Treyfish
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By Peter Christian Hall APRIL 2, 2013
An emerging bird flu that is mysterious and deadly is haunting China. With four fresh H7N9 casesreported in Jiangsu Province and no indication as to how three Chinese adults caught the little-noted avian flu virus that killed two of them in March, the global medical community is hoping the new flu will calm down until China?s health system can determine how it spread.
?I can tell you this thing is real and definitely has the markings of being a killer,? says Jason Tetro, coordinator of the Emerging Pathogens Research Centre in Ottawa, which on Monday examined gene sequences from three of China?s H7N9 cases.
?I don?t wish to cause panic,? Tetro said in an interview, noting that if the subtype were proven to have emerged from a small farm, he wouldn?t be m..
..And there are signs that authorities this time, too, have been less than forthcoming; the Jiangsu Province Health Department announced the four new H7N9 cases only after a microblogger whose Weibo profile says he is a hospital administrator posted a shot of what looked like a patient?s diagnosis on Tuesday.
This might explain why FluTrackers, a U.S. website that hosts a global volunteer disease-surveillance network, has been suffering renewed denial-of-service attacks that it says are originating in China. The Florida-based site first noted server overloads in April 2011 and was told by its server provider in mid-December 2012 that page views from China were running at an ?astonishing? level that closed the month at almost 10 million, said Sharon Sanders, FluTrackers? president and editor-in-chief, in a series of e-mail exchanges.
After FluTrackers banned Chinese IP addresses that were sending thousands of requests, traffic slowed by more than two-thirds, only to rebound in March to almost 6.7 million page views from China. ?When the site goes down, it is extremely inconvenient,? wrote Sanders, but a backup site that uses ?multiple social media venues? makes it ?really impossible to take us down.?
Why would Chinese authorities care about FluTrackers? For one thing, the nonprofit website is watching China. An item Sanders posted on March 7 seems to have constituted the first overseas mention of the Shanghai H7N9 cases. While journalists in China and Hong Kong dig for stories there, FluTrackers has about 50 regular posters and several hundred intermittent volunteers tracking and documenting threats to public health ? particularly emerging diseases ? around...:tiphat:
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/04/02/new-bird-flu-strain-creates-fear-and-surveillance/
By Peter Christian Hall APRIL 2, 2013
An emerging bird flu that is mysterious and deadly is haunting China. With four fresh H7N9 casesreported in Jiangsu Province and no indication as to how three Chinese adults caught the little-noted avian flu virus that killed two of them in March, the global medical community is hoping the new flu will calm down until China?s health system can determine how it spread.
?I can tell you this thing is real and definitely has the markings of being a killer,? says Jason Tetro, coordinator of the Emerging Pathogens Research Centre in Ottawa, which on Monday examined gene sequences from three of China?s H7N9 cases.
?I don?t wish to cause panic,? Tetro said in an interview, noting that if the subtype were proven to have emerged from a small farm, he wouldn?t be m..
..And there are signs that authorities this time, too, have been less than forthcoming; the Jiangsu Province Health Department announced the four new H7N9 cases only after a microblogger whose Weibo profile says he is a hospital administrator posted a shot of what looked like a patient?s diagnosis on Tuesday.
This might explain why FluTrackers, a U.S. website that hosts a global volunteer disease-surveillance network, has been suffering renewed denial-of-service attacks that it says are originating in China. The Florida-based site first noted server overloads in April 2011 and was told by its server provider in mid-December 2012 that page views from China were running at an ?astonishing? level that closed the month at almost 10 million, said Sharon Sanders, FluTrackers? president and editor-in-chief, in a series of e-mail exchanges.
After FluTrackers banned Chinese IP addresses that were sending thousands of requests, traffic slowed by more than two-thirds, only to rebound in March to almost 6.7 million page views from China. ?When the site goes down, it is extremely inconvenient,? wrote Sanders, but a backup site that uses ?multiple social media venues? makes it ?really impossible to take us down.?
Why would Chinese authorities care about FluTrackers? For one thing, the nonprofit website is watching China. An item Sanders posted on March 7 seems to have constituted the first overseas mention of the Shanghai H7N9 cases. While journalists in China and Hong Kong dig for stories there, FluTrackers has about 50 regular posters and several hundred intermittent volunteers tracking and documenting threats to public health ? particularly emerging diseases ? around...:tiphat:
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/04/02/new-bird-flu-strain-creates-fear-and-surveillance/
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