Deadly avian flu on the wing
By Mike Davis
The first bar-headed geese have already arrived at their wintering
grounds near the Cauvery River in the southern Indian state of
Karnataka. Over the next 10 weeks, 100,000 more geese, gulls and
cormorants will leave their summer home at Lake Qinghai in western
China, headed for India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and, eventually,
Australia.
An unknown number of these beautiful migrating birds will carry H5N1,
the avian flu sub-type that has killed 61 people in Southeast Asia and
which the World Health Organization (WHO) fears is on the verge of
mutating into a pandemic form like that which killed 50 to 100 million
people in the fall of 1918.
As the birds arrive in the wetlands of South Asia, they will excrete
the virus into the water, where it risks spreading to migrating
waterfowl from Europe, as well as to domestic poultry. In the
worst-case scenario, this will bring avian flu to the doorstep of the
dense slums of Dhaka, Kolkata, Karachi and Mumbai.
The avian flu outbreak at Lake Qinghai was first identified by Chinese
wildlife officials at the end of April. Initially it was confined to a
small islet in the huge salt lake, where geese suddenly began to act
spasmodically, then to collapse and die. By mid-May it had spread
through the lake's entire avian population, killing thousands of
birds. An ornithologist called it "the biggest and most extensively
mortal avian influenza event ever seen in wild birds".
Chinese scientists, meanwhile, were horrified by the virulence of the
new strain: when mice were infected they died even quicker than when
injected with "genotype Z", the fearsome H5N1 variant currently
killing farmers and their children in Vietnam.
Yi Guan, leader of a famed team of avian flu researchers who have been
fighting the pandemic menace since 1997, complained to the British
Guardian newspaper in July about the lackadaisical response of Chinese
authorities to the unprecedented biological conflagration at Lake
Qinghai.
"They have taken almost no action to control this outbreak. They
should have asked for international support. These birds will go to
India and Bangladesh and there they will meet birds that come from
Europe." Yi Guan called for the creation of an international task
force to monitor the wild bird pandemic, as well as the relaxation of
rules that prevent the free movement of foreign scientists to outbreak
zones in China.
In a paper published in the British science magazine Nature, Yi Guan
and his associates also revealed that the Lake Qinghai strain was
related to officially unreported recent outbreaks of H5N1 among birds
in southern China. This would not be the first time that Chinese
authorities have been charged with covering up an outbreak. They also
lied about the nature and extent of the 2003 SARS epidemic, which
originated in Guangdong but quickly spread to 25 other countries. As
in the case of SARS' whistleblowers, the Chinese bureaucracy is now
trying to gag avian-flu scientists, shutting down one of Yi Guan's
laboratories at Shantou University and arming the conservative
Agriculture Ministry with new powers over research.
Meanwhile, as anxious Indian scientists monitor bird sanctuaries
throughout the sub-continent, H5N1 has spread to the outskirts of
Lhasa, the capital of Tibet; to western Mongolia; and, most
disturbingly, to chickens and wildfowl near the Siberian capital of
Novosibirsk.
Despite frantic efforts to cull local poultry, Russian Health Ministry
experts have expressed pessimism that the outbreak can be contained on
the Asian side of the Urals. Siberian wildfowl migrate every fall to
the Black Sea and southern Europe; another flyway leads from Siberia
to Alaska and Canada.
In anticipation of this next, and perhaps inevitable, stage in the
world journey of avian flu, poultry populations are being tracked in
Moscow; Alaskan scientists are studying birds migrating across the
Bering Straits, and even the Swiss are looking over their shoulders at
the tufted ducks and pochards arriving from Eurasia.
H5N1's human epicenter is also expanding: in mid-July Indonesian
authorities confirmed that a father and his two young daughters had
died of avian flu in a wealthy suburb of Jakarta. Disturbingly, the
family had no known contact with poultry and near panic ensued in the
neighborhood as the media speculated about possible human-to-human
transmission.
At the same time, five new outbreaks among poultry were reported in
Thailand, dealing a terrible blow to the nation's extensive and highly
publicized campaign to eradicate the disease. Meanwhile, as Vietnamese
officials renewed their appeal for more international aid, H5N1 was
claiming new victims in the country that remains of chief concern to
the WHO.
The bottom line is that avian influenza is endemic and probably
ineradicable among poultry in Southeast Asia, and now seems to be
spreading at pandemic velocity among migratory birds, with the
potential to reach most of the earth in the next year.
Each new outpost of H5N1 - whether among ducks in Siberia, pigs in
Indonesia or humans in Vietnam - is a further opportunity for the
rapidly evolving virus to acquire the gene or even simply the protein
mutation that it needs to become a mass-killer of humans.
This exponential multiplication of hot spots and silent reservoirs (as
among infected but asymptomatic ducks) is why the chorus of warnings
from scientists, public-health officials, and finally, governments has
become so plangently insistent in recent months.
The new US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the
Associated Press in early August that an influenza pandemic was now an
"absolute certainty", echoing repeated warnings from the WHO that it
was "inevitable". Likewise, Science magazine observed that expert
opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as "100%".
In the same grim spirit, the British media revealed that officials
were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries,
based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000
Britons. The Blair government is already conducting emergency
simulations of a pandemic outbreak ("Operation Arctic Sea") and is
reported to have readied "Cobra" - a cabinet-level working group that
coordinates government responses to national emergencies, like the
recent London bombings, from a secret war room in Whitehall - to deal
with an avian flu crisis.
Little of this Churchillian resolve is apparent in Washington.
Although a sense of extreme urgency is evident in the National
Institutes of Health, where the czar for pandemic planning, Dr Anthony
Fauci, warns of "the mother of all emerging infections", the White
House has seemed even less perturbed by migrating plagues than by
wanton carnage in Iraq.
Prevention and cure
As the president was packing for his long holiday in Texas, the Trust
for America's Health was warning that domestic preparations for a
pandemic lagged far behind the energetic measures being undertaken in
Britain and Canada, and that the administration had failed "to
establish a cohesive, rapid and transparent US pandemic strategy".
That increasingly independent operator, Senate majority leader Bill
Frist, had already criticized the administration in an extraordinary
(and under-reported) speech at Harvard at the beginning of June.
Referring to Washington's failure to stockpile an adequate supply of
the crucial antiviral oseltamivir (or Tamiflu), Frist sarcastically
noted that "to acquire more anti-viral agent, we would need to get in
line behind Britain and France and Canada and others who have tens of
millions of doses on order".
The New York Times on its July 17 editorial page, a May 26 special
issue of Nature and the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs have also
hammered away at Washington's failure to stockpile enough scarce
antivirals - current inventories cover less than 1% of the US
population - and to modernize vaccine production. Even a few prominent
Senate Democrats have stirred into action, although none as boldly as
Frist at Harvard.
The Department of Health and Human Services, in response, has sought
to calm critics with recent hikes in spending on vaccine research and
antiviral stockpiles. There has also been much official and media
ballyhoo about the announcement of a series of successful tests in
early August of an experimental avian flu vaccine.
But there is no guarantee that the vaccine prototype, based on a
"reverse-genetically-engineered" strain of H5N1, will actually be
effective against a pandemic strain with different genes and proteins.
Moreover, trial success was based on the administration of two doses
plus a booster. Since the government has only ordered 2 million doses
of the vaccine from pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Pasteur, this may
provide protection for only 450,000 people. As one researcher told
Science magazine, "it's a vaccine for the happy few".
At the least, gearing up for larger-scale production will take many
months and production itself is limited by the antiquated technology
of vaccine manufacture, which depends on a vulnerable and limited
supply of fertile chicken eggs. It would also likely mean the
curtailment of the production of the annual winter flu vaccine that is
so often a lifesaver for many senior citizens.
Likewise, Washington's new orders for antivirals, as Frist predicted,
will have to wait in line behind the other customers of Roche's single
Tamiflu plant in Switzerland. In short, it is good news that the
vaccine tests were successful, but that does little to change the
judgment of the New York Times that "there is not enough vaccine or
antiviral medicine available to protect more than a handful of people,
and no industrial capacity to produce a lot more of these medicines
quickly".
Moreover, the majority of the world, including all the poor countries
of South Asia and Africa where, history tells us, pandemics are likely
to hit especially hard, will have no access to expensive antivirals or
scarce vaccines. It is even doubtful whether the WHO will have the
minimal pharmaceuticals to respond to an initial outbreak.
Recent theoretical studies by mathematical epidemiologists in Atlanta
and London have raised hopes that a pandemic might be stopped in its
tracks if 1 to 3 million doses of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were available
to douse an outbreak in a fail-safe radius around the early cases.
After years of effort, however, the WHO has only managed to inventory
about 123,000 courses of Tamiflu. Although Roche has promised to
donate more, the desperate rush of rich countries to accumulate
Tamiflu will be certain to undercut the WHO's stockpile.
As for a universally available "world vaccine", it remains a
pipe-dream without new, billion-dollar commitments from the rich
countries, above all the United States, and even then, we are probably
too late.
"People just don't get it," Dr Michael Osterholm, the outspoken
director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at
the University of Minnesota, recently complained. "If we were to begin
a Manhattan Project-type response tonight to expand vaccine and drug
production, we wouldn't have a measurable impact on the availability
of these critical products to sufficiently address a worldwide
pandemic for at least several years."
"Several years" is a luxury that Washington has already squandered.
The best guess, as the geese head west and south, is that we have
almost run out of time. As Shigeru Omi, the Western Pacific director
of WHO, told a UN meeting in Kuala Lumpur in early July: "We're at the
tipping point."
.
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| User: "=?iso-8859-1?q?Uncle_Wally_da_HOOROO_Guru=99?=" |
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| Title: Re: Deadly flu heading for Asia |
18 Aug 2005 11:02:51 PM |
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AS LONG AS IT doesn't come to Oz -=- we don't want any asia flu
carriers here !!!
HOOROO
UNCLE WALLY
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| User: "FourCell" |
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| Title: Re: Deadly flu heading for Asia |
18 Aug 2005 11:04:35 AM |
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Other wild birds carrying H5N1 will travel to Alaska, then down the
West Coast of the US.
.
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| User: "dreamwalker" |
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| Title: Re: Deadly flu heading for Asia |
18 Aug 2005 08:53:48 PM |
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"FourCell" <fourcell@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1124381075.898361.167700@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Other wild birds carrying H5N1 will travel to Alaska, then down the
West Coast of the US.
So?
.
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| User: "Ready4Football" |
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| Title: Re: Deadly flu heading for Asia |
18 Aug 2005 10:20:45 PM |
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"dreamwalker" <backfromthe@dead.com> wrote in message
news:5c7c3$43053bb0$40762896$19287@powerweb.allthenewsgroups.com...
"FourCell" <fourcell@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1124381075.898361.167700@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Other wild birds carrying H5N1 will travel to Alaska, then down the
West Coast of the US.
So?
SO? Well, dreamwalker, this is how it starts, how it always starts. We blow
it off until it's too late. Oh, they're working on a vaccine! How nice! Do
you have that much faith in medical science? Do you really believe they can
quickly find a cure for a new and deadly virus? The number of viral
infections that modern medicine can cure is zero, although we do have
effective vaccines for some of them. What about cancer and AIDS? WE can't
even cure leprosy, and that's been around how long? But the politicians
will lie and people will die. A book I read recently, Full Circle by Michael
Boyle, is pure fiction, but the H5N1 situation is playing out just like that
book. Avian flu may be very unfunny twelve months from now.
.
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| User: "dreamwalker" |
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| Title: Re: Deadly flu heading for Asia |
18 Aug 2005 10:23:59 PM |
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"Ready4Football" <not@home.com> wrote in message news:rbydnQ2jJYoJ0pjeRVn-hA@wavecable.com...
"dreamwalker" <backfromthe@dead.com> wrote in message
news:5c7c3$43053bb0$40762896$19287@powerweb.allthenewsgroups.com...
"FourCell" <fourcell@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1124381075.898361.167700@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Other wild birds carrying H5N1 will travel to Alaska, then down the
West Coast of the US.
So?
SO? Well, dreamwalker, this is how it starts, how it always starts. We blow
it off until it's too late. Oh, they're working on a vaccine! How nice! Do
you have that much faith in medical science? Do you really believe they can
quickly find a cure for a new and deadly virus? The number of viral
infections that modern medicine can cure is zero, although we do have
effective vaccines for some of them. What about cancer and AIDS? WE can't
even cure leprosy, and that's been around how long? But the politicians
will lie and people will die. A book I read recently, Full Circle by Michael
Boyle, is pure fiction, but the H5N1 situation is playing out just like that
book. Avian flu may be very unfunny twelve months from now.
Why don't you spend more time trying to control what you can. You'll find life will go much smoother
and you'll be happier.
Your pal, the dreamwalker
.
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| User: "Ready4Football" |
|
| Title: Re: Deadly flu heading for Asia |
20 Aug 2005 12:28:30 AM |
|
|
"dreamwalker" <backfromthe@dead.com> wrote in message
news:91157$430550d3$40762896$20507@powerweb.allthenewsgroups.com...
"Ready4Football" <not@home.com> wrote in message
news:rbydnQ2jJYoJ0pjeRVn-hA@wavecable.com...
"dreamwalker" <backfromthe@dead.com> wrote in message
news:5c7c3$43053bb0$40762896$19287@powerweb.allthenewsgroups.com...
"FourCell" <fourcell@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1124381075.898361.167700@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Other wild birds carrying H5N1 will travel to Alaska, then down the
West Coast of the US.
So?
SO? Well, dreamwalker, this is how it starts, how it always starts. We
blow
it off until it's too late. Oh, they're working on a vaccine! How nice!
Do
you have that much faith in medical science? Do you really believe they
can
quickly find a cure for a new and deadly virus? The number of viral
infections that modern medicine can cure is zero, although we do have
effective vaccines for some of them. What about cancer and AIDS? WE
can't
even cure leprosy, and that's been around how long? But the politicians
will lie and people will die. A book I read recently, Full Circle by
Michael
Boyle, is pure fiction, but the H5N1 situation is playing out just like
that
book. Avian flu may be very unfunny twelve months from now.
Why don't you spend more time trying to control what you can. You'll find
life will go much smoother
and you'll be happier.
Your pal, the dreamwalker
I'm an old boy scout, dreamwalker. Gotta be prepared
.
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