China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

[AlaskaDenise]

http://www.thanhniennews.com/healthy/?catid=8&newsid=21927
Last Updated: <!--2006-11-07 13:28:54 todaysDate = Date(06, 11, 07, 13, 28, 54); --><SCRIPT language=JavaScript> dayarray = new Array("Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday","Saturday"); montharray = new Array("January", "February", "March", "April","May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December"); todaysDate = new Date("November 07, 2006 13:28:54"); document.write(dayarray[todaysDate.getDay()] + ", " + montharray[todaysDate.getMonth()] + " " + todaysDate.getDate() + ", "); //if (todaysDate.getYear() < 1000){ //document.write(todaysDate.getYear() + 2000); //} else { document.write(todaysDate.getFullYear()); //} document.write(" 13:28:54 Vietnam (GMT+07)"); </SCRIPT>Tuesday, November 7, 2006 13:28:54 Vietnam (GMT+07)

The director of China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, Chen Hualan, and the director of influenza research at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Shu Yuelong, said no "Fujian-like" strain of bird flu had spread among the country's birds and human victims.

"This viewpoint and conclusion have no scientific basis," Chen told the official Xinhua news agency, rejecting a paper published last week in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (www.pnas.org).

"The paper's so-called 'Fujian-like virus' is not a new strain," she said. "These viruses are quite stable genetically and have not shown any major changes in resistance," he added.

Scientists worldwide are grappling with the risk that H5N1 bird flu, which has spread widely among fowl and can infect and kill humans in close contact with infected birds, may mutate into a deadly version that spreads easily between humans.

China's official scientific counter-blast came after scientists in Hong Kong and the United States said they had found the new strain of H5N1 virus in China and warned it could have started another wave of outbreaks in birds across Southeast Asia.

The strain is called the "Fujian-like virus" because it was first isolated in eastern China's Fujian province in March 2005.

It has been detected increasingly widely since Oct. 2005 in poultry in six provinces in China, said Guan Yi and Malik Peiris from the University of Hong Kong, and Rob Webster of St Jude Children's Research Hospital in the United States.

The strain might also have become resistant to vaccines, which China began using on a large scale from Sept. 2005 to protect poultry from H5N1, they said.

But the two Chinese scientists said the Fujian virus was not a new strain and was, genetically, over 99 percent consistent with the bird flu that appeared in southern China in early 2004.

Chen accused the Hong Kong and U.S. researchers of "unscientific methods" and said China's current vaccination programme was effective.

She also acknowledged a new strain of the H5N1 virus had been found in northern China in early 2006, and said China had already reported this finding to international animal health authorities.

Shu, the Chinese influenza expert, rejected the international scientists' conclusion that the new Fujian strain was behind recent human infections in China.

China's latest official comment in the controversy appears unlikely to still concerns. The World Health Organisation has said the new strain of the H5N1 virus has not shown any mutation that would enable it to spread easily among people.

But the U.N. health body has expressed frustration with Chinese agriculture officials for not quickly sharing virus samples with international researchers to allow better understanding of bird flu's spread and evolution.

.​

 

[Mingus]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

I call Xinhua an ?unscientific? organ of the PCC.

 

[GaudiaRay]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

Is it rational or irrational to believe that this virus is evolving always marginally, in small steps?

For the past two years, only those who believed WRONGLY that reassortment would be the probable way that the next pandemic virus would arrive on the scene, including reassortment of then H5N1, would ever say, >But the two Chinese scientists said the Fujian virus was not a new strain and was, genetically, over 99 percent consistent with the bird flu that appeared in southern China in early 2004. <

There's not a soul here who would disagreee to say that what is causing the illness by the virus, included in the virus, was a "new strain".

The fact that Niman demonstrates larger and smaller recombinations within the genes which influence virulence and transmissibility, which are themselves only very small parts of the entire virus itself, based on China's own released data, proves that the virus is changing and is conserving genetic segments, one of which is Fujian-derived.

To say otherwise is to deny their own facts. This is illogical. The Chinese are not illogical.

So, what is China really saying here? What is there point?

 

[Mingus]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

So, what is China really saying here? What is there point?

Spin-off communication from the communist party of china. This is no science, this is politics

 

[HenryN]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

I now think China is trying to ignore the 3 changes in the receptor binding domain (via recombination).

Three isolates have K222R, V223I, and S227R

One has K222R

One has V223I

That is recombination in action.

 

[HenryN]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

I now think China is trying to ignore the 3 changes in the receptor binding domain (via recombination).

Three isolates have K222R, V223I, and S227R

One has K222R

One has V223I

That is recombination in action.

H5N1 Case Fatality Rate

Recombinomics Commentary
Novermber 29, 2004


http://www.recombinomics.com/News/11290403/H5N1_case_fatality_rate.html

"Efficient human to human transmission is still the key event and recombination can place a human receptor binding sequence on an avian H5 background and achieve human to human transmission without changing the rest of the avian genes, which are producing the 70% case fatality rate."

 

[JJackson]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

What China is saying is

1] There is nothing wrong with our vaccine, it does not need replacing.

2] Our progressivly less effective vaccine is not a/the cause of drift in the predominant wild type away from a strain which the vaccine can protect against.

Just my opinion.

 

[wetDirt]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

What China is saying is

1] There is nothing wrong with our vaccine, it does not need replacing.

2] Our progressivly less effective vaccine is not a/the cause of drift in the predominant wild type away from a strain which the vaccine can protect against.

Just my opinion.

They are also saying, "There's nothing wrong with our antiquated and unsanitary farming practices, and there is nothing wrong with rural sanitation, and there's no danger to our food supply."

The comment about the viruses being "99% similar" is particularly misleading, as is their witholding of the remainder of the sequences. There still seems to be a disconnect between the Department of Agriculature and the Department of (human) Health there.

 

[GaudiaRay]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

We have all been told repeatedly that it takes one or two polymorphism changes to transform this highly deadly virus into a highly transmissible form of H5N1.

There are thousands of polymorphisms.

The Chinese are telling us that the Fujian clade has now reconfirmed the fact that this virus is evolving very rapidly, and they are telling us that because there is no control over the direction of this evolution, it is extremely possible that what has now happened in that one percent (1%) will result in a Phase Six Pandemic.

This is what I believe the Chinese have just told us.

Thank them for their frank observation that we are the doorstep of Phase Six. We await the next single polymorphism changes inside this 1% arena.
Phase Six is has reconfirmed that it is on its way, first to China? maybe, and then to the rest of the nations who trade with China or who have political and cultural exchanges or relations.

Fair questions: "What country does no business with China? What countries block Chinese from entering their borders?"

I know that most of the Antarctic does no business with China; nor for that matter do the people living on the Moon. Beyond that, the Chinese are our brothers and sisters.

 

[Sonny]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

February 2006 Yale Globe.
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/article.print?id=7042
A standoff has arisen between Chinese scientists and international health officials over bird flu. The Chinese have expressed reluctance to share avian-flu samples ?needed to develop an effective antidote.

Last spring, deaths of thousands of wild birds in a secluded region of western China, led officials from the WHO and the UN?s Food and Agriculture Organization to ask China?s Ministry of Agriculture for samples recovered from the infected birds. An official did not provide samples, but instead referred to an academic paper from a team headed by US scientists that made use of China?s samples, but did not consult with Chinese scientists or credit their work.

The US team has since apologized. Nationalism, data-hoarding and a desire for accolades have become more of a problem as scientists compete on ground-breaking research. By now, other countries, including Indonesia, Turkey and Nigeria, have all delivered samples to international authorities. The Chinese samples ? and international cooperation ? could be particularly useful for developing current vaccines that could stop the fast-evolving virus. ? YaleGlobal

 

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

February 2006 Yale Globe.
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/article.print?id=7042
A standoff has arisen ........? YaleGlobal

Note date - so this debate is THAT old?

(Except of course from Dr. Niman)

.

 

[Sonny]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

How Academic Flap Hurt World Effort on Chinese Bird Flu
Nicholas Zamiska
The Wall Street Journal, 27 February 2006

BEIJING ? China's efforts to maintain control over samples of avian flu taken on its soil, as well as the research done on them, have put it at odds with international health officials trying to defeat the disease.

The standoff pits a high-ranking veterinarian in China's Ministry of Agriculture named Jia Youling against international health authorities leading the fight against bird flu. Their conflict surfaced after wild birds began dying by the thousands last spring in a remote region of western China. At the ministry's headquarters in Beijing, officials from the World Health Organization and the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization asked Dr. Jia to share with them the samples of bird flu that scientists under his ministry had collected from the birds.

He didn't provide them. Instead, Dr. Jia -- a professorial-looking 58-year-old who had risen steadily through the ministry's ranks since he joined it in 1979 -- began to talk about a recent research paper he had noticed on avian flu. According to Julie Hall, the WHO's top communicable-disease expert in Beijing and a participant at the meeting, he had a complaint: Months earlier, a team led by American scientists published a paper in an academic journal using China's samples, but without crediting or consulting their Chinese counterparts. The occasion, Dr. Hall says, "was used to express their deeper concern about ensuring that Chinese scientists were duly recognized." Dr. Jia declined to comment, saying, "I don't want to mention those things because they are all in the past."

Since that meeting, China hasn't provided a single sample from its infected flocks, despite repeated requests by WHO amid the roughly 30 outbreaks the country has reported in the past 12 months.

In another field, a dispute like this might seem like typical academic back-biting. But as the lethal form of bird flu known as H5N1 spreads beyond Asia into Africa and Europe, the stakes are rising fast. Since late 2003, at least 92 people in five Asian countries, as well as Turkey and Iraq, have died from avian flu, which has devastated flocks of birds across Asia. Disease experts fear human casualties could soar into the millions if the virus mutates to allow rapid transmission between people.

The genetic information contained in China's samples could help develop a more effective vaccine that could save countless lives. Currently, a human bird-flu vaccine produced by a unit of Sanofi-Aventis SA, Paris, is finishing clinical trials. Like many rival vaccines, it is based on an older strain of H5N1 taken from Vietnamese samples in 2004 and is endorsed by WHO. The Bush administration last fall asked Congress to spend $162.5 million on bird-flu vaccines, $100 million of which will be spent on Sanofi's vaccine.

But if the virus from China has changed significantly since then, scientists making the vaccine might never know, and Americans could be spending millions of dollars buying an antidote that is a year or more out of date.

"We think it's very important that [China] share viruses with the WHO as soon as they can, so we can test the vaccine efficacy," says Michael L. Perdue, an avian-flu expert with WHO at its headquarters in Geneva. "When people start hoarding" samples of bird flu, he says, "it limits our capability to develop the optimal vaccine."

Chinese officials have told WHO and FAO officials that they will begin sharing their samples again soon. A person familiar with China's position says it has taken time to negotiate a new agreement to ensure that Chinese researchers are involved in, and properly credited for, research on Chinese viruses. This person noted that other countries don't share their viruses with China.

"All the scientists should collaborate, but there's still a lot of competition," adds Shu Yuelong, the director of China's national influenza laboratory in Beijing. "Scientists are human."

Other countries from Indonesia to Turkey and Nigeria have provided international health authorities with samples of the virus from stricken birds.

China is widely considered to be a key laboratory for research. Scientists say the close proximity of poultry, people and pigs in southern China has spawned past influenza pandemics, including the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968.

For now, the more than 100 virus isolates Chinese veterinarians have collected from bird-flu outbreaks across China sit in refrigerators at China's National Influenza Research Center in Harbin, a city best known for its winter ice-carving festivals. The center employs around 500 scientists, at least 50 of whom are working on avian influenza and report to Dr. Jia's ministry.

One researcher worried that the Chinese lab would lose its competitive edge and would have less work to do if it was too generous in sharing their viruses.

"If we get the virus, and we send it out right away," a Chinese scientist says, we "don't need those people."

The Harbin scientists are proceeding with their own research. They have tested H5N1's virulence in mice, chickens, ducks and geese. The lab published six papers last year and three have been accepted this year, according to one scientist. The scientific journal Virology published a paper, written by a group of 10 researchers from China, in October. The paper used samples collected from China's outbreaks in 2004 to test an avian-flu vaccine made in China for use with birds.

When it comes to not sharing, China isn't alone. All over the world, competitive pressures can drive scientists to hoard data that might lead to ground-breaking research.

U.S. researchers have drawn flak. This past September, complaints over the failure of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to share the genetic sequences of flu viruses with outside researchers prompted the prominent scientific journal Nature to print an article titled, "Flu researchers slam US agency for hoarding data." In the article, a CDC official said the need for openness "must be balanced against the needs for maintaining high standards for data quality and for protecting sensitive information when the situation warrants."

"There is a world-wide tendency to bash China for everything it does," says Juan Lubroth, a senior officer of the animal-health service for the FAO. "I think it's important that countries hold a mirror up to themselves."

China's handling of disease outbreaks has come under intense scrutiny from the international community before. In early 2003, Chinese government officials defied efforts by world health officials to investigate outbreaks of severe acute respiratory disease. SARS eventually killed at least 349 people in mainland China, more than in any other country.

By the next year, official attitudes in Beijing appeared to have changed somewhat. Bird flu began breaking out across the country early that year, killing flocks of chickens, ducks, geese and doves. Local officials shipped some of the dead birds to researchers in Harbin.

WHO officials asked China's Ministry of Agriculture if they could obtain specimens to share abroad. After months of talks over issues such as how to transport the samples, the ministry agreed to hand over around half a dozen isolates.

In other areas as well, international health officials say, China has been helpful and cooperative. The country's Ministry of Health recently shared two of the seven virus samples it has collected from its human cases, according to Dr. Hall. The Ministry of Agriculture also has shared genetic sequences of viruses it has collected.

By last summer, things had changed. On the shores of China's largest saltwater lake, in a remote corner of the Tibetan plateau, at least 5,000 geese, gulls and other wild birds had died from avian flu. It was the first report of the disease attacking birds other than domestic poultry in such large numbers. Chinese researchers traveled to obtain samples of the virus from the dead birds. At their meeting with the agriculture ministry in Beijing, officials from WHO and FAO asked for the samples.

Instead, Mr. Jia told them about the paper that appeared several months earlier in the Journal of Virology. His point: China's permission to use its samples was never sought, his scientists were excluded from the research and their names were noticeably missing from the list of 14 scientists who contributed to the study.

"That's when it surfaced in all of its entirety," says WHO's Dr. Hall.
The paper, whose lead author was Elena A. Govorkova, a Russian researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., seemed innocuous enough. The study concluded that some of the latest strains of the H5N1 virus killing birds in Asia were lethal to ferrets as well and still posed a serious threat to humans. It used two samples from China and 11 others from elsewhere in Asia.

Dr. Govorkova's use of the Chinese samples, however, was news to Chen Hualan, the director of the Harbin research center who isolated them. Nobody had asked Dr. Chen's permission before using her samples, a violation of WHO guidelines. Dr. Chen, 36 years old, the daughter of rice farmers and a rising star in China's scientific ranks, first heard about the study when she received a call early last year from a young official with the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, according to a person familiar with the situation. The official had been scanning the latest research articles on bird flu and came across Dr. Govorkova's study. He noticed the paper from Memphis seemed to reference samples that could have come only from Dr. Chen's lab. "I've been burned," Dr. Chen told an international health official who spoke with her after she heard about the Memphis paper.

The Chinese researcher tried to clarify what happened with Dr. Govorkova's supervisor at St. Jude, an influenza specialist named Robert Webster. Dr. Webster quickly replied with an apology for what he described as a mix-up.

Dr. Govorkova also sent Dr. Chen a note, apologizing for the oversight. "I feel that this was an honest mistake," Dr. Govorkova says. "We apologized almost immediately." For her part, Dr. Chen says: "I really don't want to talk about that. It's something that happened a long time ago. Dr. Webster already apologized." She added that her laboratory will share the samples soon.

Both Drs. Webster and Govorkova say they believe China's Ministry of Agriculture is less concerned about this particular incident than in ensuring Chinese researchers have exclusive access to the country's viral samples.

"This has been used by the authorities as a crutch," Dr. Webster says. "They want all the credit themselves, which is reasonable," he adds. "They will eventually release them once they have a major publication." He points out that he has collaborated with Chinese scientists, including Dr. Chen, since the incident. Dr. Webster also points out that such oversights aren't unknown when so many researchers are involved, as is often the case, and at least one other similar incident happened in which the Chinese weren't properly credited for their work last year.

Dr. Govorkova says authorities "are making an excuse" and notes that even before the incident over her paper, "it was very difficult to obtain samples" from the Chinese. She says she has received an email from the Journal of Virology inquiring about the crediting of Dr. Chen's work and has replied suggesting a correction.

At another meeting in Beijing this fall, several WHO officials met with the Ministry of Agriculture again to try and coax China into sharing its samples. Dr. Jia again brought up the issue of the paper, according to two people who were in the room.

While the Ministry of Agriculture still hasn't shared any samples, it and WHO have been hammering out a new agreement for months that has been referred to as the "Seven Steps" plan, according to a person familiar with the talks. It is aimed at ensuring Chinese scientists are credited and involved in the work that comes from strains collected on Chinese soil.

"It's like a marriage," Dr. Hall says. "You have to keep working at it."

Source:
The Wall Street Journal

 

[sharon sanders]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

Thank you Sonny for that post.

I would like to remind everyone that we do not bash any countries or experts etc. It is acceptable to respectfully disagree and to discuss those points. Thank you.

 

[GaudiaRay]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

Is it fair to observe that the academe is now failing the world's populations, with failures of attribution and with failures to publish observations unrecognizeable to the sequence generators without expanded collegiality, and that the academe, be they in China or the US, have failed the world by hoarding that information to only those who are members of the WHO recognized labs, when in fact there are virologists around the world who can and would interpret the information with a different filer, vastly different than the way that it's being interpreted by the Chinese, the US and the WHO supported?

This is a bright light call out to each of them that the consequences are not those associated with the academe, grants and recognition. The consequences are that the worlds population, all 6 billion, or 5.99999999 billion excluding those who have access to the hoard of easily NAIAID generated sequences, are dependent on an "arrangement" now proven broken by the Zamiska article above.

Is there a Gordion Knot here?

 

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

And the flap goes on...and on....and on....
(with a little new info)
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/6-11-14/48116.html

China's Ministry of Agriculture Critical of Hong Kong Scientist

<TABLE class=author width="100%"><TBODY><TR><TD align=left>By Zhang Yi
Asia Times
</TD><TD align=right>Nov 14, 2006</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>


Jia Youling, chief veterinary officer of China's Ministry of Agriculture.



China's Ministry of Agriculture is caught in a controversy sparked by the possible existence of a variant of the H5N1 bird flu virus. The Ministry is making serious accusations about the findings published by Chinese and American researchers.

Virologists Guan Yi and Malik Peiris, of the University of Hong Kong, and Rob Webster of St Jude Children's Research Hospital in the United States published a study in the US-based Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal. The report indicated that in the past year, a new strain of bird flu virus, the "Fujian-like virus," has become dominant amongst poultry and has shown up in human infection cases in six Chinese provinces.

At a press conference held by China's Ministry of Agriculture on November 10, Chinese officials criticized Guan's study and claimed that Guan "quoted untrue information," "used unscientific research methods" and "made unsubstantiated speculations."

China's Ministry of Agriculture claimed that there was no new strain of bird flu virus. Although China previously agreed to help epidemiological studies by providing specimens to the World Health Organization (WHO), according to the WHO, since 2004, the Ministry has not provided any specimens of the "Fujian-like" strain of the bird flu virus.

According to Guan, China's Ministry of Agriculture issued orders to stop the study of the new virus in Guangdong Shantou University, and to destroy samples of the virus.

Initially, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture claimed that there was no variation in the H5N1 virus, and therefore it was unnecessary to provide WHO with viral samples. But on November 10, Jia Youling indicated that it was the refusal of the U.S. to import bird flu virus specimens that had caused a delay in the delivery of samples to the WHO.

According to professor Guan Yi, from July 2005 to June 2006, researchers collected 53,220 specimens from chickens, geese, and ducks in six southern provinces in China. However, Jia Youling questioned whether Guan Yi had the manpower and material resources to gather so many specimens for his study.

Guan Yi said that amongst the fecal specimens gathered, 1294 were infected with H5N1 bird flu virus. In the samples collected from October 2005 onward, gene sequencing of the viruses showed a predominance of the Fujian-like virus. Between April and June 2006, 103 of 108 samples were identified as containing the Fujian-like variant of H5N1.

China's Ministry of Agriculture said that Guan Yi claimed to have discovered this new strain of virus in the year 2005, but genetic sequence comparisons showed that the virus is the same as a virus discovered in two counties of Hunan province in February 2004. Therefore, the Fujian-like virus was "not a new strain of virus."

Guan Yi's study also pointed out that this new virus seems to have developed resistance to the vaccine currently used to protect poultry in China. But experts from China's Ministry of Agriculture emphasized that Guan had only tested 76 serum samples, and did not provide sufficient data. Therefore, they claimed that Guan's conclusion was "an arbitrary conclusion" and "irresponsible."

The Chinese government criticized Guan's conclusions for being based on a small number of samples. Yet it was the Ministry of Agriculture that tried to stop Guan from setting up his research and even ordered him to destroy virus samples.
An expert from the WHO said that it was regrettable that China's Ministry of Agriculture had not handed over specimens of the new strain of virus.

.

 

[sharon sanders]

Re: China scientists call bird flu paper ?unscientific?

If we can not discuss this issue without derogatory remarks I will move this thread to the archives.