The Problem That Refuses To Go Away

[sriracha john]

Bird flu virus detected in free-range ducks in Thailand

The Department of Livestock Development of Thailand has detected the bird flu disease in free-range ducks in its random check on poultry to monitor, control and eradicate the deadly disease.

The Department's Director-General Yukol Limlaemthong was quoted by the Thai News Agency as saying that lab test results confirmed that bird flu virus was found in the samples of free-range ducks from the central province of Chai Nat.

The department ordered the culling of more than 1,700 ducks and announced an intensified 21-day surveillance in the area.

Officials focus on free-range ducks because they can spread the disease without showing any sign of bird flu symptoms. (something I didn't previously know).

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Russia professes avian flu will strike in Europe

MOSCOW — Russian authorities, struggling to contain an outbreak of avian flu that has killed thousands of birds in Siberia, admitted Thursday that a spread of the virus into Europe seems almost inevitable.

"It is quite likely that the flu will creep westward. What else can it do? The infection is picking up momentum," said Viktor Maleyev, deputy director of the Russian Health Ministry's Institute of Epidemiology.

Equally worrying, health officials confirmed the outbreak includes a strain that has been known to affect humans, known as H5N1. Scientists fear expansion of the virus' geography increases the chances of a major outbreak within the human population.

While there have been isolated cases of avian flu around the world, including in the United States, the most dangerous strain of the virus until now has been concentrated largely in Asia, with human cases limited to Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia.

(wasn't aware previously that bird flu was even in Russia, now it's poised to spread?)

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Bird flu pandemic 'could be avoided if —'

A widely predicted bird flu pandemic, which experts say could kill millions of people, could be avoided if health authorities act fast to control the initial outbreak, say two teams of researchers.

The outbreak would have to be detected within 48 hours, warns one team. The other says that people affected, as well as those in their immediate surroundings, would need to receive flu drugs within 21 days. Giving people a vaccine, even one that does not exactly match the pandemic virus, would also help, they say.

Bird flu is caused by the H5N1 virus. It affects poultry but has also killed 55 people in South-East Asia since December 2003. Health experts fear it could mutate into a form that spreads from person to person, causing a pandemic that would cost millions of lives (see Time to prepare for bird flu pandemic 'running out').

Keeping the pandemic in check will depend on being ready to detect and respond to the new form of virus, say the researchers.

The predictions come from two separate research teams whose findings are published online on 3 August by the journals Nature and Science.

Both teams created computer models of an H5N1 outbreak in Thailand.

They simulated different strategies for controlling the outbreak, using varying combinations of drugs, vaccines, and quarantine methods to determine the best way to prevent the virus from spreading.

"If — or, more likely, when — an outbreak occurs in humans, there is a chance of containing it and preventing a pandemic," says Elizabeth Halloran of Emory University, United States, who co-authored the Science paper. "However, it will require a serious effort, with major planning and coordination, and there is no guarantee of success."

Is Thailand up for that challenge???

Halloran's team simulated a rural population of 500,000 people, taking into account how they travel and come into contact with each other, for example at work or school.

The difficulty of containing an outbreak will be partly determined by how infectious the virus is — in other words how many people someone with the disease will pass it on to.

The researchers found that the outbreak could be contained if someone with bird flu passed it on to an average of 1.4 others, and if health authorities delivered anti-flu drugs to people surrounding the outbreak within 21 days.

If health authorities were to vaccinate half the population before the outbreak, even with a vaccine that is not perfectly matched to the pandemic virus, then drugs would be able to contain an outbreak if each infected person passed the virus on to 1.7 others on average.

But if the virus were more infectious, infected people and their households would need to be quarantined to guarantee containment.

The authors of the second study, published in Nature, agree that health authorities need to adopt a combination of measures to contain an outbreak.

Led by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, United Kingdom, they simulated a population of 85 million living in Thailand and bordering regions of neighbouring countries.

Edited August 5, 2005 by sriracha john

[astral]

It is just natures way of controlling population.

Read the history books about the Plague in Europe,

or more recently influenza out breaks back in the last century.

If I go any further with this I will probably overstep the forum rules.