Bird Flu - Avian Influenza - news - information

Monday, March 05, 2007

China launches mass bird flu vaccination campaign

BEIJING, March 5 (Reuters) - China will vaccinate billions of domestic poultry over the next few months to guard against an outbreak of bird flu this spring, when the virus is at its most contagious, state media reported on Monday.

China’s Agriculture Ministry ordered the vaccination campaign to begin before March 15 and end before May, Xinhua news agency said.

During spring months, migratory birds fly north to summer nesting grounds, providing fertile conditions for spreading the deadly H5N1 virus.

“The ministry will also send experts to help monitor the breeding of poultry and waterfowl, and intensify monitoring of live poultry markets, border areas and regions where bird flu outbreaks were reported in the past,” Xinhua said.

Notice of the campaign comes days after health authorities confirmed a woman from China’s southeastern Fujian province had been infected with bird flu. She remains in hospital, Xinhua said.

Bird flu story source: Reuters’ Alert Net

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Suspected bird flu victim dies in Laos

UPDATE TO: Laos says sick woman probably country’s second known bird flu victim

A 42-year-old Laos woman believed to have contracted the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus died in hospital in the capital Vientiane on Sunday, the World Health Organisation said.

“The patient passed away at approximately 14:30 today,” the World Health Organisation said in statement issued jointly with the Laos health ministry.

Tests had showed the woman had H5 bird flu, but the authorities were still waiting for further results to determine whether it was the H5N1 strain.

Bird flu story source: AFP

Laos says sick woman probably country’s second known bird flu victim

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP): A woman who fell ill last month is probably the second human victim of bird flu in Laos, although conclusive test results are still pending, a Health Ministry official said Sunday.

Laboratory test results showed the woman, from the capital province of Vientiane, tested positive for an H5-type flu virus _ but it will take about six more days to know if she has the virulent H5N1 subtype, Dr. Bounlay Phommasack said by telephone.

Bounlay said it was almost certain the woman has H5N1, as she lives near a village that had poultry infected with the virus.

Health officials confirmed confirmed the country’s first known human case of bird flu late last month _ a 15-year-old female who fell ill on Feb. 10, just days after H5N1 was confirmed in poultry in the area. The girl was hospitalized in Vientiane and later transferred to Thailand, where she remains in a stable condition.

Both afflicted women reside in Vientiane province, though outside Vientiane municipality, the Lao capital.

Initial tests on the second woman were conducted by Laos’ National Center for Laboratory and Epidemiology, and a clinical specimen was also sent to the World Health Organization reference laboratory for verification and confirmation, Bounlay said.

The woman was tested after she developed a fever and pneumonia in late February.

“The woman’s exposure to sick poultry is unclear at this stage and investigations are ongoing,’’ WHO said in a statement.

Most human cases of H5N1 have been linked to contact with infected birds.

Hospital staff and close family members in contact with the patient were given the medicine oseltamivir as a post-exposure measure, Bounlay said. None have shown any flu-like symptoms.

Avian influenza story source: AP

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Bird flu experts urge halt to wild bird trade

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Leading virologists urged governments on Saturday to curb the trade of wild birds as they can spread the H5N1 bird flu virus, which has made a comeback in many parts of the world in recent months.

The warning comes as Hong Kong confirmed a scaly-breasted munia found dead in late February in the densely-populated district of Sham Shui Po had tested positive for the H5N1.

It was the 13th wild bird to have been found dead with the virus in Hong Kong since the start of this year.

“The munia is not a migratory bird. Again, it points to humans and the trade in movement of birds that are responsible for spreading this virus,” said virologist Robert Webster from St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

Small, wild birds are bought and sold across borders and released for religious purposes in many parts of the world. The practice is particularly strong in Hong Kong, which has a huge population of Buddhists and Taoists. The city imports the small birds mostly from mainland China.

“It goes back in all religions, release of birds from Noah’s Ark,” Webster told Reuters in Hong Kong.

“It’s not a Hong Kong thing or a Buddhist thing but numbers here are larger than in most places. We can’t blame the birds, it comes down to the humans,” he said.

VIRUS RE-EMERGING

The virus has re-emerged in recent months in birds in Vietnam, Myanmar, Japan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Britain and Pakistan, and killed a string of people in Indonesia. A farmer in China and a 15-year-old girl in Laos who are infected with the disease are battling for their lives.

John Oxford, virology professor at the Royal London Hospital, said the resurgence of the virus in Asia was deeply worrying and he called on governments to hammer out contingency plans.

“Without plans, there is no action. A lot of countries in southeast Asia, their plans are not substantial. That’s what I find worrying. In China, there is still an attitude that it is not their problem,” Oxford told Reuters in an interview.

Webster said repeat sightings of the disease during the cooler months in the last few years were evidence of active reservoirs of the virus in Asia.

He said the virus was probably resident all year-round in some species of ducks, which show no apparent signs of the disease. These viral loads would then build up in winter, jump to domestic chickens, which then pass them on to wild birds. Wild birds then carry the virus onward to other places.

Webster urged agriculture authorities to begin surveillance of healthy-looking birds and conduct culling when necessary.

“Some species of ducks are naturally more resistant to the H5N1 ... or the virus is being attenuated in the duck. The duck is the Trojan horse,” said Webster, an authority on the H5N1.

“There has to be surveillance of healthy looking-birds even though it is expensive. If authorities of the world put their resources into doing that, they could solve this problem.”

Source for bird flu story: Reuters

Malaysia not to use vaccine, still to cull birds to curb bird flu

KUALA LUMPUR, March 3 (KUNA)—Malaysia ruled out resorting to vaccine to contain the deadly H5 N1 virus in poultry and asserted it will keep on culling infected birds as the better option, proven affective in controlling the disease.

In remarks to television channels, Head of the Disease Control and Veterinary Biologics Unit, Veterinary Services Department, Dr. Kamarudin Mohamed Isa said on the sidelines of the ASEAN Workshop on Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) Control and Eradication that countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam were compelled to vaccinate ducks.

Indonesia and Vietnam used vaccines because culling birds would cost more to compensate farmers, he said.

Indonesia alone has more than 300 million chicken and Vietnam has more than 70 million ducks and using the vaccine is considered a successful economic alternative to minimize the costs and compensations which would cost more than one billion Ringgit (RM), he added.

Malaysia however, is still culling poultry and compensating farmers due to the small number of infected birds, Dr. Kamarudin pointed out.

Malaysia is also constantly observing the situation and is carrying out awareness campaigns aimed at villagers regarding the disease and this has proved effective in curbing its spread, he said.

He also stressed on the importance of cooperation among the ASEAN member states to help neighbors in quelling the disease and minimizing risk of its spread to other countries.
Bird flu story source: Kuwait News Agency

Friday, March 02, 2007

Kuwait finds H5N1 bird flu in chicken, falcon

KUWAIT, March 2 (Reuters) - Kuwait’s health ministry said on Friday it had found two new cases of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in a chicken and a falcon, bringing to 41 the number of birds infected with the virus in the Gulf Arab country.

Sixty handlers and their families have tested negative for the disease, and Kuwait is closing poultry shops in residential areas for three months in a campaign to curb its spread, health ministry official Ahmed al-Shatti told Reuters.

Kuwait confirmed 39 cases of bird flu last month but said 20 of them were in falcons at the zoo and a farm in the south of the country. The rest were domestic birds caged in people’s yards.

Kuwait closed the bird section of the zoo and banned the import of live birds after last month’s outbreak, the first in two years. It last reported a case of bird flu in a flamingo in 2005.

Avian influenza story source: Reuters

Thursday, March 01, 2007

China confirms human case of bird flu

BEIJING (AP) — China reported a new human case of bird flu on Thursday as Indonesia and the World Health Organization drew closer to resolving a dispute over virus samples that could be used to develop a commercial vaccine against the disease.

The human infection in China occurred in the coastal province of Fujian, where a 44-year-old farmer surnamed Li was diagnosed on Feb. 18 after he developed a fever and began coughing, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

It was the mainland’s first human case of bird flu since Jan. 10, when the government said a 37-year-old farmer in Anhui province in eastern China had contracted bird flu but had recovered.

Xinhua said tests by the provincial disease control and prevention center showed Li had been infected with the H5N1 virus strain and that the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the result on Feb. 27.

The report did not say whether the farmer worked with poultry or whether infected birds were found, but said that she had “made contact with dead fowl.”

Joanna Brent, a spokeswoman for the WHO’s Beijing office, said 22 out of China’s 23 human cases — including the latest in Fujian — “have not been forewarned by a poultry outbreak,” a sign of weakness in its animal surveillance system. In Fujian itself, three human infections have been reported but no sickness in birds, she said.

“This suggests that strategies for monitoring H5N1 in poultry need further strengthening. An exclusive focus on outbreaks is no longer sufficient,” Brent said. “All countries need to implement surveillance strategies to monitor where the virus is circulating and how the virus is changing.”

Avian influenza story source: AP

Myanmar has first bird flu outbreak in a year

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar has suffered its first outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus in a year, but there was no immediate evidence of human infections, a senior official said on Thursday.

Fowl on four farms on the northern outskirts of Yangon, three of them small family farms, had tested positive for the virus, Than Hla of the Ministry of Livestock Breeding & Fisheries told Reuters.

The outbreak on the largest of the farms prompted the culling of all 1,500 chickens and ducks on it, he said.

“The owner of the farm informed us immediately and we carried out necessary tests. The results of the laboratory tests showed it was H5N1. Arrangements are under way to have the specimen tested at the reference laboratories abroad,” Than Hla said.

“It is in a residential area and we are taking all possible measures to control the situation and to monitor the spread,” he said, adding that so far there had been no trace of the virus spreading to humans.

Later on Thursday he said the virus had also been found on three small family farms in the same area and all 300 fowl on them had been culled.

The infection probably came from migrating birds, a common suspect in bird flu outbreaks, Than Hla said.

It was the former Burma’s first outbreak of the feared disease since March last year and the military-ruled country has not reported any human cases.

Bird flu story source: Reuters