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Quiplash! [deleted] says:
Three other news feeds worth following:
#1 NewsNow Bird flu. UK-based website. Updates from ~21,000 news sources every 5 minutes
www.newsnow.co.uk/newsfeed/?name=Bird+Flu
#2 Google News Bird flu / Avian flu
news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q="avian+f...
#3 Topix.net News: Influenza
www.topix.net/health/influenza
Plus three more must-read blogs:
#1 The coming influenza pandemic?
influenzapandemic.blogspot.com/
#2 H5N1
crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/
#3 Effect Measure
effectmeasure.blogspot.com/
Originally posted 80 months ago.
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Quiplash! edited this topic 80 months ago.
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[I don't consider it the "only weapon"
and there certainly isn't enough to go around,
nor quick tests available
to tell if you really had been exposed to a deadly strain and need to start taking it.
Some wondered if those deaths were getting so much press
because citizens are buying the medication for themselves,
(or, *something* over the internet, said to be real Tamiflu...)
and governments would rather have it, to stockpile/choose where to distribute...]
Posted 80 months ago.
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Are you stocked up for what your household normally needs/uses?
Car and home maintenance done?
Those with health insurance; all your physical checkups and dental work done?
Make hay while the sun shines.
Posted 79 months ago.
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Study: Two Bird Flu Victims In Vietnam Die After Becoming Resistant To Tamiflu
Dr. Anne Moscona, a flu expert at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, called the deaths frightening and said they demonstrate the dangers of hoarding drugs
"People who stockpile will naturally share or take drugs at the wrong dose, and that's really a bad idea,"
The new report involved eight Vietnamese bird flu patients given Tamiflu upon being hospitalized in 2004 or 2005. Half of the patients died. Lab tests showed two of those who died — girls ages 13 and 18 — had developed resistance
Roche is conducting animal studies of different dosages to see which works best. Results are expected early next year.
The New England Journal of Medicine
~SD
Posted 78 months ago.
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Quiplash! [deleted] says:
This last piece is very troubling news indeed.
Posted 78 months ago.
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edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2004/bird.flu/
Posted 78 months ago.
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bump! www.fluwikie.com/
Posted 77 months ago.
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"Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy"
www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/avianflu/inde...
www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/panflu/index....
Posted 76 months ago.
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H5N1 bird flu polymorphisms "Expression Profiling"
Fatal Bird Flu Familial Cluster
In Azerbaijan Grows Again
By Dr. Henry L. Niman, PhD
Googled
4-12-6
Today WHO disclosed that another person (17F) related to several H5N1 positive patients in Azerbaijan, has also tested positive for H5N1 bird flu. The latest disclosure raises the number of relatives or close friend who were H5N1 positive to 7, representing 5 families.
The index case (17F) died on February 23. Initially she was thought to have died from respiratory complications associated with lung cancer. However, the initial WHO report failed to indicate that she was a first cousin of the second confirmed H5N1 fatality (20F) who died March 3. Her close friend (17F) died March 8 and her brother (16M) died March 10. Thus, the first 4 H5N1 positive cases in the community died, and all were related or neighbors.
The latest report indicates that two more relatives developed symptoms on March 11, after the first four had died. In addition, a sister (16F) of one of the discharged patients (15F) also was H5N1 positive in local tests.
Thus, there were 7 patients who were H5N1 positive and closely linked, although the disease onset dates were spread over a period of more than a month. The extended time frame makes a common source unlikely, although WHO initially speculated that the cases were linked to feather plucking of dead wild birds.
These cases are similar to the large and extended clusters in nearby eastern Turkey and raise questions about genetic alterations such as S227N in the receptor binding domain. S227N was detected in the index case in Turkey, and some reports suggest that H5N1 from the sister also had S227N.
Although the latest WHO update indicated additional cases in Azerbaijan were not found, H5N1 migrating back north from Africa could bring or create more H5N1 with S227N, resulting in more large clusters and more efficient human-to-human transmissions,
Originally posted 75 months ago.
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ScrewDriver edited this topic 75 months ago.
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05/05/06
Live bird flu virus found in victim's blood
HELEN BRANSWELL
Canadian Press
Toronto — Live H5N1 avian flu virus can be isolated in the blood of its human victims, a finding that will be reported by Thai researchers in an upcoming issue of a scientific journal.
Evidence that H5N1 can spread via the bloodstream to parts of the body not normally attacked by influenza viruses confirms this particular flu strain poses special challenges for both patient treatment and infection control, experts say. It also raises theoretical questions about the safety of the donated blood system should H5N1 trigger a pandemic.
"This is the first report of a high amount of (H5N1) virus in blood in humans," University of Ottawa virologist Earl Brown said of the findings, outlined in a letter slated for publication in the June issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases.
"That's a bit surprising because blood is poisonous to flu virus. If you take any blood ... and add it to flu, you kill it (the virus). This showed that the virus was living in the blood," said Dr. Brown, who was not an author of the letter.
While some types of viruses spread well in blood, cases of viremia — viral infection in the bloodstream — have only rarely been reported with influenza.
The researchers — from Chulalongkorn University, Srinakharinwirot University and the National Institute of Animal Health, all in Bangkok — reported on the case of a five-year-old Thai boy who died of H5N1 infection Dec. 7.
A blood sample drawn on the day he died contained high levels of live virus
The finding helps to explain reports that some humans with H5N1 experience what is called systemic infection, with the flu virus spreading beyond its normal home in the respiratory track to organs that would typically go untouched by human flu viruses.
Other research groups have reported finding traces of H5N1's RNA in blood. Those findings were highly suggestive that the virus was using the bloodstream to disseminate throughout the body, but were not strong enough evidence to rule out that spread was actually occurring via other routes such as the lymphatic system.
Researchers at Oxford University's clinical research unit at the Hospital for Tropical Medicine in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, for instance, reported last year on a boy whose H5N1 infection spread to his brain, causing encephalitis.
The lead author of that report, virologist Menno de Jong, said his group has found viral RNA in the blood of about half of the H5N1 patients in which they've looked for it.
"It was really surprising for influenza, because the case reports of human influenza and viremia are so rare," he said from Ho Chi Minh City.
"It's probably quite common in H5N1 infected patients."
That poses challenges for treating patients infected with H5N1 because if the virus is spreading through the blood, so too must drugs that aim to combat the infection.
Currently there are only four flu antivirals on the market and one, zanamivir (sold as Relenza) is administered to the respiratory tract by inhalation. The drug would need to be formulated in an injectable form to be useful for systemic infection, Dr. de Jong said.
It also raises concerns about infection control for health-care workers and laboratory scientists coming in contact with the blood of H5N1 patients — although precautions against contact with blood are widespread as a consequence of years of experience with blood-borne infections like HIV and hepatitis C.
"I think for this kind of flu, infection control measures should include all bodily secretions, basically," Dr. de Jong said.
The findings also raise questions about whether blood transfusions could be a source of infection if H5N1 were to become a pandemic strain.
Canadian Blood Services and the American Red Cross have been studying the issue, but currently it is believed that the risk is more theoretical than real, because influenza's incubation period is so short. Once people develop symptoms they would be unlikely to want to give blood and would probably be turned away if they showed up to a blood-donor clinic.
"From the blood-donor and blood-supply point of view, the issue would be whether there's virus in the blood before the patient becomes ill," said Dr. Jeffrey McCullough, who holds an American Red Cross professorship in transfusion medicine at the University of Minnesota.
"Once you've got somebody that's sick, of course, they wouldn't be acceptable as a blood donor," he said.
Originally posted 74 months ago.
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ScrewDriver edited this topic 74 months ago.
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www.birdflurss.com/rss.xml - Get the important BIRD FLU news via RSS to your feedreader or syndicate it to your website.
Posted 74 months ago.
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Update 05/13/06 @ 17:40EST
This could be about Quiplash! :-)
The same story from the link without graphics
March 23, 2006 11:07 p.m. EST
AVIAN FLU: PREVENTING A PANDEMIC
A Bird Flu Watcher Develops
A Following Through the Internet
By NICHOLAS ZAMISKA
March 23, 2006 11:07 p.m.; Page B1
Henry L. Niman is a sort of macabre bird watcher, trailing the deaths of chickens, ducks and pigeons late at night by the glow of a computer monitor in the office of his suburban Pittsburgh home.
There, the 57-year-old biochemist keeps vigil over a blog and an explosion of offshoot Internet discussion groups tracking the avian flu virus across the world. Dr. Niman sleeps "a few hours here and there," living partly on dwindling savings from previous research jobs. He recently shifted his schedule toward the Asian time zones to keep up with the fast-moving bird flu developments in the region.
While he hasn't published a peer-reviewed paper since the mid-1990s, Dr. Niman says that he hopes his time trolling the Web "will pave the way for rapid acceptance" by the scientific community of his theories about how the virus is evolving. On Web message boards he has been called everything from "a Churchill of our times" to a "gonzo scientist." But in the World Wide Web of bird flu addicts, Dr. Niman is famous.
PREVENTING A PANDEMIC
Interactive Map
As a global team of top scientists stalks the avian influenza virus in hopes of staving off a human pandemic, a parallel universe of nonprofessional laptop sleuths -- fostered in part by Dr. Niman's many Web postings -- is racing to beat them at their own game.
These amateur detectives are supercharged by a mix of conviction, fear, distrust of authority, and old-fashioned competitive spirit. They believe mainstream scientists are missing important clues about the virus's evolution -- and that's why ordinary citizens have to take the lead. So they are scanning news reports from various countries trying to figure out how the virus is mutating and whether there have been clusters of bird flu cases in humans. Such a grouping could indicate the beginning of a pandemic since the virus would be spreading from person to person.
"I'm just a housewife, but I've been obsessed with this," says a 49-year-old mother of two daughters from outside Hershey, Pa. She asked not to be identified by name so her neighbors wouldn't think she was "goofy." She started following bird flu on the Internet a little over a year ago, when she was researching the proper dosage of a flu medication for her daughters. She has spent hours each day tracking the latest developments on the Web. She has theorized that India will spark the pandemic.
"I know it's strange, and I know it's not normal, but I just can't seem to break away from it," this woman says.
Dr. Niman hasn't formally recruited any of his followers; he doesn't direct their research and he certainly doesn't issue orders. His relationship with his acolytes is informal and even a bit distant. He posts commentary about bird flu on his company's Web site, and frequently contributes to various bird flu discussion groups. The amateurs take it from there.
"It has brought together a fairly diverse group," Dr. Niman says of his Web postings. "These are people who just became more concerned about what is going on."
The Internet is infamous for fostering obsessions and pseudo-science of all kinds. But the prospect of a bird flu pandemic has an apocalyptic quality that can quickly breed fear and distrust.
H5N1, the strain of avian influenza that worries health experts the most, has killed millions of birds across Asia and has now spread into Europe and Africa. The virus can pass from birds to humans through close contact, but some scientists warn that a single mutation could make it readily transmissible among people as well, killing millions around the world in a matter of months.
That even the professional bird flu experts are sometimes reduced to conjecture spurs still more second-guessing among Dr. Niman's troops. It also highlights what some see as the import of Dr. Niman's mission.
Dr. Niman is "a natural-born celebrity, brilliant but weird," someone going by the name Montanan writes of Dr. Niman on a bird flu blog. "And he is emerging as a 'blog star.' Whether you love him, hate him or are neutral, you can't ignore him."
Dr. Niman first turned his attention to bird flu in 2003, and has since joined curevents.com, one of several sites with bird flu discussion groups. The activity on such sites has surged in recent months. The forum had 8,361 discussion "threads" and 116,014 posts as of yesterday.
[Henry L. Niman]
"Go after them NIMAN! damn I am sick and tired of the run around about H2H!" a bird flu blogger with the screen name monkeyeyes2 wrote on a similar site, referring to the World Health Organization's attention to the possibility of broad human-to-human infection.
Since graduating from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with a doctorate in biochemistry, Dr. Niman has had several jobs in the sciences, the last of which was a research job at Shriners Burn Center in Boston, where he was also affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He says he left to found his own business, Recombinomics Inc., in the hope of eventually developing vaccines. He has raised around $75,000 from a couple of investors so far, he says. "Right now it's mostly me and the patent attorneys," he says of his company, adding that he is trying to secure some laboratory space in Baltimore.
So far Dr. Niman's company hasn't made any bird flu vaccines, but it has filed for patents on a method he thinks could work. The idea is to try to predict the ways in which a virus will mutate. Since part of the problem with seasonal influenza is that the virus changes every year, scientists have to wait until a strain emerges before they can make a vaccine.
Dr. Niman thinks flu viruses are swapping chunks of genetic material with one another when they infect the same host, spawning mutant strains of the virus. He thinks he can forecast what a new strain will look like because different viral strains, he says, exchange genetic information in predictable ways. Theoretically, this method could be used to develop a vaccine for a rapidly evolving virus, he says.
He is pushing his theory relentlessly on the Web, and is trying to win followers who support so-called recombination, and thus generate business for his start-up vaccine company.
Meanwhile, Dr. Niman has forced at least some mainstream scientists to take a look at his ideas. He has suggested a theory about pig influenza viruses in South Korea that the World Health Organization felt compelled to look into, at Dr. Niman's constant urging, lest it miss an important clue. But Klaus Stöhr, a bird flu expert at the WHO, calls the Niman leads "far-fetched," saying this was putting it "diplomatically." And last March, the prominent journal Science wrote an article about the claims, titled "Experts Dismiss Pig Flu Scare as Nonsense."
[Niman Map ]
A map on Dr. Niman's Web site tracks bird flu's spread across the world.
At numerous points in the complex evolution of the bird flu virus, Dr. Niman has said that human-to-human transmission has occurred, suggesting that a pandemic was around the corner. In February of last year, Dr. Niman wrote: "The flu pandemic of 2005 has clearly begun." He said in a recent telephone interview that "'begun' didn't mean that people were going to be dropping dead, but that we had moved to another phase, that it was more efficiently transmitted."
"Niman pours forth a veritable stream-of-consciousness series of commentaries, taking news tidbits from here and there and concocting some truths, and a generous helping of pure baloney," wrote Martin Williams, of Hong Kong, on his blog that covers H5N1.
"He's just prolific," Dr. Williams said later in a phone conversation. "It's just scaremongering. People like to read it and get excited."
"That's utter nonsense," Dr. Niman says in response, adding that the criticism stems from a disagreement the two had over whether migratory birds are responsible for the spread of the virus around the world.
Dr. Niman says he's not bothered by his critics. "They don't really argue the science," he says. "They basically do personal attacks."
Dr. Niman's Internet shock troops have adopted a division of labor, organizing themselves into groups dedicated to translating Chinese news reports and responsible for illustrating the spread of the disease across Asia with sophisticated maps. For example, Gaudia Ray Sarna, of Ojai, Calif., a Stanford law school graduate, claims to have done "the first academic analysis of the Old Testament's Tenth Plague," describing the plague "and the facts of pandemic flu as we know them now, from 1918 and from London 1665." The study is titled "Why smear blood on the doorposts?"
And a British flu watcher emailed Dr. Niman to alert him to several species of dead birds piling up outside the Briton's house, as well as a dead fox in a pile of magpies.
"I find the reactions he gets and the intensity of scrutiny we give him most entertaining," writes the blogger Montanan. "He is both a scientist and a dramatist. And we definitely are a willing audience."
Update Links May 13 2006
Podcast Network Check #s 14, 13, 12, 11,
Henry L Niman Biography
Breaking News FluTrackers
Dr. Henry Niman Expertise The Experts' Forum
*
Originally posted 74 months ago.
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ScrewDriver edited this topic 74 months ago.
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Quarantine measures taken in Bucharest
Posted 73 months ago.
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Lab confirms transmission of bird flu between people
Case in Indonesia no immediate cause for concern, experts say
June 24, 2006
The World Health Organization reported yesterday the first lab-confirmed case of avian flu spreading from one person to another - a 10-year-old boy in Indonesia who infected his father.
But health experts said there's no immediate cause for concern. Although this flu strain's unique genetics made it relatively easy to trace from person to person, it died with its victims and was no more likely to spread between humans than other strains.
"If anything, it appears we have ducked another bullet," said Dr. William Schaffner, an avian flu expert and chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Since the first human cases of avian flu were reported in Southeast Asia in 1997, experts have warned that the constantly mutating virus could someday spawn a worldwide epidemic, known as a pandemic.
The virus has killed millions of birds in at least 30 countries, but outbreaks among humans have been rare. There have been 228 reported human cases worldwide and 130 deaths, almost all of them in Asia, according to the World Health Organization.
Health experts say the fact that avian flu kills more than half its victims makes the prospect of a pandemic particularly frightening.
In the Indonesian case, seven members of a family were infected on a remote northern island, according to Dick Thompson, a spokesman for the World Health Organization. Six of the victims died.
The first five relatives were infected with identical strains of H5N1, as the bird flu strain is known. But the virus mutated in the sixth victim, a 10-year-old boy. He passed the mutated virus to his father, Thompson said. That mutation enabled an Indonesian lab to match the strains that infected father and son, he said.
The father died about four weeks ago, he said. But soon after he was infected, roughly 50 people whom he had come into contact with were identified and closely observed for three weeks - twice the normal incubation period for avian flu. None developed avian flu symptoms, Thompson said.
The mutation made the avian flu strain easier to identify but did not make it any more infectious, Thompson said.
"While it's the first time there's been lab confirmation [of human-to-human infection], there doesn't seem to be any public health implications," he said.
The WHO report, released yesterday at a news conference in Indonesia, shows that even in remote areas, health officials around the world are carefully monitoring avian flu outbreaks, Schaffner said.
"They were able to do all this working with people on a remote island in Indonesia. What it does is affirm that our distant early warning system has been vastly improved," he said.
Health experts say that human-to-human transmissions of avian flu - within families - had occurred before. The first reported case was published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, when researchers documented a daughter in Thailand who infected her mother.
Family clusters of avian flu victims have also been found in Azerbaijan, Turkey and Thailand, said Dr. Robert Edelman, associate director of the Center for Vaccine Development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, one of the testing sites for an avian flu vaccine.
"Thank God it didn't go beyond that family here," Edelman said yesterday.
Health experts say that close contact within families makes them susceptible to spreading the virus. There may also be a genetic component that makes some families more susceptible than others, he said.
"There are many, many, many people in Asia who have been exposed to avian flu, and yet the numbers of those infected are still relatively small," Edelman said.
Avian flu infection spreads by way of the intestinal tracts in birds and mammals. Cats have become infected in some parts of the world when they eat diseased birds. In humans, the virus is believed to spread when it reaches the respiratory tract and binds to receptors there, Edelman said.
Edelman is part of a national effort to come up with an experimental avian flu vaccine that could be distributed in the event of an outbreak.
Initial results of a vaccine tested last year in a major clinical trial at the University of Maryland and other research sites around the country were mixed. Researchers announced in March that the vaccine triggered protective immune responses in about half of those given a high dosage.
The vaccine appeared to be safe but required such large doses that it would be difficult to make sufficient quantities for a major outbreak, the researchers say.
Edelman and other researchers hope an updated vaccine using aluminum hydroxide to fortify its effects will yield better results.
"It should give the vaccine a little more kick," Edelman said.
The second vaccine is being tested nationwide on 600 adults and another 600 people age 65 and older in a second clinical trials.
Researchers at the University of Maryland will test 225 adults and 101 elderly volunteers as a part of that effort, Edelman said. They have finished recruiting the adult volunteers but need volunteers 65 and older, Edelman said. Volunteers are paid $500.
Anyone 65 or older interested in volunteering may call: 410- 706-6156.
To read archived coverage of issues dealing with avian flu, go to baltimoresun.com/avianflu.
By Dennis O'Brien
From the Baltimore Sun
Posted 72 months ago.
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For another take on that "no cause for concern" news there is
the satirical WHO themesong thread
Posted 72 months ago.
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UK drugs firm GlaxoSmithKline believes it has developed a vaccine for the H5N1 deadly strain of bird flu that may be capable of being mass produced by 2007.
Posted 71 months ago.
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H5N1 virus now harder to detect in humans
New links added to index @ start of thread:
www.emergingdisease.org/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=17
The Flu Clinic
Originally posted 70 months ago.
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ScrewDriver edited this topic 70 months ago.
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