquired some mutations that might make it more likely to cause a human pandemic, scientists say.

But there is no evidence so far that the H7N9 flu - now known to have infected nine people in China, killing three - is spreading from person to person, and there is still a chance it might peter out and never fully mutate into a human form of flu. Just days after authorities in China announced they had identified cases of H7N9, flu experts in laboratories across the world are picking through the DNA sequence data of samples isolated from the patients to assess its pandemic potential.

One of the world's top flu experts, Ab Osterhaus, who is based at the Erasmus Medical Centre in The Netherlands, said the sequences show some genetic mutations that should put authorities on alert and entail increased surveillance in animals and humans. "The virus has to a certain extent already adapted to mammalian species and to humans, so from that point of view it's worrisome," he told Reuters in a telephone interview. "Really we should keep a very close eye on this."

Technicians carry out a test for the H7N9 bird flu virus using test reagents at the Beijing Center for Diseases Control and Prevention in Beijing

New cases

China's National Health and Family Planning Commission confirmed on Sunday that three people had been infected with the new H7N9 flu, with two deaths of men in Shanghai aged 87 and 27 who fell sick in late February. Chinese authorities have in the past two days confirmed another six cases, including another fatal one. The World Health Organization [WHO] says the cases of H7N9 are "of concern" because they are the first in humans. "That makes it a unique event, which the World Health Organization is taking seriously,'' the Geneva-based United Nations health agency said on Wednesday. Other strains of bird flu, such as H5N1, have been circulating for many years and can be transmitted from bird to bird, and bird to human, but not from human to human.

So far, this lack of human-to-human transmission also appears to be a feature of the H7N9 strain. Flu viruses are classified based on two types of protein found on their surface, haemagglutinin and neuraminidase, which are abbreviated to H and N. Although it is very early days, scientists say initial analysis also suggests H7N9 does not appear to make birds particularly ill - in other words it is what is known as a low pathogenic avian influenza, of LPAI. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean it will be mild in humans, says Wendy Barclay, a flu virology expert at Britain's Imperial College London.

Finding the source

 

[waltky]

Granny says don't go kissin' onna chickens so' ya won't get the bird flu...

H7N9 case in Beijing is downplayed
Mon, Apr 15, 2013 - EXPECTATIONS: Six new H7N9 cases in Henan and Zhejiang provinces have been reported, while a senior WHO official says more cases are likely

A WHO official yesterday said that it was not surprising that a new strain of bird flu has spread to China’s capital after sickening dozens in the eastern part of the country. Up until Saturday, when Beijing officials reported the capital’s first case of H7N9, all cases had been in Shanghai and other eastern areas of China. Yesterday, the first two cases were reported in Henan Province, which is next to Beijing. Four new cases were also reported in Zhejiang Province yesterday by a provincial newspaper on its Weibo account.

It’s not the case that everyone confirmed infected with H7N9 was “clustered in one small area with the same source of exposure,” said Michael O’Leary, head of the WHO’s office in China. “So we’ve been expecting new cases to occur ... Furthermore, we still expect that there will be other cases.” A seven-year-old girl was Beijing’s first confirmed case of H7N9, which has now sickened 55 people, of whom 11 have died. Health officials believe the virus that was first spotted in humans last month is spreading through direct contact with infected fowl.

O’Leary said “the good news” was that there was still no evidence that humans had passed on the virus to other humans. “As far as we know, all the cases are individually infected in a sporadic and not connected way,” he said, adding that the source of infection is still being investigated. The girl, whose parents are in the live poultry trade, was admitted to a hospital on Thursday with symptoms of fever, sore throat, coughing and headache, the Beijing Health Bureau said. O’Leary said early treatment can be effective, as demonstrated by the girl, who was recovering in hospital and in stable condition.

In the only other reported cases outside of eastern China, health officials in Henan Province announced that tests on two men on Thursday revealed they had the H7N9 virus. They said a 34-year-old restaurant chef who had displayed flu symptoms for about a week was in critical condition in hospital, while a 65-year-old farmer who was in frequent contact with poultry was in stable condition after receiving treatment. The officials said that 19 people who had been in close contact with the two men had not shown any flu symptoms. The four newest patients in Zhejiang — a 64-year-old female farmer and three retirees aged 62, 75 and 79 — were all seriously ill, the Zhejiang Daily reported.

H7N9 case in Beijing is downplayed - Taipei Times

See also:

Study: Environment Speeds Evolutionary Change
April 12, 2013 - A new study challenges the widely held belief that evolutionary changes in living organisms take place slowly, over hundreds, thousands or millions of years.

Researchers have found evidence species can evolve much more quickly when in response to environmental change. Tim Benton studies how living organisms respond to changes in their environment. In a paper published in Ecology Letters, the professor of biological sciences at the University of Leeds in England examines why marine species, for example, have declined so rapidly in size and number over the past 50 years. “Is this a response that is due to them having less food or the temperature of the water changing from climate change or is it a response that is due to natural selection working and evolutionary biology happening?” Benton said. To find out, Benton’s team of researchers conducted a series of laboratory experiments with soil mites, tiny spider-like creatures that, among other things, reproduce rapidly. “We brought them in from the wild and put them in test tubes, where each test tube maintained about 1,000 individuals in a free running population. Every day, we just put in a little bit of food," he said. "And in some of the populations we took out juveniles and in other populations we harvested adults. And then we just left them to it over about 100 weeks.”

That’s normally long enough for about 20 generations of soil mites. In their new test tube environments, the tiny creatures competed for food, sex and survival in different ways than they would have in the wild. And in charting the mites’ growth rates, genetics and reproduction over this relatively brief span of time, the scientists observed that natural selection produced significant evolutionary changes. For example, Benton said, the length of time the mites needed to reach adulthood doubled during the course of the experiment. “Because it is taking them so much longer to grow up, then that means that the population responds to changes in a different way," he said. "Population growth rate is slower, which means that there are very large changes in population dynamics, the way the population size responds to environmental change in itself.”

According to Benton, the mite study suggests there is a powerful interplay between environmental and evolutionary change. “And [after] one or two more complementary studies like ours in different groups, then people will quite happily accept, I think, the force of evolutionary change in ecological time," he said. "So over a single human life time, 100 years, there are likely to be very large changes and if we don’t start thinking about the evolutionary changes as well as the changes in the environment then the things we put in place to protect the species we want to manage won’t actually work.”

One place where this might have a critical impact is in fisheries management. "Given that we are harvesting large animals all the time, that’s what we do when we go out fishing," he said. "The phenotypic response that we see in the reduction of size is likely to be an evolutionary response and that’s what we found in our laboratory study. So what that means is, if you stop fishing because your stock is getting depleted and the animals are increasingly smaller and smaller and smaller, there is no necessity that they will be able to recover because you’ve had a hard-wired evolutionary change. So they won’t just be able to spring back.” There’s no guarantee that they will again grow larger and larger. Benton added that environmentally-induced evolutionary changes could also have serious implications for other wildlife conservation efforts, as well as for disease and pest control programs.

Source

 

[editec]

Yeah this is a PARTICULARLY DEADLY virus.

One hopes it isn't too easily communicated.

 

[waltky]

New bird flu is still mutating...

Gene Swapping Makes New China Bird Flu a Moving Target
April 15, 2013 - A new bird flu virus that has killed 13 people in China is still evolving, making it hard for scientists to predict how dangerous it might become.

Influenza experts say the H7N9 strain is probably still swapping genes with other strains, seeking to select ones that might make it fitter. If it succeeds, the world could be facing the threat of a deadly flu pandemic. But it may also fail and just fizzle out.

A girl, who was previously infected with the H7N9 bird flu virus, waves as she is being transferred to a public ward from the ICU at Ditan hospital in Beijing

The virus' instability also raises questions about whether H7N9 might become resistant to antiviral drugs such as Roche's antiviral drug Tamiflu, a possibility already suggested by analyses of genetic data available on the strain so far. “Even with just the three [gene] sequences we have available, there's some evidence that one doesn't quite fit with the other two. So we might think this virus is still fishing around for a genetic constellation that its happy with,” said Wendy Barclay, a flu virologist at Imperial College London. “Maybe there are other viruses out there that it is still exchanging genes with until it gets to a stable constellation.” To be able to say with any confidence whether this new strain, which before March had never been seen in humans, could go on to cause a pandemic, scientists need to know a lot more.

H7N9 a triple mix bird flu

So far, genetic sequence data from samples from three H7N9 victims and posted on the website of GISAID, the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data, show the strain is a so-called “triple reassortant” virus with a mixture of genes from three other flu strains found in birds in Asia. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine last week, researchers who conducted a detailed analysis of the strain's origin said it seemed that so far the re-assortment of genes to make H7N9 had taken place in birds rather than in humans or in any other mammal - a somewhat reassuring sign. Barclay said this may continue, and could mean it is some time before the strain finds a form in which it can spread swiftly and efficiently in bird populations.

Yet genetic analyses also show the virus has already acquired some mutations that make it more likely be able to spread between mammals, and more able to spark a human pandemic. A study in the online journal Eurosurveillance by leading flu experts Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin and Masato Tashiro at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo, said the H7N9 sequences “possess several characteristic features of mammalian influenza viruses, which are likely to contribute to their ability to infect humans”. These features, the scientists wrote, “raise concerns regarding their pandemic potential”. That sentiment was echoed on Saturday by the World Health Organization (WHO), which said “genetic changes seen among these H7N9 viruses suggesting adaptation to mammals are of concern” and warned: “Further adaptation may occur”.

Pandemic potential

 

[waltky]

China bird flu been mutatin'...

Gene data show China bird flu mutated "under the radar"
19 Apr.`13 - The new strain of bird flu that has killed 17 people in China has been circulating widely "under the radar" and has acquired significant genetic diversity that makes it more of a threat, scientists said on Friday.

Dutch and Chinese researchers who analyzed genetic data from seven samples of the new H7N9 strain say it has already acquired similar levels of genetic diversity as much larger outbreaks of other H7 strains of flu seen previously in birds. "The diversity we see in these first few samples from China is as great as the diversity we have seen with a large outbreak in the Netherlands several years ago and one in Italy," said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, who worked on the study as part of a nine-member team. "This means it (the H7N9 strain in China) has been spreading quite a bit and it's important to understand where exactly that is going on."

Its genetic diversity shows the virus has an ability to mutate repeatedly and is likely to continue doing so, raising the risk that it may become transmissible among humans. Koopmans, whose research was published in the online journal Eurosurveillance, said the circulation would probably have taken place in either birds or mammals, but said exactly which animals were involved was not yet clear. "Simply the fact that this virus is spreading under the radar - because that is what this data confirms - is of concern," she told Reuters in a telephone interview. The H7N9 virus is so far known to have infected 87 people in China, killing 17 of them. Health officials raised further questions on Friday about the source of the new strain after data indicated that more than half of patients had had no contact with poultry.

MUTATIONS

A scientific study published last week showed the H7N9 strain was a so-called "triple reassortant" virus with a mixture of genes from three other flu strains found in birds in Asia. One of those three strains is thought to have come from a brambling, a type of small wild bird. For their study, Koopmans and her team compared some data from the first two weeks of the China H7N9 outbreak with data from a large H7N7 flu outbreak in birds and people the Netherlands in 2003 and an H7N1 epidemic in birds in Italy in 1999 and 2000. The Dutch outbreak resulted in infection of poultry on 255 farms and led to the culling of about 30 million chickens. Some 89 people were also diagnosed as having the H7N7 virus and one person, a vet, died as a result of the infection. The comparison suggested that "widespread circulation (of the H7N9 strain in China) must have occurred, resulting in major genetic diversification", the researchers wrote in their study. They added: "Such diversification is of concern, given that several markers associated with increased risk for public health are already present."

Flu experts in China and at the World Health Organization say there is no evidence so far that H7N9 is passing easily between people. But scientists who analyzed the genetic sequence data from three early samples from China say the virus has already acquired some mutations that might make it more likely to be able to do so in the future, raising the risk of a human pandemic. "Although human infections with H7 influenza viruses have occurred repeatedly over the last decades without evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, the absence of sustained human-to-human transmission of H7N9 viruses does not come with any guarantee," Koopmans' team wrote in their study.

Gene data show China bird flu mutated "under the radar"

 

[waltky]

New bird flu strain spreads more easily...

WHO: Bird-to-human infections easier with new flu
Apr 24,`13 -- World Health Organization officials say a lethal new strain of bird flu that emerged in China over the past month appears to spread more easily from birds to humans than the one that started killing people in Asia a decade ago.

Scientists are watching the H7N9 virus closely to see if it could spark a global pandemic but say so far there is little evidence to show the virus can spread easily from human to human.

Health officials at a news conference Wednesday in Beijing said they believe the infections with the H7N9 strain are primarily taking place at live poultry markets.

The virus has infected more than 100 people in China, seriously sickening most of them, and killing around 20 - mostly near the eastern coast around Shanghai.

Source

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China's H7N9 'one of most lethal' flus
April 24, 2013 - INTERNATIONAL experts probing China's deadly H7N9 bird flu virus say it's "one of the most lethal influenza viruses" seen so far and conclude that the likely source of infection is poultry.

China had confirmed 108 cases and 22 deaths since the infections were announced on March 31, with a higher proportion of cases in older people. "This is definitely one of the most lethal influenza viruses we have seen so far," said Keiji Fukuda, one of the leading flu experts for the World Health Organisation, which has led a team on a week-long visit to China to study H7N9. "We think this virus is more transmissible to humans than H5N1," he said, referring to the strain the WHO estimates has killed more than 360 people globally since 2003. "When we look at influenza viruses this is an unusually dangerous virus," he said. But we are really at the beginning of our understanding, he said."

The team said the likely source of infection was poultry, as chickens, ducks and pigeons from poultry markets had tested positive for H7N9. Experts have previously said the animal reservoir for H7N9 appeared to be unspecified birds. There are worries over the prospect of such a virus mutating into a form easily transmissible between humans, which could then have the potential to trigger a pandemic. Chinese health officials have acknowledged so-called "family clusters", where members of a single family have become infected but have so far declined to put it down to human-to-human transmission.

Such cases could be examples of what health officials call limited human-to-human transmission, in which those in close contact with the ill become infected, as opposed to widespread, or "sustained", transmission. So far most H7N9 cases have been confined to the commercial hub Shanghai and nearby provinces in eastern China. The number of reported new cases in Shanghai has seen a "dramatic slowdown", Cox said, calling the reduction in the frequency of new cases "very encouraging". Tuesday marked the fourth consecutive day where no new cases were reported in Shanghai, although one was reported in Taiwan.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...-to-new-province/story-fn3dxix6-1226628269470

 

[waltky]

Sounds like bio-weapons research...

Lab-Altered H5N1 Flu More Infectious to Humans than Birds
April 26, 2013 - A new study suggests a laboratory-mutated H5N1 avian influenza virus could pose a greater risk to humans than to birds, adding to concerns about the new avian flu strain that has emerged recently in China.

Over a year ago, Japanese researchers created a genetically-altered version of the H5N1 avian influenza virus to explore the risk of human-to-human transmission. They reported in the journal Nature in early 2012 that the mutated pathogen could be transmitted among mammals through the air in aerosol droplets -- for example, from sneezing. They conducted their experiments with ferrets, small domesticated mammals that are a good model for human disease transmission. The experiment showed that the viral strain has the potential to cause a global human pandemic, even without contact with infected poultry or even person-to-person contact. That finding sparked international security concerns that the pathogen could be used as a biological weapon.

So far, 600 cases of H5N1 in humans have been reported to the World Health Organization. The virus causes severe pneumonia and respiratory failure. The illness has killed 60 percent of those who have contracted it. Following up on the Japanese research, an international team studied just how infectious the virus would be to humans, should mutated copies ever jump the species barrier. John Skehel is a virologist with the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Writing in the journal Nature, Skehel and co-researchers describe how effectively amino acids from the mutant bird-flu strain are able to bind, or latch onto human cell surface proteins or receptors, as compared with bird or avian cells. “And we find that it will bind to human receptors about 200 times better than it binds to avian receptors,” Skehel explained.

In other words, humans appear to be at far greater risk than birds of becoming ill with the deadly mutated form of the H5N1 virus. And even though the mutant virus' grip on human cells is not as strong as that of other infectious flu viruses, it still appears, in the laboratory, to be highly contagious to human cells -- a finding one researcher described as "confounding." As scientists continue to learn more about H5N1, international public health officials are also keeping a close watch on another avian flu virus, which the World Health organization is calling one of the most lethal pathogens doctors have ever faced. Since it was detected this past February, the H7N9 influenza strain has infected more than one hundred people in China, mostly in Shanghai, and killed nearly one-quarter of them. So far, all human cases appear to have resulted from contact with infected birds, and the new strain has shown no signs of being transmissible from human to human.

Tom Frieden is director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Frieden says H5N1 -- in its natural, unmutated form -- is easy to spot and control because infected flocks become visibly sick. Not so with H7N9. “With H5[N1], the birds get sick and the country culls the flock and it stops spreading. Here, the birds don’t get sick so you can’t cull the flock,” stated Frieden. Frieden says the CDC, like a number of other international medical research centers, is studying samples of the H7N9 virus it acquired from China. The CDC is working closely with Chinese health officials to develop a vaccine against the new bird flu.

Source

 

[waltky]

'Be Very Prepared' For Eventual Bird Flu Mutations...

New Bird Flu Virus Could Spread Among Humans
Sunday, 28 Apr 2013 - There is no evidence that the deadly H7N9 bird flu has yet spread between humans in China but health authorities must be ready for the virus to mutate at any time, a top US virologist has warned.

Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said officials in China had studied more than 1,000 close contacts of confirmed cases and not found any evidence of human-to-human transmission. "That is powerful evidence because if you had a thousand contacts with someone with the flu you would be pretty sure some of them would have been infected," Fauci said in an interview with AFP.

Nevertheless, Fauci cautioned that authorities needed to be ready for the possibility of the virus mutating and spreading between humans. "It's unpredictable as are all the influenza. One of the things we need to be concerned about is this might gain the capability of going human-to-human which up to this point has not happened and is somewhat encouraging news," Fauci said. "But we still need to be very prepared for the eventuality of that happening."

Researchers are already developing a diagnostic test to identify H7N9, along with a vaccine, with clinical trials due in July or August. "Work is under way on making a diagnostic test to be able to pick it up quickly," Fauci said. "We have already started on an early development of a vaccine as we did with H5N1 years ago... Hopefully, we will never have to use it." More than 110 people in mainland China have been confirmed to be infected with H7N9, with 23 deaths, since Beijing announced on March 31 that the virus had been found in humans.

Most of the cases have been located in eastern China, although Taiwan has reported one case. Another case has been found in southern China, while Chinese officials confirmed a further outbreak in the central province of Hunan. Chinese authorities have identified poultry as the source of the virus and have confirmed that patients became sick from contact with infected live fowl. A visiting team from the World Health Organization, which wrapped up a week-long visit to China on Wednesday, said there had been no human-to-human transmission but warned H7N9 was "one of the most lethal" influenza viruses ever seen.

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com Anthony Fauci: New Bird Flu Virus Could Spread Among Humans

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd purt sure Granny got it `cause she cackles alla time...

H7N9 bird flu is a 'serious threat' - researchers warn
1 May 2013 - The outbreak of a new type of bird flu in China poses a "serious threat" to human health, but it is still too soon to predict how far it will spread, experts have said.

Of the 126 people known to be infected so far, 24 have died, with many more still severely ill in hospital. The H7N9 virus has not, however, yet proved able to spread between people - which limits its global threat. The threat should be "treated calmly, but seriously", researchers advised. There is concern over both the pace and severity of the outbreak. There has been a relatively high number of known infections since the first case was detected in April.

Prof John McCauley, the director of a World Health Organization (WHO) collaborating centre in the UK, said: "It is unusual to get these numbers." Of those infected, a fifth died, a fifth recovered and the rest are still ill. The infection results in severe pneumonia and even blood poisoning and organ failure. "The WHO considers this a serious threat," said Prof McCauley, "but we don't know at this stage whether this is going to spread from human to human." So far nearly all cases have been traced back to contact with poultry. If the virus adapts to spread readily between people it will pose a much greater threat and scientists warn that the virus is mutating rapidly. The last major bird flu, H5N1, made the jump to people in 1997 and killed more than three hundred people - yet, it is still unable to spread between humans. Predicting which viruses will become deadly on a global scale is impossible.

Prof Jeremy Farrar, a leading expert in bird flu and the director-elect of one of the world's largest research charities, the Wellcome Trust, said N7N9 needed to be taken seriously. "Whenever an influenza virus jumps across from its normal host in bird populations into humans it is a cause for concern," he said. Often in pandemics older people have some immunity as they have lived longer and have been exposed to similar viruses before. However, in this outbreak the ages of those infected ranges from two to 81. Prof Farrar said: "That suggests there truly is no immunity across all ages, and that as humans we have not seen this virus before. "The response has been calm and measured, but it cannot be taken lightly."

New threat

A study published in the Lancet medical journal suggests that H7N9 influenza is a mix of at least four viruses with origins in ducks and chickens. Unlike the previous H5N1 outbreak, it is not deadly to poultry. It means it is much harder to track the spread of the virus. A highly controversial piece of research in 2012 showed that it would take five mutations to transform H5N1 into a pandemic. Prof Wendy Barclay, an influenza researcher at Imperial College London, said: "H7N9 might be one step closer to being able to become a pandemic than H5 is in nature at the moment." It already has one of the five mutations when it is infecting birds. "In people who have caught the H7 virus so far we can see [another] one of the important mutations occurring in those people in a matter of days," she said.

BBC News - H7N9 bird flu is a 'serious threat' - researchers warn

 

[waltky]

Granny says she wish dey'd make up dey's mind whether it the end o' the world or not...

CDC: Current China Bird Flu Strain Can't Cause Pandemic
May 06, 2013 — The head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the current strain of bird flu that is causing illness and deaths in China cannot spark a pandemic in its current form - but he added that there is no guarantee it will not mutate and cause a serious pandemic.

In an exclusive interview at the Reuters Health Summit in New York, Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, said more than 2,000 people have been in contact with infected individuals, and only a handful have become ill. Virtually all of the rest have had direct contact with poultry, the identified cause of the virus. "This particular virus is not going to cause a pandemic because it doesn't spread person-to-person," Frieden said. "But all it takes is a bit of mutation for it be able to go person-to-person. I cannot say with certainty whether that will happen tomorrow, within 10 years or never." The new strain of bird flu known as H7N9, which began infecting people in February, has so far sickened at least 127 people and killed 27. According to the latest CDC estimates, the flu kills about 20 percent of the people it infects.

The United States has been working closely with Chinese health officials, and has recently distributed test kits to detect this new strain of flu, which has never before appeared in humans. Tests by Chinese health officials have found the virus in chickens, ducks and pigeons, but Frieden said it is not yet clear how the virus spreads in birds. New strains of flu present a threat because if they do become easily transmissible, they might quickly spread around the globe, attacking individuals who have no natural defense against the virus.

Pedestrians wearing medical masks walk on the street outside National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei, April 26, 2013. A 53-year-old Taiwan businessman contracted the H7N9 strain of bird flu while travelling in China, the first reported case outside of mainland China.

The CDC has activated its Emergency Operations Center to monitor the disease and currently has 193 staff working on H7N9. "We've got a team working in China, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam," he said. Frieden said there are several factors that make this particular virus especially worrisome. An analysis of the genetic code of the virus shows that it has receptors that bind to the lower respiratory tract of people, much like the more familiar bird flu strain known as H5N1. "That is why it's causing severe disease," Frieden said. But it also has receptors that bind to the upper respiratory tract of people, which may explain why it is more transmissible from birds to people than H5 appears to be, he said. And unlike H5N1, which caused severe disease in poultry, this new virus does not, which may make it more difficult to control because researchers will not be able to cull poultry flocks.

Frieden said even with H5, it took 18 months from the emergence of the virus until the 100th case. By comparison, it took only about one month from the emergence of H7 until the 100th case. "If you look at the geographic spread of H5, within a couple of years it was all over Asia, into Africa, into the Middle East," he said. Frieden said he cannot predict what the spread of H7 will be in birds, though he said he is concerned it may be quite wide. "If there is evolution in the virus, it could go person-to-person, and that could cause severe pandemic," he said. In the United States, the CDC has developed and distributed H7N9 test kits, given to states and to several countries. Frieden said the agency is working on flu vaccines for the virus and clinical trials could begin in the summer.

CDC: Current China Bird Flu Strain Can't Cause Pandemic

 

[waltky]

Granny says dat's a plague of Biblical proportions...

CDC: 1 in 5 Death Rate for New Chinese Bird Flu
May 9, 2013 – About one in five people who have contracted a new strain of bird flu in China (H7N9) have died, according to a report released today by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

So far, the virus has mostly struck older people, a majority of whom were male, and the evidence shows that transmission of the virus occurs largely from birds to people--although researchers suspect there have been a few cases of human-to-human transmission within families. “As of April 29, 2013, China had reported 126 confirmed H7N9 infections in humans, among whom 24 (19%) died,” said the May 10 edition of the CDC’s “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report."

H7N9 is also referred to as Avian Influenza and is spread mostly through chickens, ducks, and pigeons, according to the report. “The median age of patients with confirmed infection is 61 years" and "58 (71%) of the cases are among males,” the report said. “Only four cases have been confirmed among children." "Most of the confirmed cases involved severe respiratory illness," reported the CDC. "Of 82 confirmed cases for which data were available as of April 17, 81 (99%) required hospitalization. Among those patients hospitalized, 17 (21%) died of ARDS [Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome] or multi-organ failure, 60 (74%) remained hospitalized, and only four (5%) had been discharged.”

The report said the CDC is coordinating with state and local health departments, as well as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to closely monitor animals and the potential spread, but has found no evidence of the Chinese bird flu in the United States. Meanwhile, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture reported that 68,060 bird and environmental specimens were tested and 46 – 0.07 percent – tested positive for H7N9. From April 5 through April 29, state and local health departments from 18 states reported evaluating 37 travelers from China to the United States and found no cases of infection. “Although no evidence of sustained (ongoing) human-to-human spread of this virus has been identified; small family clusters have occurred where human-to-human spread cannot be conclusively ruled out,” the report says.

The report states that almost all cases are presumed to have come from exposure to infected birds. “Among 82 confirmed cases for which exposure information is available, 63 (77%) involved reported exposure to live animals, primarily chickens (76%) and ducks (20%),” the CDC report says. “However, at least three family clusters of two or three confirmed cases have been reported where limited human-to-human transmission might have occurred.” Testing for the virus is available for U.S. public health laboratories, the U.S. Department of Defense laboratories, and World Health Organization-recognized National Influenza Centers.

CDC: 1 in 5 Death Rate for New Chinese Bird Flu | CNS News

 

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Chinese family hit hard by H7N9 avian influenza...

Bird flu devastates Shanghai family
Fri, May 17, 2013 - The virus has already killed her mother and Kelly Gu’s father lies critically ill with H7N9 avian influenza in a Shanghai hospital bed — the only couple both infected in China’s outbreak of the disease.

As her mother lay dying, Gu was urgently summoned back to Shanghai from her doctoral studies in chemistry in France, but she was too late, missing the chance to say goodbye by a day. In her first interview with Western media, she said she knew her mother was dead when her father, already showing symptoms of fatigue and fever, told her by telephone: “It’s just like winning a lottery, it’s a lottery of very bad luck.” The Gu family’s experience portrays a government-run health system battling a new disease, while sometimes showing a lack of empathy for victims and their kin. The H7N9 strain of bird flu has sickened 130 people in China and killed 35 of them, according to the latest available national figures.

The government and the WHO have repeatedly said there is no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, but Gu’s parents could be a rare “family cluster.” Experts at the US government’s Centers for Disease Control say such clusters could represent limited spread between people caused by prolonged, unprotected exposure. If the virus were to mutate into a form easily transmissible among humans it could trigger a pandemic. Gu, 26, said her father, who works in a property management office, was sad about his only child living overseas — a fact that may have saved her life. Her mother, a 52-year-old housewife she described as an optimist with a knack for technology, was probably infected on her daily trip to the market near their home in western Shanghai.

She had already been ill for five days by the time the central government revealed the H7N9 outbreak, going twice to a district-level hospital. The next day, having trouble breathing and suffering from fever, she went to one of Shanghai’s finest hospitals, Huashan, but the emergency room doctor sent her home, ordering three days rest. She was dead in two. Beijing has been praised by the WHO for openness over H7N9, in contrast to its coverup a decade ago of SARS, which originated in China and killed 800 people globally, but critics question why it took the government three weeks to make an announcement after the first deaths, despite Internet postings describing a mysterious illness at a Shanghai hospital.

The case of Gu’s parents — she declined to give their full names — reflects how the government-run health system struggled in the early stages. “[The doctor] hadn’t seen the scanning result of my mother’s lung and he hadn’t asked her to take another one. He just judged it was a normal fever and sent her back home,” Gu said. Her mother died on April 3 of acute respiratory distress and was confirmed to have the H7N9 virus a day later, one of Shanghai’s earliest cases. Her father had started showing symptoms on April 1. There are only two other such “family clusters,” a father and two sons in Shanghai, and another father and son in Shandong Province. Gu’s father has defied doctors’ expectations by clinging to life, but is under sedation on a respirator and does not respond when she tries to talk with him on a video link.

MORE

 

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Chinese poultry industry takes big financial hit over bird flu...

Bird Flu Costs in China set at $6.5 Billion
May 21, 2013 - Scientists and economists say the H7N9 bird flu outbreak in China has cost that country's poultry industry $6.5 billion, as consumers shun chicken and health officials make gains in controlling the deadly virus.

The cost data, provided by China's agriculture ministry, was reported Tuesday at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. At the conference, United Nations experts warned health authorities worldwide to be on the lookout for the virus, which is known to have infected 130 people in China since first appearing in March. Chinese authorities say 36 of the victims have died.

A top World Health Organization official, Keiji Fukuda, told the gathering the immediate outbreak has been controlled, but it is unlikely the virus has simply disappeared. He repeated findings showing the virus in its present form crossed from birds to humans at live markets in China where chickens and other poultry are slaughtered and sold.

Authorities say there is no evidence of person-to-person transmission in the outbreak. China's official Xinhua news agency said emergency virus control procedures were lifted last week in eastern provinces and major cities, including Shanghai, Jiangsu and Shandong, where most of the infections occurred.

Bird Flu Costs in China set at $6.5 Billion

 

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Bird flu becoming drug resistant...

H7N9 bird flu drug resistance concern
28 May 2013 - Drug resistance has been detected in patients infected with the new bird flu that has emerged in China, say doctors.

The H7N9 virus became resistant to Tamiflu in three out of 14 patients treated with antiviral drugs at Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre. The researchers, writing in the Lancet, said resistance emerged with "apparent ease" and was "concerning". There have been no new cases of the infection for more than two weeks.

Resistance

Doctors analysed the virus in 14 patients. All had pneumonia and half needed ventilation to keep them alive. Treatment with antivirals reduced levels of H7N9 in most patients and led to an improvement in symptoms. Yet the treatment failed in three patients. Genetic testing of the virus in these patients showed it had acquired the mutations needed to resist the drugs. The doctors believe that in at least one patient the emergence of resistance was a direct consequence of treatment with Tamiflu.

Such antiviral drugs are the only way of treating the infection. The researchers said: "The apparent ease with which antiviral resistance emerges in H7N9 viruses is concerning, it needs to be closely monitored and considered in future pandemic response plans." There have been 131 confirmed cases and 36 deaths since the virus was first reported early this year. However, the most recent case reported was on 8 May. Efforts to close poultry markets are thought to have significantly reduced the spread of the virus.

BBC News - H7N9 bird flu drug resistance concern

 

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Bird flu passes among humans...

Concern after bird flu 'passes from father to daughter'
6 August 2013 > Researchers have reported the first case of human-to-human transmission of the new bird flu that has emerged in China.

The British Medical Journal said a 32-year-old woman was infected after caring for her father. Until now there had been no evidence of anyone catching the H7N9 virus other than after direct contact with birds. But experts stressed it does not mean the virus has developed the ability to spread easily between humans. By 30 June there had been 133 cases of H7N9 bird flu reported in eastern China and 43 deaths. Most people had visited live poultry markets or had close contact with live poultry in the week or two before they became ill.

Intensive care

Yet researchers found that the 32-year-old woman had become infected in March after caring for her 60-year-old father in hospital. Unlike her father - who had visited a poultry market in the week before falling ill - she had no known exposure to live poultry but fell ill six days after her last contact with him. Both died in intensive care of multiple organ failure.

Tests on the virus taken from both patients showed the strains were almost genetically identical, which supports the theory that the daughter was infected directly from her father rather than another source. Public health officials tested 43 close contacts of the patients but all tested negative for H7N9, suggesting the ability of the virus to spread was limited. The researchers said that while there was no evidence to suggest the virus had gained the ability to spread from person to person efficiently, this was the first case of a "probable transmission" from human to human.

'Strong warning sign'

"Our findings reinforce that the novel virus possesses the potential for pandemic spread," they concluded. Dr James Rudge, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that limited transmission between humans is not surprising and has been seen before in other bird flu viruses, such as H5N1.

He added: "It would be a worry if we start to see longer chains of transmission between people, when one person infects someone else, who in turn infects more people, and so on. "And particularly if each infected case goes on to infect, on average, more than one other person, this would be a strong warning sign that we might be in the early stages of an epidemic." An accompanying editorial in the BMJ, co-authored by Dr Rudge, concluded that while this study might not suggest that H7N9 is any closer to delivering the next pandemic, "it does provide a timely reminder of the need to remain extremely vigilant".

BBC News - Concern after bird flu 'passes from father to daughter'

See also:

Scientists plan controversial lab-made bird flu
7 Aug.`13 WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists who sparked an outcry by creating easier-to-spread versions of the bird flu for research purposes want to try such experiments again using a worrisome new strain. This time around, the U.S. government is promising extra scrutiny of such high-stakes research up front.

Since it broke out in China in March, the H7N9 bird flu has infected more than 130 people and killed 43. Some of the world's leading flu researchers argue that genetically altering that virus in high-security labs is key to studying how it might mutate in the wild to become a bigger threat to people, maybe even the next pandemic. "We cannot prevent epidemics or pandemics, but we can accumulate critical knowledge ahead of time" to help countries better prepare and respond, Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University in the Netherlands told The Associated Press.

In letters published Wednesday in the journals Science and Nature, Fouchier and colleagues from a dozen research centers in the U.S., Hong Kong and Britain outlined plans for what's called gain-of-function research — creating potentially stronger strains, including ones that might spread easily through the air between lab animals. They say the work could highlight the most important mutations for public health officials to watch for as they monitor the virus' natural spread or determine how to manufacture vaccines.

The announcement is an attempt to head off the kind of international controversy that erupted in 2011 when Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, created easier-to-spread strains of another deadly kind of bird flu, the better-known H5N1. The concerns: How to guard against laboratory accidents with the man-made strains, and whether publishing findings from the research could offer a blueprint for would-be bioterrorists. The H5N1 work eventually was published. Now the researchers aim to explain to the public ahead of time why they want to do more of this scary-sounding research, and how they'll manage the risks.

The Obama administration already had tightened oversight of research involving dangerous germs. Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced an extra step: In addition to scientific review, researchers who propose creating easier-to-spread strains of the new H7N9 will have to pass a special review by a panel of experts who will weigh the risks and potential benefits of the work. "There are strong arguments to do the science," but it has to be done properly or not at all, said Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, which will refer such projects to the special HHS panel. "It's not a rubber stamp," Fauci said. "If the risk is felt to be too high by this outside review, they will recommend it won't be done and we won't fund it."

More Scientists plan controversial lab-made bird flu

 

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Mutated bird flu may pose threats beyond the current outbreak...

China Bird Flu Analysis Finds More Virus Threats Lurking
August 21, 2013 — A deadly new bird flu virus in China evolved from migratory birds via waterfowl to poultry and into people, and there are other bird flu viruses circulating that could follow the same path, scientists have found.

The study - an analysis of the evolutionary history of the H7N9 bird flu that has so far killed 44 people - identified several other H7 flu viruses circulating in birds that the researchers said “may pose threats beyond the current outbreak”. While none of the additional H7 strains they detected has yet been found in humans, some are able to infect other mammals such as ferrets, the researchers said, suggesting a jump to humans may be possible. “The discovery ... reminds us that even if H7N9 does not return, there are risks lurking amongst the great diversity of avian influenza viruses,” said Peter Horby, a bird flu expert at the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Hanoi, Vietnam, who was not involved in the research.

H7N9 bird flu, which was unknown in humans until February, has so far infected at least 135 people in China and Taiwan, killing 44 of them, according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) data. Most cases have been in people who had visited live poultry markets or had close contact with live poultry. In recent weeks the number of new infections in people has dropped dramatically, thanks largely, experts say, to the closure by Chinese authorities of many live poultry markets and the summer season. But many virologists fear the human case rate may pick up again with the return of autumn and winter in China.

To trace the evolution of H7N9 and its path into humans, researchers led by Maria Huachen Zhu and Yi Guan of the University of Hong Kong conducted field surveillance around the main H7N9 outbreak region and mapped out, or sequenced, genetic codes of a large number of bird flu viruses they found. Reporting their findings in the journal Nature on Wednesday, they concluded that H7 viruses probably transferred from ducks to chickens on at least two independent occasions and that a so-called “reassortment” of these viruses with others called H9N2 eventually generated the H7N9 outbreak virus. They also found another previously unrecognized H7N7 virus strain had emerged and is circulating in poultry in China. In experiments testing this strain, they discovered it has the ability to infect ferrets - an animal model often used by scientists to find out more about what flu might do in humans - suggesting it could jump into people in future.

Flu experts praised the research, with Horby describing it as using the kind of “microbial forensics” essential for helping scientists piece together where new bird flu viruses come from and what other threats might be out there. Ian Jones, a virologist at Britain's University of Reading, said the discovery of other H7 bird flu strains was interesting but stressed they were “not of immediate public concern”. “The study identifies the route of adaptation [for H7N9] from migratory birds to local waterfowl to poultry in live markets and then to people,” he said. “Surveillance programs can now focus on key strains in the adaption process and eradicate them before they complete the jump to people.”

China Bird Flu Analysis Finds More Virus Threats Lurking

 

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Well ain't dat just ducky...

Ducks were bird flu 'melting pot'
21 August 2013 > Ducks were the melting pot of viruses that led to the new bird flu emerging in China early this year, according to Chinese scientists tracking the evolution of the virus.

Ducks picked up viruses from migrating birds and passed them onto chickens. The study, published in the journal Nature, showed humans were probably then infected with H7N9 due to contact with chickens at live poultry markets. There have been 133 human cases of the bird flu and 43 deaths. The team, including researchers at the Shantou University Medical College, were trying to trace the root of the outbreak.

They took samples from 1,341 chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, partridges and quail as well as faecal and water samples from live poultry markets. By comparing the similarities and differences between the genetic codes of influenza viruses in each of the animals, scientists can work out how the virus evolved and spread. Their report said: "Domestic ducks seem to act as key intermediate hosts by acquiring and maintaining diverse influenza viruses from migratory birds. "This probably led to outbreaks in chickens resulting in the rapid spread of the [virus] through live poultry markets which became the source of human infections."

Market danger

There have been very few cases since China introduced controls on live poultry markets. The authors added: "To control H7N9 and related viruses ultimately it is necessary to reconsider the management of live poultry markets in urban areas." The study also uncovered a similar bird flu called H7N7, which appears able to infect mammals. The scientists said this group of H7 bird flus may "pose threats beyond the current outbreak".

Commenting on the research, Dr Peter Horby, from the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam, said: "This kind of microbial forensics is essential in helping us piece together the origin of novel avian influenza viruses such as H7N9. "When combined with analyses of poultry production and marketing systems, it can help us identify practices that might reduce the risks of H7N9 and other novel viruses re-emerging. "Whilst this brings us closer to understanding the pathway to emergence, more detective work is needed to fully reveal the ecology and source of H7N9 viruses, which seem to be concentrated in live poultry markets but elusive elsewhere in the production chain. "The discovery of a novel H7N7 lineage that can infect ferrets reminds us that even if H7N9 does not return, there are risks lurking amongst the great diversity of avian influenza viruses."

BBC News - Ducks were bird flu 'melting pot'

 

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H1N1 mutates to H7N9...

New China H7N9 strain gives kick to mutant bird flu research
23 Oct.`13 - Dutch scientists hidden away in a top-security laboratory are seeking to create mutant flu viruses, dangerous work designed to prepare the world for a lethal pandemic by beating nature to it.

The idea of engineering viral pathogens to be more deadly than they are already has generated huge controversy, amid fears that such viruses could leak out or fall into the wrong hands. But with China braced for scores more cases of a deadly new strain of H7N9 bird flu, Ron Fouchier and Ab Osterhaus say the benefits of this gene mutation research far outweigh the risks. The experiments, designed to explore H7N9's potential to develop drug resistance and find which genetic modifications might enhance its ability to spread, could offer the know-how to halt a lethal flu pandemic, they say.

That could be with well-timed new vaccines or other therapies tuned to the pandemic strain's genes. "We're bracing for what's going to happen next. If H7N9 becomes easily transmissible between humans, yes, the case fatality ratio may go down a little from where it is now, but we'd still be talking about millions of people dying," says Osterhaus, the head of a highly bio-secure laboratory in the Netherlands which will lead some of the H7N9 mutation work. "This is a critical question - what does this virus really need to become transmissible? It is of extreme importance to being able to understand what's going on."

As things stand, 45 of the 136 people known to have contracted H7N9 bird flu in China and Taiwan have died - giving a case fatality rate of around 30 percent. Fouchier, who has already done so-called "gain of function" experiments with another strain of bird flu, H5N1, says we need to get ahead of the game with H7N9 since its pandemic risk would rise "exponentially" if it gained in nature what he aims to give it in the lab - the ability to spread easily among people.

"OUTRAGEOUS CHUTZPAH"

 

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H5N6 claims it's first victim in China...

China reports first death from H5N6 avian flu
Thu, May 08, 2014 - A Chinese man has died from the H5N6 strain of avian influenza, in what is believed to be the world’s first case of human infection from the virus subtype, state media and experts said.

Tests showed the 49-year-old man from Nanchong in the southwestern province of Sichuan had contracted the virus, Xinhua news agency said late on Tuesday, citing local health authorities. The patient had been exposed to dead poultry and was initially diagnosed as having pneumonia, the report said, adding that authorities said people who had had close contact with him have shown no symptoms.

Experts believe the infection is an individual case and the risk of further infection is low, it said. ProMED-mail, a reporting system run by the US-based International Society for Infectious Diseases, said on its Web site: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first human case of H5N6.” The strain has been used for a vaccine in poultry and it has been identified in migratory birds in Taiwan, it added.

Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control said H5N6 has previously been detected in the environment in Germany, Sweden and the US. Bird flu has taken a significant toll in China this year, with a total of 250 cases and 96 deaths from the H7N9 strain in the January-to-March period, according to China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission.

Last year, the country recorded 46 deaths and 144 cases from the H7N9 outbreak, which started early last year and returned in the autumn. The virus ignited fears that it could possibly mutate to become easily transmissible between people, but Chinese officials and the WHO said there is no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission.

China reports first death from H5N6 avian flu - Taipei Times