bird flu

The journal Science has just published an important letter from veterinary pathologist Dr. Ilaria Capua of the Istituto Zooprofilattico delle Venezie and her colleagues in national veterinary laboratories in the UK, Australia and the US pledging to deposit avian influenza gene sequences into the publicly available online depository, GenBank, as soon as they are determined. This is an important breakthrough in a controversy that roiled the world of flu virologists for almost a year (see posts here, here, here and here). But there is still some way to go. Capua was among the first scientists to…
We recently posted about the confusion about the diagnosis of the seven year old girl in Indonesia for whom local tests indicated H5N1 infection but where the WHO laboratory was not able to confirm it. We contrasted the news reports from AP and Bloomberg, the first of which quoted Indonesian Ministry of Health sources as alleging WHO had determined the girl didn't have the virus while the second said the tests were inconclusive, quoting WHO itself. This is a matter of bad sourcing by the AP. The Indonesian authorities are not reliable and this is a typical example. New specimens were sent to…
Two articles in local Indonesian news sources are of interest. They illustrate the difficulty of trying to figure out what is happening using local news reports. Both relate to the hospitalization of a reporter for the Indonesian magazine Tempo who had covered the culling of poultry and the funeral of a bird flu victim. I have had both articles translated by a native speaker, since previous translations were via machine (see, for example, here). The machine translations are much more difficult to read but the essential elements of the reports are discernible. Since we have more idiomatic…
What do you do when the chickens come home to roost and they look healthy (but might not be)? Ask the folks in Hong Kong. Except they don't know either. Update, 6/15/06: The Chinese Ministry of Health is confirming the diagnosis of H5N1 in the 31 year old truck driver from Shenzhen. He is now officially the 19th human case in China. China (Mainland) decided to control avian influenza by a massive poultry vaccination program. That's a lot of vaccinations, since they produce 4 or 5 billion new birds a year. Billion, as in one thousand million, or more than 100 vaccinations per second every…
At a meeting in Jakarta of Indonesian health and agriculture ministries, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the National Commission on Bird Flu, one Indonesian official announces the obvious while another tells us that what is obvious is yet to be shown. Jeez. "Limited human-to-human transmission may have occurred in small clusters in the country. It has not only happened in several regions in Indonesia but also in Azerbaijan and other places in the world," Coordinating Minister for the People's Welfare Aburizal Bakrie said Friday after a meeting…
Computer programmers are associated with computer viruses, not human viruses. But at the end of April an Indian computer programmer landed in Boston incubating measles virus. He had been hired by a business investment firm whose offices were on the 18th floor of a Boston skyscraper, the John Hancock Tower. May 5 he developed fever, cough and then a rash and became the index case in what is so far an 11 person outbreak, the largest number of measles cases in the city since 1989. (Boston Globe) The outbreak is of special interest for what it says for the spread of infectious disease in the era…
One of the most valuable things WHO has to offer in an influenza pandemic is information. Unfortunately, this hasn't been their strong suit. They have been relatively slow in disseminating epidemiological information, mainly because they have not been able to get good cooperation from the member states. Even when they can release the information, however, unaccountably they don't. Their risk communication skills are, shall we say, vestigial. The sequence release issue has become a crisis of confidence in WHO veracity. Yes, they have problems with member states (see here, here, here, here and…