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HANOI, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) – Bird flu has stricken Vietnam’s central Quang Ngai province, raising the total number of affected localities in the country to three, according to a local veterinary agency on Tuesday. Late last month, bird flu killed 70 ducks and sickened 150 others raised by a household in the province’s Binh Son district, whose specimens have recently been tested positive to bird flu virus strain H5N1, the Department of Animal Health under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said, adding that the whole duck flock has been culled. Now, bird flu is hitting southern Dong Thap province, and Nghe An and Quang Ngai in the central region. Bird flu outbreaks in Vietnam, starting in December 2003, have killed and led to the forced culling of dozens of millions of fowls in the country.

Niger’s Ministry of Livestock is intensifying its bird surveillance along the 1,500-kilometre border with northern Nigeria after a recent resurgence of bird deaths. The Ministry of Livestock in Niger has ordered the killing of more than 20,000 birds suspected of carrying the virus since 2006. It has also paid about US$46,000 in compensation to farmers with sick birds to encourage them to hand over infected animals. Officials in the northern Nigeria states Kebbi, Kano and Katsina reported several thousand poultry deaths on 29 July. Birds have been sent to laboratories in Italy to determine if the H5N1 avian flu virus is responsible. Two years ago, a bird flu outbreak in Nigeria spread north to Niger. Niger’s Director of Animal Services, Dr. Maiga Zourkaleni, is preparing a team that will visit high-risk border areas Zinder, Maradi, Dosso and Tahoua. “We are working as hard as we can to prevent another cross-border infection,” he said. More

Source: International Herald Tribune
An Indonesian factory worker has died of bird flu, bringing the death toll in the country worst hit by the virus to 112, a top health official said Sunday. The 19-year-old died last week in a hospital just west of the capital, Jakarta, Nyoman Kandun, the director general of communicable disease control at the Health Ministry, said by text message. He gave no more information. Indonesia has regularly recorded human deaths from bird flu since the virus began ravaging poultry stocks across Asia in 2003. Its toll of 112 accounts for nearly half the 240 recorded fatalities worldwide. Bird flu remains hard for people to catch, but health experts worry that the virus could mutate into a form that passes easily between humans, possibly triggering a pandemic that could kill millions. So far most human cases have been linked to contact with infected birds. Scientists have warned that Indonesia, which has millions of backyard chickens and poor medical facilities, is a potential hot spot for the start of a global pandemic.

Source : National News Bureau, Public Relations Department of Thailand
Public Health authority of Pijit province, Doctor Prajak Wattanakul alongside the Contagious Disease Control Unit reported from the Sam Ngam district hospital yesterday that the team were called on to inspect 4 new patients who are suspected of having Avian Flu. The patients comprise of 2 young children ages 6 and 10 and two elderly women ages 62 and 70. Despite the patients being from different Tambon in the district, physicians found that all had come into contact with poultry before falling ill and all exhibited symptoms of coughing, fatigue, shortness of breath and other bird flu related conditions. Doctors have sent off samples of the patients to be analyzed, and are expecting results in 1-2 days. All 4 have been quarantined, as the chickens that they had contacted all experienced unexplained deaths in the past days.

(NaturalNews) China’s National Disease Authority has confirmed that a man whose 24-year-old son died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu is also infected with the disease, raising concerns about human transmission of the virus. H5N1 is a particularly virulent and lethal strain of the influenza virus that primarily infects domestic and wild birds. So far, it does not spread easily between birds and humans, but health officials fear that it could mutate into a form that is highly contagious from human to human. Given the intensely lethal nature of the disease, such a strain could easily lead to a global health crisis. Neither the infected man, identified only by his surname Lu, nor his son were known to have had contact with infected poultry. Health officials are carrying out an analysis on the DNA of the viruses that infected the two men to determine if they are the same strain, or whether the men contracted the virus from different sources. More

A worldwide outbreak of avian or ‘bird flu’ is still not excluded and health officials recognize that new drugs are needed since new strains of the virus appear everyday. Now, U.S. scientists are using supercomputers to find new drugs to fight the virus and to stay ahead of these mutations. And it is encouraging to learn that a team of UC San Diego scientists has isolated more than two dozen promising and novel compounds from which new ‘designer drugs’ might be developed to combat this disease. The 27 new identified compounds appeared to be equal or stronger inhibitors than currently available anti-flu drugs like Tamiflu. More

Laboratory tests have shown a drug extracted from the medicinal herb St John’s Wort can be used to treat poultry infected with bird flu, a veterinary professor said. Field tests in Vietnam had also been satisfactory, he added. The results were released as World Health Organisation representatives prepared to meet officials in Beijing to discuss concerns about the mainland’s use of the human antiviral drug amantadine to suppress bird flu outbreaks. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said yesterday it was also seeking clarification from Beijing. Liang Jianping, of the Lanzhou Institute of Animal and Veterinary Sciences, said the compound hypercin had been found to be effective in treating and preventing bird flu. “We have found hypercin can kill 99.99 per cent of H5N1 and H9N2 virus in vitro within 10 minutes,” Professor Liang said. More

LATimes
JAKARTA, INDONESIA — Threats to shut down a U.S. Navy medical research lab here may undermine the hunt for mutating viruses that could set off the next flu pandemic, Western scientists warn. Indonesia suspended negotiations with the United States over the fate of Naval Medical Research Unit No. 2 last month after senior politicians said it didn’t benefit Indonesia and could be a cover for spying. The biomedical research lab opened in Jakarta in 1970 and is used to study tropical diseases, including malaria, dengue fever and avian flu, according to an embassy fact sheet. It has a staff of about 175 scientists, doctors, veterinarians and technologists; only 19 are Americans and the rest are Indonesians. The Navy also has research labs in Egypt, Kenya, Peru and Thailand. More

Although there are public H5N1 sequences from Purwakarta, the public sequences are from 2004 and are clade 2.1, which is the clade found throughout Indonesia (see phylogram). The number of public 2007 sequences from Indonesia is limited, and there are no public 2008 sequences, so the relationship between the strain described in the local media, and recent isolates cannot be independently confirmed. More

BIRD flu tests will be carried out today on seven swans found dead in a river near Caernarfon. The carcasses were discovered floating in the Seiont not far from the town’s historic castle. Locals alerted harbour master Richard Jones on Wednesday, and his team recovered three dead swans in the morning, followed by four more in the afternoon. Yesterday the team were back at the riverbank after residents reported another swan appeared to be ill. Mr Jones said he was initially advised by Defra that the government would not test for bird flu in cases involving less than 10 dead wild birds. He was advised to safely bag up the birds in black bin liners and throw them into a waste bin.

The above comments raise additional concerns regarding H5N1 surveillance. The lack of testing and reporting has been a concern for the past several years, and recently has received additional attention due to Indonesia’s comments on reducing reporting frequencies on human H5N1 infections. Although this announcement has received a great deal of attention, the under-reporting of H5N1 in birds and humans is widespread.

England has a surveillance program, but as noted above, the level of testing is a major concern. When H5N1 reports were widespread in western Europe in early 2006, England reported one H5N1 positive swan that washed up on the shores of Scotland. That isolate was closely related to H5N1 detected in Sweden, Denmark, and northern Germany, suggesting that the level of H5N1 in England was significantly higher than the one reported positive. Read More

ROBIN McDOWELL/AP
JAKARTA, Indonesia - A 15-year-old girl died of bird flu last month, becoming Indonesia’s 109th victim, but the government decided to keep the news quiet. It is part of a new policy aimed at improving the image of the nation hardest hit by the disease.

“How does it help us to announce these deaths?” Heath Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said Thursday, after confirming that the girl from southern Jakarta tested positive on May 13 and died one day later. “We want to focus now on positive steps and achievements made by the government in fighting bird flu.”

Indonesia’s decision could aggravate the World Health Organization, which waits to update its official tally of Indonesia’s bird flu deaths until after they are formally announced by the government. The toll on its Web site stood at 108 on Thursday — accounting for nearly half the 241 recorded fatalities worldwide. More

Photo Tommy Mac
AVIAN Influenza, another name for bird flu is fundamentally a disease of birds caused by a variety of strains of influenza viruses that have adapted to a specific host, particularly in water fowl. The H5N1 strain of influenza - often referred to as bird flu - is first known to have jumped from chickens to humans in 1997. Since 2004 it has ripped through poultry and wild bird populations across Eurasia, and had a 53% mortality rate in the first 147 people it is known to have infected.

Health authorities fear this strain, or its descendent, could cause a lethal new flu pandemic in people with the potential to kill billions after the virus responsible for causing the disease jumped the specie-barrier to infect humans. Experts fear the nature of the disease could be more lethal than ten hydrogen bombs after causing a pandemic. Of the 382 human cases reported so far the world over, 241 have been devoured by the deadly disease. More

2008-05-22 14:51:42 -
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) - Bangladesh’s Health Ministry says the nation’s first human case of H5N1 strain of bird flu infection has been detected. A health ministry statement says a child was infected by the virus in January. The statement released by the Directorate General of Health Services on Thursday did not give the child’s name, age, or other details about the case. The child is recovering after treatment. The statement said the case was diagnosed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Bangladesh in recent months have culled hundreds of thousands of birds after the virus was detected last year.

Recombinomics Commentary 21:27
May 14, 2008
The Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry announced Tuesday that the deadly H5N1 bird influenza virus detected in six dead swans in Akita Prefecture and Hokkaido were all of the same type.

it differs from the virus which in the past is verified in the country, presently has become popular in Indonesia and Vietnam. H5N1 detected in 2006/2007 in South Korea and Japan and instead is more closely related to H5N1 in Indonesia (clade 2.1) or Vietnam (clade 2.3 – Fujian strain). Read more

Sequences collected in early 2006 from all eight gene segments from isolates in Nigeria at Genbank are just now being made public. They are closely related to previously released sequences from Lagos, Nigeria. These sequences have a number of polymorphisms shared with isolates in Europe as well as Egypt/Gaza.

Although the sequence data is not unique, the collection dates in January and February of 2006 raise considerable doubts regarding the denials of H5N1 infections in Europe in late 2005, as well as the spread of H5N1 in Nigeria due to trade and smuggling. Read more

Recombinics
The HA sequences from a falcon in Saudi Arabia, A/falcon/Saudi Atabia/6732-2/2007, is being released at Genbank. The sequence is virtually identical to the earlier wild bird sequence from Saudi Arabia, A/houbara bustard/Saudi Arabia/6732-1/2007, and differs at one positive, A328G.

Thus, this sequence is also the Uvs Lake strain of clade 2.2.3. This close relationship suggest the NA sequence from the falcon will also have G743A, which was in the wild bird NA sequence as well as all Uvs Lake sequences isolated since early 2007.
Read more

Bird flu is continuously spreading to different regions of the country. Anisur Rehaman, West Bengal’s Animal Resources Development (ARD) Minister confirmed a new H5N1 virus outbreak in the Darjeeling region of eastern India. The bird flu attack in Darjeeling district brings the total number of West Bengal regions that have been hit by the virus in the existing year to 15.

The minister confirmed that the blood samples of dead birds picked up from the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal were infected with the highly pathogenic bird flu virus. He also said that culling would begin shortly in the region. Read more

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Like the rumble of distant thunder, bird flu continues to spread across Asia, Africa and Europe. Although it’s been out of the news lately in the United States, scientists say that avian influenza, as it’s also known, remains a serious threat to human and animal health.

The lethal H5N1 version of the virus is mutating rapidly and rampaging through bird flocks throughout those parts of the world, infecting and often killing people who come in contact with them.

The fear is that the virus will change into a form that makes human-to-human transmission quick and easy. At least seven slightly different subtypes already have been identified. Read more