Catbird
Senior Moderator
"With Bird Flu, 'Right Now, Anything Is Possible'
April 19, 2013
...The flu experts who arrived in China yesterday and today, and their Chinese counterparts, are confronted with an urgent set of unknowns.
"Where is the virus?" Fukuda wonders. "Where is it keeping itself? How are people getting exposed to it? How are they getting infected by it? Those are some of the really basic questions that we're asking."
...So far, testing of nearly 48,000 animals — nearly all birds — has found the virus in only 39.
"There are very few positives for H7N9," says Dr. , the chief veterinary officer of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, based in Rome. "I would have expected maybe more hits in the poultry sector."
Lubroth tells Shots that Chinese agricultural investigators took samples from bird markets, poultry slaughterhouses, poultry farms, wild bird habitats and bird environments.
...But the search for the animal sources of H7N9 is really only beginning. Until last week, Lubroth says, animal tests for it weren't very reliable. There's a good test, but the Chinese haven't had time to distribute it very widely.
"They have more samples than they have results," he says. Forty-thousand samples currently await analysis.
..."The surveillance has to be very targeted," Lubroth says, "and because we don't have a lot of information, that target is quite dark."
The usual tactic in this kind of situation is called "trace-back." That is, start with the poultry markets where people who got the virus shopped or worked, then trace the source of the poultry back to the farms where they came from.
But Lubroth says many poultry-sellers don't keep good records. And asking them where they got their chickens often leads to dead ends.
"They can shrug. They can say there's a middleman," Lubroth says, "and then you go to the middleman and he's not there anymore."..."
xhttp://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/19/177793443/with-bird-flu-right-now-anything-is-possible
April 19, 2013
...The flu experts who arrived in China yesterday and today, and their Chinese counterparts, are confronted with an urgent set of unknowns.
"Where is the virus?" Fukuda wonders. "Where is it keeping itself? How are people getting exposed to it? How are they getting infected by it? Those are some of the really basic questions that we're asking."
...So far, testing of nearly 48,000 animals — nearly all birds — has found the virus in only 39.
"There are very few positives for H7N9," says Dr. , the chief veterinary officer of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, based in Rome. "I would have expected maybe more hits in the poultry sector."
Lubroth tells Shots that Chinese agricultural investigators took samples from bird markets, poultry slaughterhouses, poultry farms, wild bird habitats and bird environments.
...But the search for the animal sources of H7N9 is really only beginning. Until last week, Lubroth says, animal tests for it weren't very reliable. There's a good test, but the Chinese haven't had time to distribute it very widely.
"They have more samples than they have results," he says. Forty-thousand samples currently await analysis.
..."The surveillance has to be very targeted," Lubroth says, "and because we don't have a lot of information, that target is quite dark."
The usual tactic in this kind of situation is called "trace-back." That is, start with the poultry markets where people who got the virus shopped or worked, then trace the source of the poultry back to the farms where they came from.
But Lubroth says many poultry-sellers don't keep good records. And asking them where they got their chickens often leads to dead ends.
"They can shrug. They can say there's a middleman," Lubroth says, "and then you go to the middleman and he's not there anymore."..."
xhttp://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/19/177793443/with-bird-flu-right-now-anything-is-possible
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