Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

[Shannon Bennett]

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=95246

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</TD></TR><TR><TD class=small_txt>PPA blames Rumsfeld?s ?commercial enterprise? for bird flu fears

Friday, February 08, 2008
By Imtiaz Ali

Karachi

Bird flu ?rumours? are affecting the poultry industry and causing financial losses of up to Rs300 million daily, former chairman of the Pakistan Poultry Association (PPA), Khalil Abbasi, said Thursday at a press conference at the Karachi Press Club.

?The bird flu hype is part of the media campaign of a US-based commercial enterprise, which has former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as president. All of this is being done merely to boost the sales of its product ?tami-flu?,? Abbasi alleged. He said that the H5N1 (bird flu) virus was first detected in Scotland in 1960 and it still exists in Great Lakes area of the USA, but it was ?overplayed? when it hit Thailand and other Asian countries. ?Why are we assuming that the virus would turn ?vicious?? This is a fallacy because no human transmission has been reported so far in the world,? Abbasi said.

PPA chairman, Abdul Basit, said that since 2004, bird flu fears had caused losses worth billions of rupees to the poultry industry. This, he said, had resulted in the closure of 40 percent of farms. ?Hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs only due to ?sensational news? because no human infection has been found so far in Pakistan,? Basit said.

The ?chicken crisis,? the PPA chairman claimed, was in the same list as the sugar, wheat and flour ?crises.? There are around 25,000 poultry farms in the country, employing over 1.5 million people with an investment of around Rs 200 billion. Approximately Rs 45 billion to Rs 50 billion worth of agricultural products and by-products are being used in poultry feed, the PPA chairman said, adding that the poultry crisis would ultimately compound the agricultural crisis.

A vaccine is available to effectively control the virus in birds, and effective use of this vaccine in Pindi, Islamabad and Abbotabad has controlled the disease in those areas. Karachi will follow suite soon, Basit said.

He said that around Rs 300 million were being spent on this vaccine annually in Pakistan.

The PPA urged the government to immediately implement the law for distance between farms in order to control the spread of the virus, provide subsidies on imports of the bird flu vaccine, and provide the medicine free of cost to affected areas.

Basit read out a statement issued by Bernard Vallet, director-general of the Paris-based Animal Health Organization. Vallet said that the risks of bird flu were ?over-estimated and fears of an imminent pandemic were non-scientific assumptions.?

Layer chickens were vaccinated and this is the first time that bird flu has infected broiler chickens, Dr Jalali said, adding that since the life span of broiler chickens was around seven weeks, farmers usually did not vaccinate them. He called for the implementation of a vaccination programme for the eight million broiler chickens in Pakistan, in order to prevent an outbreak of the virus.

One of the speakers at the press conference blamed the media for ?over-emphasizing? the fears of bird flu. This led to a heated exchange between poultry and health officials and journalists present there.


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[Snowy Owl]

Re: Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

...got to land here...

It is the same wording used in the Island of La R?union when the Chikungunya pandemic swept the island, at that time the Tourists Industries where the lobby that put all its weight on the media and finding contradictions between GP or experts.

Of course, the fact that Mr Rumsfeld is a major owner of the patented Tamiflu doesn't help. He should sell his shares, and this has been foretold, there is a conflictual relation between public health and Rumsfeld Tamiflu.

As stated years ago, Mr Rumsfeld should sell his shares of Gilead, it would help the communities that is pumping up Preparedness world wide.

Rant over

Snowy

 

[tropical]

Re: Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

"Basit read out a statement issued by Bernard Vallet, director-general of the Paris-based Animal Health Organization. Vallet said that the risks of bird flu were ?over-estimated and fears of an imminent pandemic were non-scientific assumptions.?"

"... Abbasi alleged. He said that the H5N1 (bird flu) virus was first detected in Scotland in 1960 ..."

In Italy, 100 years ago.

 

[vinny]

Re: Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

im begining to think that H5N1 will never be able to make the final jump into becoming a pandemic,i mean if it cant do it in pakistan or india in those poor countrys, it never will, will it,i just think that something else may come out and bite us on the bum proverbaly speaking,while were watching this.

 

[sharon sanders]

Re: Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

I caution all about reading post #1 as to the truthfulness of those statements including, but not limited to, the supposed statement by Dr. Vallat.

For instance, here is information about the persons who have been infected by H5N1 in Pakistan from the WHO site in the significant timeline pdf:

"Pakistan informs WHO of 8 people in the
North West Frontier Province that have
tested positive for H5N1 in the national
reference laboratory. These are the first
suspected human cases ever reported in
Pakistan. The presence of virus was
confirmed in samples from one of these
patients, a 25-year-old man from
Peshawar (onset date 21 November)."

 

[Shannon Bennett]

Re: Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

Vinny, life comes with few guarantees. Whether or not this virus is the cause of the next pandemic no one can calculate for certain. What you can depend on is another flu pandemic of some kind. I am still of the opinion however, that H5N1 is the more likely candidate. As long as people are still getting sick with bf I would not take my eye off of the virus. Every time the virus gets into a human and starts to replicate it ups the chances that one of the replications will enable it to survive quite well in humans.

Some other things to think about.

How many in India are actually sick with the virus? We have no idea. The government insists there are no human cases but, they have been giving Tamiflu to everyone with a fever as a matter of course. Then they are testing the blood for signs of the virus. Both of these practices will ensure a negative test result. I am going to second guess the governments strategy. My assumption is they are worried about both a killing blow to their poultry sales and, they worry about panicking their citizens. I still don't believe we have stumbled onto a pandemic strain but I don't think we are out of the woods either.

We also know that some strains are readjusting their temperature preferences to ones that are closer human hosts. Bird temps are three or more degrees higher than those of humans. Lowering the previously high temp requirement to one that is nearer humans is one of the major changes that needed to occur for the virus to more easily infect humans. That lowering of a temperature preference has not changed.

The virus is still spreading geographically. Humans have done their utmost to control the spread and they continue to lose this war. They have also done everything within their power to eradicate all known poultry hosts whenever an outbreak occurs. This may have slowed but obviously it didn't stop the geographical spread.

Virtually all of our eggs were in the Tamiflu basket. By that I mean there really is only one viable antiviral at this time. We are now seeing resistant H5N1 strains. This is very disconcerting. What happens then if we see an outbreak of H5N1 in humans and have few choices to treat the disease? If Tamiflu blankets are no longer effective it means both a higher mortality rate and more chances for the virus to replicate in humans.

We are also seeing seasonal flu's resistant to Tamiflu. When the bf virus eventually meets up with a seasonal virus, and it will at some point, then swapping genes will increase the likelihood of both a Tamiflu resistant strain with killing potential.

The problem for you and others is this is moving at a pace that is slower than you anticipated. It is hard to watch a high impact collision that unravels in slow motion and not get the idea that something will avert the disaster. Experts aren't swayed by the slow motion and neither should you be. Keep up with your preps, stay alert to new changes, then go for a walk. It may still be years off or it could be tomorrow. As I said on another forum, only the great god of probability statistics has the answer to when this will become a pandemic.

 

[Shannon Bennett]

Re: Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

I added the first post because I thought it needed to be included in the historical record. That is why I put the caveat in the title-misinformation. The statement is a political argument applied to a scientific/health disaster. The statement is based on one mans personal bias and not on any scientific criteria. Please bear that in mind when you read this. One angry man does not influence the behavior of H5N1. Neither does he have some inside information you and I do not have.

 

[sharon sanders]

Re: Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

I am glad you posted the first article Shannon so we can address true misinformation.

There has been limited human to human transmission in the world. Just last month in China here:

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Re: China Confirms H2H Transmission of Recent H5N1 Cases
<hr style="color: rgb(204, 204, 204);" size="1"> <!-- / icon and title --> <!-- message --> China CFR: 62.9%

Bird flu case in Jiangsu sees son infect the father

The son is dead and the father is under medical care. China?s foreign ministry tries to be reassuring, saying there is no evidence the virus has mutated and made human-to-human transmission possible. With the world?s largest poultry industry China is the world?s greatest incubator for the disease.

Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) ? A 24-year-old man died in December in Jiangsu from the avian flu and may have passed it on to his father, but there is no evidence the virus mutated into a kind of flu which can be easily transmitted from human to human.

?The initial judgment is that it was an infection from close contact,? said Chinese Health Ministry spokesman Mao Qun'an. But in the Jiangsu case, there were ?no biological features for human-to-human transmission.?

What is known is that the father, who got sick just before his son died and is now in intensive care, did not come into contact with dead or diseased birds.

It is not known however how the young man who died got infected since he, too, is known not have come into contact with infected birds.

The H5N1 strain of the avian flu virus has so far been transmitted by diseased birds and this has limited the contagion. But there are fears it might mutate and that humans might infect one another. Should this happen the world might face a pandemic.

However, the suspected human-to-human infection is also but the latest in a number of suspected cases in which people are said to have infected other members of their family.

With the world?s biggest poultry population and millions of backyard birds, China is at the centre of the fight against bird flu. Millions of animals have been vaccinated.

The most recent cases have brought the number of confirmed human infections of bird flu in China to 27, with 17 deaths, but there are fears that figures might higher because not all cases have been reported.

Another outbreak, on December 29, occurred in the city of Turpan in the remote Xinjiang region. It killed almost 5,000 fowl and led to the culling of 35,000 more.

Since 2003 the H5N1 has killed about 200 people, almost all in Asia, and ravaged poultry flocks worldwide, this according to the World Health Organisation.
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[sharon sanders]

Re: Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

Then there is the now famous "Karo Cluster"' in Indonesia in 2006:

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Human Flu Transfers May Exceed Reports
<hr style="color: rgb(204, 204, 204);" size="1"> <!-- / icon and title --> <!-- message --> <!--StartFragment --> June 4, 2006

<nyt_headline type=" " version="1.0">Human Flu Transfers May Exceed Reports </nyt_headline>

<nyt_byline type=" " version="1.0"></nyt_byline>By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
<nyt_text></nyt_text>In the wake of a cluster of avian flu cases that killed seven members of a rural Indonesian family, it appears likely that there have been many more human-to-human infections than the authorities have previously acknowledged.
The numbers are still relatively small, and they do not mean that the virus has mutated to pass easily between people ? a change that could touch off a worldwide
epidemic. All the clusters of cases have been among relatives or in nurses who were in long, close contact with patients.
But the clusters ? in Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Vietnam ? paint a grimmer picture of the virus's potential to pass from human to human than is normally described by public health officials, who usually say such cases are "rare."
Until recently, World Health Organization representatives have said there were only two or three such cases. On May 24 Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the federal

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, estimated that there had been "at least three." Then, last Tuesday, Maria Cheng, a W.H.O. spokeswoman, said there were "probably about half a dozen." She added, "I don't think anybody's got a solid number."
And Dr. Angus Nicoll, chief of flu activities at the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, acknowledged that "we are probably underestimating the extent of person-to-person transmission."
The handful of cases usually cited, he said, are "just the open-and-shut ones," like the infections of nurses in the 1997 Hong Kong outbreak and of a Bangkok office worker who died in 2004 after tending her daughter who fell sick on an aunt's farm.

Most clusters are hard to investigate, he said, because they may not even be noticed until a victim is hospitalized, and are often in remote villages where people fear talking. Also, he said, by the time doctors from Geneva arrive to take samples, local authorities "have often killed all the chickens and covered everything with lime."

The W.H.O. is generally conservative in its announcements and, as a United Nations agency, is sometimes limited by member states in what it is permitted to say about them.
Still, several scientists have noted that there are many clusters in which human-to-human infection may be a more logical explanation than the idea that relatives who fell sick days apart got the virus from the same dying bird.
For example, in a letter published last November in Emerging Infectious Diseases analyzing 15 family clusters from 2003 through mid-2005 in Southeast Asia, scientists from the disease control centers, the W.H.O. and several Asian health ministries noted that four clusters had gaps of more than seven days between the time family members got sick. They questioned conventional wisdom that only one, the Bangkok office worker, was "likely" human-to-human.

In one Vietnam cluster, not only did a young man, his teenage sister and 80-year-old grandfather test positive for A(H5N1) avian flu, but two nurses tending them developed severe pneumonia, and one tested positive.
In another questionable case, the Vietnamese government's assertion that a man developed the flu 16 days after eating raw duck-blood pudding was publicly ridiculed by a prominent flu specialist at Hong Kong University, who said it was more likely that he got it from his sick brother.
Dr. Henry L. Niman, a biochemist in Pittsburgh who has become a hero to many Internet flu watchers and a gadfly to public health authorities, has argued for weeks that there have been 20 to 30 human-to-human infections.
Dr. Niman says the authors of the Emerging Infectious Diseases article were too conservative: even though the dates in it were fragmentary, it was possible to infer that in about 10 of the 15 cases, there was a gap in onset dates of at least five days, which would fit with the flu's incubation time of two to five days.

And in a study published just last month about a village in Azerbaijan, scientists from the W.H.O. and the United States Navy said human-to-human transmission was possible. That conclusion essentially agreed with what Dr. Niman had been arguing since early March ? that it was unlikely that seven infections among six relatives and a neighbor, with onset dates stretching from Feb. 15 to March 4, had all been picked up from dying wild swans that the family had plucked for feathers in a nearby swamp in early February.
While Dr. Niman is an irritant to public health officials, his digging sometimes pushes them to change conclusions, as it did in the recent Indonesia case. The W.H.O. at first said an undercooked pig might have infected the whole family, but Dr. Niman discovered that the hostess of the barbecue was sick two days before the barbecue and the last relative was infected two weeks after it.
His prodding, picked up by journalists, eventually led the W.H.O. to concede that no pig was to blame and that the virus probably had jumped from human to human to human.

The health organization's periodic updates on the number of avian flu cases and the death toll concentrate on cases confirmed by laboratories. The updates use no names and are often cleared by the affected country's health minister.
Dr. Niman, by contrast, trolls local press and radio reports and uses Google software to translate them ? sometimes hilariously ? looking for family names, onset dates and death dates.
For example, a May 15 report quotes a village midwife named Spoilt describing the death of a woman in Kubu Sembilang, Indonesia and the hospitalization of one of her sons:
"Praise br Ginting experienced was sick to last April 27 2006, with the sign of the continuous high fever to the temperature of his body reached 390 C was accompanied by coughs... Added Spoilt, second casualties Roy Karo-Karo that also the son of the uterus from Praise br. Gintin after his mother died last May 3, also fell ill, afterwards was reconciled to RSU Kabanjahe."

Dr. Niman contends that the largest human-to-human cluster so far was not in Indonesia, but in Dogubayazit, Turkey, in January. W.H.O. updates recorded 12 infected in three clusters, and quoted the Turkish Health Ministry blaming chickens and ducks. Dr. Niman counted 30 hospitalized with symptoms and said the three clusters were all cousins with the last names of Kocyigit and Ozcan, and that most fell sick after a big family party on Dec. 24 that was attended by a teenager who fell sick on Dec. 18 and died Jan. 1.
A patriarch, Dr. Niman said, told local papers that the two branches had had dinner together six days after the 14-year-old, Mehmet Ali Kocyigit, had shown mild symptoms. He died on Jan. 1, and several other young members of the two families died shortly after, with other relatives showing symptoms until Jan. 16. No scientific study of that outbreak has been released.

Dr. Niman also said clusters were becoming more frequent, especially in Indonesia. Just last week two more emerged there, one including a nurse whose infection has not yet been confirmed. With 36 deaths, Indonesia is expected to eclipse Vietnam soon as the world's worst-hit country.

Dr. David Nabarro, chief pandemic flu coordinator for the United Nations, said that even if some unexplained cases were human-to-human, it does not yet mean that the pandemic alert system, now at Level 3, "No or very limited human-human transmission," should be raised to Level 4, "Increased human-human transmission."
Level 4 means the virus has mutated until it moves between some people who have been only in brief contact, as a cold does. Right now, Dr. Nabarro said, any human transmission is "very inefficient."
Level 6, meaning a pandemic has begun, is defined as "efficient and sustained" human transmission.

Ms. Cheng of the W.H.O. said that even if there were more clusters, the alert would remain at Level 3 as long as the virus dies out by itself.
"A lot of this is subjective, a judgment on how efficiently the virus is infecting people," she said. "If it becomes more common, we'd convene a task force to raise the alert level."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/wo...gewanted=print

 

[tropical]

Re: Misinformation; ?Bird flu hype a conspiracy to make money?

From #6:
"How many in India are actually sick with the virus? We have no idea. The government insists there are no human cases but, they have been giving Tamiflu to everyone with a fever as a matter of course. Then they are testing the blood for signs of the virus. Both of these practices will ensure a negative test result."

If the upper are the Indian, or some other countries practice, indeed, the above bolded text must be in contrary to the WHO guidelines, or it must be diferent.

Taking a blood sample taking minutes, and it is usualy everywhere done before giving any treatment, and than another (and so on) time "X" days after the begining of the tretment to see if the agent is already present.

It is unbelivable that in such an risk matter like avian flu, any country can take the ORL swabs, and blood samples only after the treatment.

Even if the person was at some rural site, the swabs, and the blood sample can be taken by nurses, refrigerated in situ, and transfered to the hospital.

For any country, if not earlyer - than now, it must exist a register of swabs / blood samples, previous, AND after the treatment.