Tracking bird flu: US wildlife workers on the front line against deadly strains

[AlaskaDenise]

By Maggie Fox, Senior Writer, NBC News

They were once featured on the show ?Dirty Jobs? but the wildlife experts who spend weeks each year wrestling wild birds to swab their behinds for avian flu don?t mind. They?re happy to be on the front line, keeping an eye out for infected birds that might bring new and deadly strains of influenza to the United States.

The program?s been dialed back a bit since it started in 2005, but the U.S. Geological Survey and Fish and Wildlife Service experts are paying close attention to reports of a new and deadly strain of bird flu ? the H7N9 virus. It?s infected 102 people in China at last count, and killed 20 of them.

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The finch species is found across the northern hemisphere, in Asia, Europe and North American. ?It is called a brambling,? Ip says. ?There are some bramblings that come straight into Alaska and into the lower 48. These little birds are just amazing. They are so small and yet able to migrate these incredible distances.?

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http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/22/17851935-tracking-bird-flu-us-wildlife-workers-on-the-front-line-against-deadly-strains?lite

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[NS1]

Re: Tracking bird flu: US wildlife workers on the front line against deadly strains

Sequence Data
required for
Analytic Validation

As the case count century mark is crossed with a 20% CFR and fewer citizens released than deceased, expectations are justified that 100% of the confirmed cases would have been sampled twice at a minimum, upon admission and healthcare separation, yielding a minimum of ~130 HA / NA pairs and 55 to 60 full genome sequence sets.

Anything less is a misappropriation of public healthcare assets by the nations honouring themselves with the titles of "Technologically Advanced" and "Modernised Medicine" practitioners.

Please extend our previous requests with your hopeful enquiries:

• 2013-04-09: Request for sequencing and deposit of historical H7N9 freezer samples
• 2013-04-10: Request for sequencing and publication of statistically-significant 120 H7 samples between 6 countries
• 2013-04-14: Request for Species- and Location-Specific Passerine sequences

We would like to thank the men and women at the United States Geological Survey for opening their freezers and lab books with the deposit at GenBank of gs_empAlaska44063061_2006_05_23, the first historical H7N9 sequence offered since the announced beginning of the H7N9 zoonotic emergence.

The emperor goose from mid-2006 in Alaska (GenBank Taxon 119239) is of interest due to the distinct HA; however, at first glance, the polymorphic pattern does not overlay with emergent H7N9 HA sequences any more than other legacy H7N9 of the same background.

Thanks to the efforts of the scientists who take to the field in pursuit of these difficult samples, we shall, in time, have the opportunity to measure if the distinctions from our emperor goose find their way into the emergent ΣH7N9.