H1N1- Ultimate News on influenza A - bird flu, swine flu & avian flu alerts

Nigerian H5N1 bird flu outbreak spreads to Lagos

H5N1 Lagos : The deadly H5N1 bird flu virus has been found in backyard poultry and at a commercial farm in Lagos, Africa's largest city which is home to about 13 million people, health officials said on Thursday. Source : Reuters

Deadly bird flu confirmed in UK

British authorities have begun deploying emergency measures to control the spread of bird flu after the country's first case of the deadly H5N1 virus was confirmed in a dead swan found in a Scottish village. Source : CNN

H5N1 in domestic fowl in Germany : highly pathogenic

The H5N1 bird flu virus found in domestic fowl in the eastern German state of Saxony was the highly pathogenic strain, the state's social affairs ministry said on Wednesday.  "We're dealing with the highly pathogenic variety here," a spokesman for the ministry said. The confirmation of bird flu at a large German poultry farm was the second instance of H5N1 in domestic fowl in the European Union after an outbreak in France in late February. Source Reuters

Human H5N1 Bird Flu in China Raise Pandemic Concerns

China has released three human H5N1 bird flu sequences.  These sequences are similar to each other and most closely related to a duck isolate in Fujian Province.  However, these isolates are quite distinct from other H5N1 sequences in China and elsewhere.  Consequently, the pandemic vaccine in clinical trails around the world and the new vaccine target from Indonesia that was recently selected by the United States will not offer significant protection against these newly released sequences from China.  Moreover, the vaccines under development will also offer little protection against the Qinghai strain which is linked to recent human outbreaks in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, and Azaerbaijan.
      
Thus, at this time there are four distinct H5N1's causing fatal human infections which will likely require custom pandemic vaccines. Thus, as H5N1 evolves, the distance between vaccines under development and new versions of H5N1 cause human infections is increasing. Source : Recombinomics Inc.

Russia: Pessimistic bird flu predictions coming true - chief doctor

Russia's chief doctor said Monday that pessimistic predictions regarding the spread of bird flu in the country had come true, particularly in the south, but that the worst may now have passed. Onishchenko said the H5N1 strain virus had been identified in seven southern regions: the republics of Daghestan, Kalmykia, Adygea, Chechnya, and Kabardino-Balkaria, and the Stavropol and Krasnodar territories.

Vaccine : not ready...try to evitate the 1976 tragedy from ABC News

For nearly nine years, infectious disease specialists at Rochester University Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y., have been conducting tests as part of a broad national effort to develop a bird flu vaccine.

Beginning in late 1997, the human trials have tested 30 different vaccines, all pegged to the H5N1 virus. The testing is funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at Rochester and six other centers around the country.

What's happening in Rochester and elsewhere is a reminder of another pandemic scare 30 years ago.

The pandemic never occurred, but the vaccine produced to protect Americans had tragic consequences.

In 1976, three American soldiers at Ft. Dix, N.J., died from swine flu, raising fears of a pandemic. Unlike bird flu, the swine flu virus was transmitted person to person.
The administration of President Gerald R. Ford mounted a national campaign urging Americans to get swine flu shots. In a famous photo opportunity that year, Ford himself rolled up his sleeve and was inoculated. But the vaccine was unsafe.  Thirty-two people died and hundreds of other developed paralysis from Guillain-Barre syndrome... Source : ABC 

 

Human bird flu victims face end in 'plague pits'

FAMILIES may have to wait for four months to bury their dead in the event of an avian flu pandemic, stirring up folk memories of the burial pits of the great plague of 1665.

A confidential Home Office report says as many as 320,000 people could die from the H5N1 strain of the virus if it mutates into a form that can readily be passed between humans.

It says the emergency services may have to enforce mass burial. “Common [mass] burial stirs up images of the burial pits used in the great plague of 1665 — where in London 70,000 people died,” it adds.

The report, Managing Excess Deaths in an Influenza Pandemic, dated March 22, says vaccines against bird flu should not be seen as a “silver bullet” solution and “will not be available in the first wave of a pandemic [possibly longer]”.  Source : The Sunday Times

1st human case of H5N1 bird flu found in Jordan

Egypt has reported 5 people infected, two of whom died now: Jordan reported its first human case of bird flu on Friday in an Egyptian labourer who was believed to have become infected while on a holiday in his home town in Egypt, health officials said. Health Minister Said Darwazeh said the man, a 31-year old labourer, who had lived in Jordan for three years, had been taken to hospital on Thursday after suffering severe breathing problems three days after arriving from his home town in Fayoum where people had been in close contact with infected poultry.
Source : Reuters