Bird Flu Bombshell

[theLIBERTARIAN]

I have never hunted deer. What San Fransisco are you talking about?

We plan on working on the Internet.

[Nictoe]

Yeah, its a real cryin shame they had to dismantle Ted Kaczynski's Montana shack. I could have lived there on twenty dollars a year also

[aliaslezarddagain]

[theLIBERTARIAN]

I have never heard that Alias. I plan on moving Ted Kaczynski's Montana shack to Minnesota and...

[aliaslezarddagain]

Evey state has it liberal stronghold, in Min it is the twin cities, just like in Texas it is Austin, Washington it is Seattle, etc. Red states have blue strongholds. This doesn't have to be a bad thing!

Anywhere outside of the major cities in places like Min and the people know damn well what it takes to survive due to the cold, wild animals and other things. This makes it to where common sense and survival trumps liberal idology when reality rears it's ugly head!

I think places like this have a built in nessesity for balance. MO

[Guest]

The Chinese government is behind the whole "Bird Flu." Looks like they're trying to thin out the over crowding population.

[bestsynd]

There is new understanding as to why the bird flu is so deadly to humans. The H5N1 virus triggers cytokines and chemokines which are inflammatory proteins at a ratio of 10 times more than a common flu.

[Nictoe]

US prepares for worst-case scenario with bird flu

Dec 05 7:14 PM US/Eastern

The federal authorities are preparing to face a possible avian flu pandemic in the United States by contemplating a worst-case scenario, under which more than 92 million people will become ill in the space of four months, US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said. The projections are based on the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic that killed about 50 million people around the world and emerged as the most serious pandemic of the 20th century.

"Because we want the assumptions to tease out and exercise the most severe case, the assumptions we are building on are primarily focused on the 1918 pandemic," the secretary told a meeting of officials from the 50 states and local governments, which focused on pandemic preparedness planning.

"The H5N1 virus we are concerned about currently resembles the triggering virus in 1918," he continued. "I will begin to use those planing assumptions in the development of models that will help us and you make decisions."

According to mathematical projections used by Washington, everything begins with an epidemic that breaks out in Thailand in a small village, where the H5N1 virus has hypothetically mutated and acquired the ability to transmit among humans.

This has not yet occurred. So far the virus has been jumping from birds to humans, but scientists believe it is just a matter of time before it learns how to move from human to human.

Bird flu has affected 130 people in Asia, with 69 of those cases being fatal.

Under the same catastrophic scenario, the epidemic will turn into a pandemic in just several weeks, spreading first in Asia before reaching Europe and the American continent 50 days later.

At the end of week six, Americans will see 722,000 pandemic cases in the United States, by week nine -- 37.4 million, by week 12 -- 90.8 million, and by the end of week 16, 92.2 million cases, according to Leavitt.

"The reality is ... pandemics happen," the secretary said. "When it comes to a pandemic, we are overdue and we are underprepared."

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/05/051206001434.cz1ycjxs.html

[Nictoe]

Death toll from bird flu hits 70 as Thai boy dies

By Panarat Thepgumpanat and Maggie Fox
Reuters
Friday, December 9, 2005; 6:49 AM


BANGKOK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Thai boy has become the 70th Asian to die of bird flu, authorities said on Friday, as reports warned a flu pandemic could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars as well as millions of lives.

China also reported a new case of H5N1, the fifth person in the country known to have been infected with the deadly virus. The 31-year-old woman, who lived in Heishan county of Liaoning province, has since recovered.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said it may seek to investigate control measures in the area, which has not reported any other human cases.

The death of the 5-year-old boy from the central province of Nakhon Nayok, 110 km (70 miles) from Bangkok, took Thailand's bird flu death toll to 14 out of 22 known cases since the virus swept through large parts of Asia in late 2003.

It was not certain how the boy caught the virus, which usually strikes those in close contact with infected fowl or their droppings, senior health officials said. The boy, who died in hospital on Wednesday, was not known to have had direct contact with chickens, health officials said.

"We believe that the boy contracted the virus from his surroundings because, although his family does not raise chickens, there are chickens raised in his neighborhood," said Thawat Suntrajarn, head of the Health Ministry's Disease Control Department.

That would follow the usual pattern of human infections of the virus, which has not yet shown signs of evolving into a form which could pass easily from person to person.

Experts say that is the great fear. If the H5N1 virus did acquire that ability, it could set off a pandemic which could kill millions of people without immunity to the new strain.

The virus is now endemic in poultry in parts of Asia and countries around the world are preparing plans to deal with a pandemic which could cause massive economic losses as well as millions of deaths.

BLEAK PICTURE

A pandemic could cause a serious recession in the U.S. economy, with immediate costs of between $500 and $675 billion, according to two new reports.

New Jersey based WBB Securities LLC predicted a pandemic could cause a one-year economic loss of $488 billion and a permanent economic loss of $1.4 trillion to the U.S. economy.

The World Bank has predicted a pandemic could cost the global economy $800 billion a year.

If the virus mutates into a form which passes between humans, it is likely to closely resemble the 1918 pandemic strain of flu that killed anywhere between 20 million and 100 million people, separate reports released by WBB and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said.

This means 30 percent of the population would be infected and more than 2 percent would die, the report from the CBO said.

"Further, CBO assumed that those who survived would miss three weeks of work, either because they were sick, because they feared the risk of infection at work, or because they needed to care of family or friends," the report reads.

The CBO said a pandemic could deal a $675 billion hit to the U.S. economy.

Hospitals would have difficulty controlling infection and might become sources for spreading the illness, the CBO said -- a fear echoed by another group, the National Center for Policy Analysis.

U.S. President George W. Bush released a $7.1 billion bird flu plan in November but Congress has yet to fund it.

ANTIVIRAL DRUGS

In a boost for countries seeking the antiviral drug Tamiflu, one of four drugs known to work against influenza, Swiss manufacturer Roche reached agreements with two U.S. generic drugmakers, as well as 13 other drug producers, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer said.

The agreements are meant to allow more production of the drug, known generically as oseltamivir, in case of an avian flu pandemic, Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a statement.

Countries are seeking to stockpile the drug but all are many million doses short of what would be needed to treat a pandemic.

Last month, Roche said Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines were free to begin making their own versions of the pill because it does not have patent protection in those countries.

Doctors believe Tamiflu may help control a pandemic of H5N1 influenza, although evidence suggests it may be less effective than it is against seasonal flu.

(Additional reporting by Kanokwan Boonngok in Bangkok; Richard Cowan, Susan Heavey and Maggie Smith in Washington; Emma Graham-Harrison in Beijing and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva)

[Guest]

OMG.

92 million people will become ill in the space of four months. Half the people will die from it. The assumptions we are building on are primarily focused on the 1918 pandemic.

"Under the same catastrophic scenario, the epidemic will turn into a pandemic in just several weeks, spreading first in Asia before reaching Europe and the American continent 50 days later.

At the end of week six, Americans will see 722,000 pandemic cases in the United States, by week nine -- 37.4 million, by week 12 -- 90.8 million, and by the end of week 16, 92.2 million cases, according to Leavitt."

[Fringe]

Sort of related...I think it's Pfizer that has a method of making a vaccine using blood cells. They won't use it on humans because it's not approved my the FDA, but they are just kicking back waiting for the request. This method would make vaccines available much faster than the current method.

Think about it. They can't make a vaccine until it mutates so that instead of it jumping from bird to human it goes human to human. Then they have to get it and go through the whole process of making a vaccine. I may be way off base but I recall something like a month to make a vaccine. In that time you have to hope that it doesn't mutate again.

Everybody go buy stock in Pfizer

[bestsynd]

A Canadian company, Biolyse Pharma Corp., have plans to use up to half a million used Christmas trees in Ontario to extract a chemical found in the needles to help manufacturer vaccine for the bird flu. Shikimic acid can be harvested from the needles of pine, spruce and fir trees. The acid is usually harvested from the star anise tree in China.

Old Christmas Trees to be used to make Avian Bird Flu Vaccine

[theLIBERTARIAN]

I told my wife that once I see 60 cases in the same hospital, I will know that it has passed from human to human. It appears these latest deaths of the children are from the virus passed from bird to human. No time to panic. But I did find it interesting that they beleive 25 more people in Turkey may be ill from the H5N1 virus. There have only been about 170 total cases world wide since 2004, and now all of a sudden there are 25 cases in a portion of Turkey? Hopefully it is not the H5N1.



Article

Third Turkish child dead from bird flu, more ill

DOGUBAYAZIT, Turkey (Reuters) - A third child from the same family in eastern Turkey died from bird flu on Friday as doctors treated more than 20 other people, mostly youngsters, suspected of having the deadly virus.

Doctors said some of the victims had been playing with the severed heads of infected birds. The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed 74 people in east Asia and has now spread to the fringes of Europe.

Turkey's health ministry said a second set of tests at a World Health Organization (WHO) laboratory had confirmed bird flu as the cause of death.

A spokeswoman in Geneva said the WHO was sending experts to the region who would check for any signs the virus had been passed from person to person -- something that has happened in only one previous but unconfirmed case.

"It is possible that they all had common exposure to sick poultry but it is also possible there may have been human to human transmission. We don't have enough information to draw a hypothesis either way," WHO spokeswoman Maria Cheng said.

"That is certainly one of the possibilities that the team is going to be investigating," she added.

The deadly H5N1 virus has so far been hard for people to catch but there are fears it could mutate into a form easily transmitted among humans. Experts say a pandemic among humans could kill millions and cause massive economic losses.

The latest child to die was Hulya Kocyigit, 11, the sister of Mehmet Ali, a 14-year-old boy who died last weekend, and of Fatma, 15, a girl who died on Thursday. She was buried alongside her brother and sister on Friday in a lime-covered grave.

The children lived in a remote rural district of eastern Turkey near the Armenian and Iranian borders, in close proximity with poultry -- just like the east Asian victims. Neighboring Azerbaijan was also going to run tests on suspect dead birds.

Doctors treating victims at a hospital in the eastern city of Van said the disease had been contracted from sick birds.

"All our patients have been in close proximity to poultry. Some patients handled the infected poultry, some of them were even playing with the heads of chickens," BBC television quoted doctor Ahmet Faik Oner as saying.

A joint WHO/European Commission team is expected to arrive in eastern Turkey on Friday. Four more WHO experts will go to Turkey at the weekend.

MORE CASES

Huseyin Avni Sahin, the head doctor at Van hospital where the children died, told CNN Turk 23 people were now being treated at his hospital for suspected bird flu.

"Fifteen of them are in bed, one in a critical condition. Eight are able to move about. Most of the patients are children," he said.

The state Anatolian news agency later said 26 people were receiving treatment at the hospital. It said 18 others had been discharged after being cleared of having the disease. Those being treated come from several provinces across eastern Turkey.

Six children were being tested for suspected bird flu in the city of Diyarbakir, hundreds of kilometers southwest of the area so far affected, hospital officials said.

The dead children's six-year-old brother was also being treated for the same disease in hospital. But their parents were in good health as they received visitors paying condolences at their tiny one-room cottage in the town of Dogubayazit.

"There is no doctor here, we are very poor," Ibrahim Kocyigit, a relative, told Reuters in a tent set up near the house to accommodate the flood of visitors.

In Dogubayazit, an anxious crowd gathered outside the state agricultural offices to dump sacks of dead poultry or ask for their poultry to be culled.

"After the deaths everybody is scared. We are all getting rid of our chickens and nobody dares eat their meat," said local trader Devlet Kaya.

The WHO said in a statement dated Thursday that Turkish authorities had told it that the district had been placed under quarantine, with no people or animals allowed to move in or out. However, a Reuters reporter there on Friday saw no controls.

Agriculture officials wearing face masks and protective white suits carried the sacks away to be culled and dumped in the municipal rubbish tip outside the town, where they are buried in a deep pit and covered with lime.

One official said 3,500 poultry had been culled in the district so far and this figure was expected to reach 5,000 by the time the operation was completed on Saturday. However, officials said some families were trying to hide their poultry.

[Nictoe]

New Bird Flu Cases in Turkey Put Europe on 'High Alert'

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
January 7, 2006

ROME, Jan. 6 - Health officials in Europe said Friday that they were on "high alert" as a third child in eastern Turkey was confirmed to have bird flu and more than two dozen people there were under observation at a local hospital, an unusual cluster of human cases that raised the possibility that the virus had become more contagious to humans.

The officials have watched with concern over the last four months as the strain of bird flu known as H5N1 has moved steadily from East Asia to the edge of Europe, first in birds and now probably in humans. A laboratory in England confirmed for the first time on Friday that the three children in Turkey, two of whom died, had had the H5N1 virus. The tests pointed to the most serious N1 strain, health officials said. Further testing on samples from them and other patients was under way.

"I'm not sure we've seen a cluster like this in terms of numbers, and certainly it's a concern," said Maria Cheng, spokeswoman for the Division of Epidemic Preparedness at the World Health Organization. "Is the virus being transmitted more easily from birds to humans, or even from humans to humans? We need to put all the pieces together before we can come to conclusions."

International health authorities say the Turkish victims - the first outside of East Asia - probably became ill after close contact with sick or dead chickens infected with the virus. Reports in the Turkish press said that two siblings who died, Mehmet Ali Kocyigit, 14, and his sister, Fatma, 15, had been playing catch with the heads of dead chickens.

While the H5N1 virus does not now readily infect humans or pass between them, scientists worry that it may acquire that ability through naturally occurring processes, a development that could ultimately set off a worldwide flu epidemic.

Scientists point out that the cluster of cases in Turkey does not indicate that such a mutation has occurred. Even if additional cases of bird flu are confirmed there, some scientists say, they probably stemmed from people handling the same sick birds - not from a mutated virus that passed between humans.

Still, the W.H.O. and the European Commission were alarmed enough to dispatch a joint team of scientists to eastern Turkey this week. Both entities also said they did not believe that people in Europe were at risk, unless they had had contact with poultry in disease zones.

"Europe is on high alert," said Christine McNab, a spokeswoman in the Director General's office of the W.H.O. "But unless there is new information, the risk still lies with people who are in contact with sick birds." In Europe, Romania and Croatia have reported outbreaks.

The full extent of the cluster is unclear because tests for H5N1, which are difficult to perform, are still under way in England. Beyond the Kocyigit siblings, another unrelated boy was also found to be infected. He is severely ill in the same hospital where the siblings were treated, in the city of Van.

Two other children in the Kocyigit family were also recently hospitalized with severe respiratory disease. One died Friday, and the other is recovering, although tests have not yet confirmed their diagnoses.

An additional 26 people are in the Van hospital under observation for possible bird flu, the Turkish Anatolia news agency reported, though many will presumably turn out to have lesser ailments.

"There is naturally panic among locals who believed for many years that there was no harm in eating dead poultry," Prof. Ahmet Faik Oner, head of the Van University Hospital child care unit, said in a telephone interview. "Now is the time to change their habits without any delay in light of these casualties."

Until now, all known 142 cases of human bird flu have been in East Asia. Most have been lone cases in families, and about half of those infected have died.

Scientists in Cambridge, England, are examining virus samples from Turkey for genetic changes from the Asian variant that could make the virus more capable of jumping from birds to humans. The European Commission, which banned poultry imports from Turkey in October, after the first outbreak in chickens there, said that it was "closely monitoring the situation."

Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Oxford University Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, who has treated more than a dozen people with bird flu, said the Turkish cluster was "worrying" but in no way meant that a flu pandemic was imminent or inevitable.

Dr. Farrar said that he, too, had seen a few tiny clusters of people with H5N1 in Vietnam and had concluded that they were probably caused by "common exposure" to the same infected birds.

"In rural communities, whether in Vietnam or Turkey, people live very close to poultry," Dr. Farrar said. "When a bird is prepared for a meal, the whole family is involved."

He also said that many patients now in Turkish hospitals would ultimately test negative for the disease.

"It's a horrible virus, but in the early stages it's like any pneumonia," he said. "When people are scared they have a lower threshold for going to the hospital. It's a natural reaction."

At the very least, the outbreak underscored serious gaps in the world's strategy for addressing this emerging disease. For one thing, even though chickens were dying, there were no reports of H5N1 in the remote village of Dogubayazit when the Kocyigit children fell ill.

"Especially in rural areas, we need to do more to get the message out," said Ms. Cheng, the W.H.O. spokeswoman.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul for this article.

[bestsynd]

What do you think Nic? Here is a Best Syndication Article on the subject.

January 8th 2006


Chickens
With the recent bird flu outbreak in Turkey involving the deaths of three children, many people are looking for ways to protect themselves and their family. Reports from Turkey tests speculate that 14-year-old Mehmet Ali Kocyigit and his sisters Fatma, 15, and Hulya, 11, all died of the H5N1 bird flu. This is according to a story from the Guardian website.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says there are a total of four cases confirmed by laboratory tests. Two of the cases were fatal, according to a press release issued on January 7th. The WHO says one of the sibling’s cause of death has not been confirmed yet, but some experts suspect it is likely the H5N1 virus.


To find out what the experts say about catching the bird flu click here