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  • China, Pakistan and Vietnam on bird flu alert

    China, Pakistan and Vietnam on bird flu alert

    Tue Feb 26, 2008 3:50am EST
    By Nick Macfie
    BEIJING (Reuters) - China and Pakistan have announced bird flu outbreaks among poultry, a day after two women, one in China and one in neighboring Vietnam, died of the virus.
    The Chinese outbreak, first noticed on February 17 in Zunyi in the southwestern province of Guizhou, had killed nearly 4,000 birds and triggered the culling of more than 238,000, Xinhua news agency said late on Monday, citing the Ministry of Agriculture.
    China has reported four outbreaks of the disease in poultry since December, when average temperatures across the country hit their lowest in decades. Bird flu tends to be more active in the cold.
    Experts fear the H5N1 strain could mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic. With the world's biggest poultry population and hundreds of millions of farmers raising birds in their backyards, China is seen as crucial in the global fight against the disease.
    Pakistani authorities found a fresh outbreak of H5N1 in chickens, the fourth case in a month, in the southern city of Karachi, a government official said on Tuesday.
    Pakistan confirmed its first human death from the virus near the northwestern town of Abbottabad in December.
    China has reported three confirmed human deaths from bird flu this year, the most recent in the southern province of Guangdong, neighboring Hong Kong.
    The woman, a 44-year-old migrant worker, probably contracted the H5N1 virus from sick poultry she kept in her backyard, Hong Kong government health officials said.
    The spate of cases is a concern for a country that has the world's biggest poultry population, many of them backyard birds roaming free. China has struggled to combat the virus with mass inoculations for birds and an education campaign for those who handle them.
    State-run Voice of Vietnam radio said on Tuesday a woman teacher had died from H5N1 in the north of the country, the fourth death from the virus this year.
    The 23-year-old woman died on Monday at a Hanoi hospital after falling sick as she ate chicken in her home province of Phu Tho, the radio quoted the Health Ministry as saying.
    In communist-run Vietnam, official announcements are often made in state-run media.
    The woman's death is the fourth out of five people infected by bird flu so far this year in Vietnam after an extended cold spell in northern provinces.
    Excluding the two deaths on Monday, bird flu has killed 232 people among the 366 known cases globally, among them 50 deaths in Vietnam, the World Health Organisation has said.
    (Additional reporting by Augustine Anthony in Islamabad and Ho Binh Minh in Hanoi; Writing by Nick Macfie; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)




  • #2
    Re: China, Pakistan and Vietnam on bird flu alert

    a couple of "interesting" comments....


    Monday, February 25, 2008

    ....but AKUH expert says long summer will clip virus? wings

    KARACHI: Since heat destroys the H5N1 virus that causes bird flu moderate weather conditions and a relatively long summer can be expected to effectively combat the threat in Pakistan, said AKUH Infectious Diseases Assistant Professor Dr Faisal Mehmood in a presentation at PMA House Saturday. Also, H5N1 remains overwhelmingly a disease of birds, and not humans.

    The Avian viruses generally do not affect humans, but in 1997, an outbreak of bird flu in Hong Kong infected 18 people and also caused six deaths. Since then, human cases of bird flu have been reported from different parts of the world including Asia and Europe.

    ?Most were traced to be in contact with infected poultry or surfaces contaminated by sick birds,? he said. Often, the flu virus that crosses the species barrier originates in areas where people live in close proximity to chickens. ?That seems to be the case in most instances of human-acquired bird flu,? said Dr Faisal.

    An outbreak of bird flu is no risk to the general public and can be controlled by culling. He, however, warned that available research does hint that the virus could mutate at some point in the future and trigger a lethal human flu pandemic.

    Elaborating his stance, he said H5N1 mutates quickly and is able to incorporate large blocks of genetic code from viruses that infect other species, a process called reassortment. For that reason, he said H5N1 has particular potential to combine with a human flu virus, creating a new viral strain that is feared to spread rapidly from person to person.

    ?Over 90% of viruses like the bird flu enter our bodies through contact between the mucous membranes of the eyes and nose and the finger nails,? he said. Although the exact incubation period for bird flu in humans is not clear, illness appeared to develop within one to five days of exposure to the virus.

    He agreed that people of all ages have contracted and died of bird flu in a scenario where very few people were infected to know all the possible risk factors for bird flu. People become sick after direct contact with infected birds or bird-contaminated surfaces, not from contact with other animals.

    To a question, he said no effective vaccine could be developed till the bird flu virus mutates and that would take several months to produce for a large population. Improved public amenities such as running water and improved hygiene may be the first and most practical line of defense against killer viruses like the bird flu.

    Answering a query, he said it has been established that infected migratory waterfowl, the natural carriers of bird flu viruses, shed the virus in their droppings, saliva and nasal secretions which can spread among domesticated birds and domestic poultry can become infected from contact with these birds or with contaminated water, feed or soil.

    Earlier, the PMA?s Dr Samreena Hashmi introduced the speaker and referred to the objectives of the session which included raising public awareness and providing medical professionals an opportunity to share their experience. app



    Daily Times is an English-language Pakistani newspaper. Daily Times, is simultaneously published from Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi.

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