Update 4/2
China Bird Flu Pandemic: WHO Tells the World Not to Panic as Number of Infected Rises
The World Health Organization (WHO) has
urged the global populace to refrain from panicking over the new bird flu pandemonium in China even as the number of infected has added four new cases on Tuesday, taking the total of reported cases now to seven.
(Note: It's up to 9 confirmed cases today.)
China is considered one of the nations most at risk from bird flu because it has the world's biggest poultry population
"It is of concern to WHO and we will be following this with the health authorities in China to know more. But for the time being, it's only seven cases and it has shown, for the time being, no human-to-human transmission," Fadela Chaib, UN health agency's spokeswoman, told reporters on Tuesday.
She admitted, however, that they are appalled as to how the virus was able to infect humans, noting it is now crucial to find how this became so. "It's the first time that H7N9 was found in humans," Ms Chaib pointed out.
On Tuesday, four more people in east China's Jiangsu Province have been confirmed infected with the H7N9 bird flu. According to a government Web site that cited the authorities in the city of Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province northwest of Shanghai, the four new patients were aged 32 to 83, have been sent to the hospitals and are all critically ill.
(Snip)
If for any consolation, the cases seem to bear no correlation with each other. "To date the investigation showed no link between the three cases, but the investigation is still ongoing,' Ms Chaib said. She noted the 88 individuals with whom the victims had been in contact with are also being monitored.
WHO likewise stressed that H7N9 could not easily be contracted by humans, although one of the four people in Nanjing infected is a poultry butcher.
"This is of concern," Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, was quoted by Bloomberg. "These are the first cases we've seen in human beings. We're watching this very closely."
Meantime, China has launched a nationwide screening programme for the rare but lethal strain.
The government of Shanghai has likewise announced a level-3 flu alert on Monday. Xu Jianguang, chief of Shanghai's health and family planning commission, said at a briefing on Tuesday that municipal health authorities will strengthen monitoring of influenza as well as report daily pneumonia cases where causes are unknown.
(Snip)
China has urged its citizens to refrain eating wild poultry.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/452917/20130403/china-bird-flu-who-pandemic.htm
April 2. 2013
BY LAURIE GARRETT APRIL 1, 2013
China's mysterious pig, duck, and people deaths could be connected. And that should worry us
Here's how it would happen. Children playing along an urban river bank would spot hundreds of grotesque, bloated pig carcasses bobbing downstream. Hundreds of miles away, angry citizens would protest the rising stench from piles of dead ducks and swans, their rotting bodies collecting by the thousands along river banks. And three unrelated individuals would stagger into three different hospitals, gasping for air. Two would quickly die of severe pneumonia and the third would lay in critical condition in an intensive care unit for many days. Government officials would announce that a previously unknown virus had sickened three people, at least, and killed two of them. And while the world was left to wonder how the pigs, ducks, swans, and people might be connected, the World Health Organization would release deliberately terse statements, offering little insight.
It reads like a movie plot -- I should know, as I was a consultant for Steven Soderbergh's Contagion. But the facts delineated are all true, and have transpired over the last six weeks in China. The events could, indeed, be unrelated, and the new virus, a form of influenza denoted as H7N9, may have already run its course, infecting just three people and killing two.
Or this could be how pandemics begin.
On March 10, residents of China's powerhouse metropolis, Shanghai, noticed some dead pigs floating among garbage flotsam in the city's Huangpu River. The vile carcasses appeared in Shanghai's most important tributary of the mighty Yangtze, a 71-mile river that is edged by the Bund, the city's main tourist area, and serves as the primary source of drinking water and ferry travel for the 23 million residents of the metropolis and its millions of visitors. The vision of a few dead pigs on the surface of the Huangpu was every bit as jarring for local Chinese as porcine carcasses would be for French strolling the Seine, Londoners along the Thames, or New Yorkers looking from the Brooklyn Bridge down on the East River.
Full article
www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/01/is_this_a_pandemic_being_born_china_pigs_virus
March 31
Three cases of human infection with H7N9 avian influenza have been detected recently in Shanghai and Anhui Province, and two of them have died, the other being in a critical condition, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said Sunday
www.china.org.cn/china/2013-03/31/content_28409396.htm
China: Dead Pigs, Ducks And Now Black Swans - China's Animal Apocalypse Crosses Into The Twilight Zone
First it was thousands of dead pigs floating in the Shanghai water supply (at last estimate over 16,000), then a thousand dead ducks were pulled from a river in the Sichuan province, and now, pushing the meme beyond even its most grotesque boundaries, we learn that five black swans were found floating lifeless on the pond of Anhui University's old campus in Hefei, traditionally inhabited by a bevy of black swans.
From Danwei: "The latest instance of floating dead animals in China - first pigs, then ducks, and now black swans - these mere five black swans became an object of heated discussion on the Internet right after the announcement was made. How did they die? Was it a natural disaster or another man-made one? As Star News tells us today, upon hearing of the news yesterday it immediately sent a journalist to the scene to find out exactly what happened. What he found was just one more filthy pond filled with oily water and garbage."
Ok, maybe there is no deep symbolism mystery to this latest black aflocalypse, which may be explained simply by unprecedented local pollution, unless of course many more "fat tails" continue keeling over in a very literal sense.
However, just when it appeared safe to discard the latest media reports of mass animal aquatic burials, an odd wrinkle appears, one which may tie the proverbial animal apocalypse room together.
Continued: Most of the rest is political rhetoric, IMO: www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-28/dead-pigs-ducks-and-now-black-swans-chinas-animal-apocalypse-crosses-twilight-zone
March 27, 2013
WHO confirms 2 new coronavirus deaths. What is coronavirus?
The deadly and mysterious coronavirus that first appeared in Saudi Arabia last year has claimed two more victims, bringing the official death toll to 11.
The World Health Organization said a 73-year-old man from the United Arab Emirates who was taken to Germany for medical treatment died at a Munich hospital Tuesday. The United Nations health authority also announced that a man from Britain who became sick in January has died. That man had traveled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and presumably became infected there.
This new strain of coronavirus has puzzled doctors since September when it was identified as the cause of death for a 60-year-old man in Saudi Arabia in June. The virus aggressively attacks its victim's lower respiratory system, leading to trouble breathing, fever, pneumonia and even death. It is part of a family of viruses that includes the common cold and is a distant cousin of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which killed almost 800 people during a global outbreak in 2002 and 2003.
So far, 17 cases of coronavirus infection have been confirmed by the World Health Organization. Patients with the virus are overcome with severe lower respiratory infections, sometimes leading to multi-organ failure. Though the virus hasn't sickened many people, the fact that it has killed 65% of its known hosts has scientists and health officials concerned.
Coronaviruses earned their name because of their physical appearance. The virus has a globular center ringed by a spiny halo - or corona - of proteins. The virus tricks a body's immune system into turning against it, said Pinghui Feng, a professor of microbiology at USC.
The bug attacks the lower respiratory system and triggers a dangerous immune system reaction known as a cytokine storm. Even after the immune system has cleared the virus, the body continues to attack cells. The fast-spreading virus - its peak production is 48 hours after infection - and the out-of-control immune response simulataneously attack the cell lining of the lungs, Feng said. The virus also aims for the kidneys, which may shut down.
(Snip) "It is currently not clear how the virus is spreading or where it comes from," said Volker Thiel of Switzerland's Institute of Immunobiology and a coauthor of that study. "It is related to coronaviruses detected in bats, but still we don't know how it jumped to humans."
Another study published in Nature revealed that the receptor that allows the virus to latch onto and infect cells is very similar in humans and several types of animals, including bats. The particular strain isolated from people is genetically very similar to three of the 60 known strains of bat coronaviruses, although it's possible that bats gave it to another animal, which then gave it to humans.
Coronaviruses like this new one are "somewhat unpredictable," said Dr. Peter Katona, a clinical professor of medicine and infectious diseases at UCLA. "I think these kinds of situations are a warning to us that these agents can mutate - and mutate quickly - and they can potentially cause great harm," Katona said. "We may have a false sense of complacency."
The 17 patients identified so far are just the "tip of the iceberg," he said. There are probably countless other cases of infection in which people didn't die, or they died from something as common as pnuemonia, so no one bothers to identify the virus, he added.
continued: https://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-coronavirus-new-victims-20130327,0,6242098.story
~~~~~~~~~
The World Health Organization (WHO) is reporting the fourteenth confirmed case of novel coronavirus (NCoV) infection after the Saudi Arabia Health Ministry notified the UN health agency earlier, according to a WHO Global Alert and Response Mar. 6. According to the alert, a 69-year-old male was hospitalized on 10 February 2013 and died on 19 February 2013. Preliminary investigation indicated that the patient had no contact with previously reported cases of NCoV infection and did not have recent history of travel. This case follows another NCoV fatality in the Saudi Kingdom last month. In addition to being the 14th confirmed case of this infection, this patients represents the eighth fatality. In Saudi Arabia alone, there has been seven confirmed cases resulting in five deaths. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are known to cause illness in humans and animals. In humans, this large family of viruses are known to cause illness ranging from the common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). This is a new strain of coronavirus that has not been previously identified in humans. The symptoms common in confirmed cases include acute, serious respiratory illness with fever, cough, shortness of breath, and breathing difficulties. Based on current clinical experience, the infection generally presents as pneumonia. It has caused kidney failure and death in some cases. Although the ability of person-to-person transmission is unclear, a recent family cluster of NCoV affecting three people in the United Kingdom opens up the question of person-to-person transmission.
SARS, 10 years later: One family’s remarkable story
(This is a reminder of why I do this public service as well as others I do this with. We are a very small number of people and I would like to see the numbers grow.-cottontop)
Nurse Susan Sorrenti caught SARS in the line of duty. A decade on, her family’s story is a reminder of what went wrong and the lessons learned.
By: Amy Dempsey News reporter, Published on Sat Mar 02 2013
snip
A lot has changed since then, both locally and globally. One of the most important things, according to Dr. Low of Mount Sinai, is the ability — provincially, nationally, internationally — to recognize when there is a problem at the doorstep.
“Surveillance and the sharing of information are the two biggest advances that we’ve made,” says Low, who worked around the clock for months during the crisis and was hailed as one of the heroes of the outbreak.
Vigilance, Low and others stress, is critical. That’s because scientists believe it isn’t a matter of if the world will see another outbreak like SARS, but when.
The coronavirus conundrum: when to press the panic button
Mark Honigsbaum
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 February 2013
A medical worker disinfects cages containing civet cats at a market selling wild animals in Guangzhou, China, during the Sars epidemic, which was also caused by a coronavirus. Photograph: Chang Feng/EPA
If Alfred Hitchcock were alive today and looking for a new way to terrorise Tippi Hedren, he need look no further than the Health Protection Agency and the "reassuring" announcement about the coronavirus.
In case, like Hedren, you've been marooned in Bodega Bay and missed the update, the coronavirus, which takes its name from the menacing, crown-like spikes on its surface, first blipped on the HPA's radar in September, when a 49-year-old Qatari man was admitted to intensive care at St Thomas' Hospital with renal failure. Now the virus seems to have been transmitted to a new patient at another hospital, providing "strong evidence for person-to-person transmission".
Never mind that there have been a total of just three confirmed cases in the UK and 11 worldwide, half those infected have died and, as there is no vaccine, health officials are "worried". They are worried not least because we have been here before: in 2003, to be precise, when severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), also caused by a coronavirus, suddenly emerged from Guangdong, China, sparking an epidemic that resulted in 1,000 deaths worldwide and grounded planes from Hong Kong to Toronto.
On that occasion, civet cats - a popular delicacy in Chinese animal markets - were to blame; this time the animal reservoir is thought to be bats. But the truth is that no one knows for certain, least of all the scientists whose job it is to keep tabs on new pathogens and alert us to the threat before they can be reprimanded for not speaking up sooner.
And that's the dilemma: press the panic button too early and you risk being labelled a wolf-crier. Do it too often and when a real wolf comes along - albeit in the guise of a bird, cat or bat - no one will believe you.
For all the current fuss about the coronavirus, the pathogen that still keeps most scientists awake at night is H5N1 bird flu, a virus that first emerged in Hong Kong around the same time as Sars, and which has been causing deaths every year since. And let's not forget about ebola, a Hammer Horror virus that reduces victims' organs to a bloody pulp and is also thought to be spread by bats (truly, Hitchcock is spoilt for choice).
Part of the problem is that we have become almost too good at detecting these risks. To keep tabs on exotic pathogens, the World Health Organisation now routinely trawls the internet for reports of unusual disease outbreaks in remote jungle regions. Meanwhile, in Africa, health workers are being encouraged to use SMS to text clinical data from the bush in real time.
For the most part, these efforts are welcome. However, the paradox is that the digital technologies that enable us to monitor the emergence of exotic diseases and take action to prevent pandemics are the very same technologies that spread fear.
This is arguably exactly what happened in the spring of 2009, when the WHO, already on high alert over bird flu, began picking up electronic chatter about an unusual flu-like illness in the Yucatan. Within weeks, "Mexican" swine flu had sparked a series of escalating pandemic alerts, whipping up needless hysteria and triggering the production of billions of dollars' worth of vaccines that had to be junked as soon as the pandemic fizzled out.
Of course, the coronavirus is a very different animal from swine flu. Judging by the messages issued by health experts, scientists have learned a lot from 2009. For instance, Professor John Oxford, who was responsible for sounding some of the direst warnings five years ago, told the BBC that the coronavirus "doesn't raise too many alarm bells" as the latest patient seemed to have got it from his father, meaning transmission probably required close contact. "If it was somebody who was not related - or a nurse or a doctor - that would be a lot more serious," said Oxford.
So that's all right then: the coronavirus is only a little bit infectious - unless, of course, it isn't.
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/14/coronavirus-conundrum-panic-button-sars
The Future Evolution Of Bird Flu
by Carl Zimmer
It’s been a rough flu season this winter in the United States and Europe, but it could be worse. A lot worse. The flu viruses that are making us sick go by names like H1N1 and H3N2, referring to the kinds of proteins that stud their surface. There’s another sort of flu lurking in other parts of the world, like Egypt, India, and Cambodia, known as H5N1. Since 2003, 615 people have come down with H5N1, and, as of Feburary 1, 364 of them had died. In January alone, 5 people in Cambodia were diagnosed with H5N1. Four of them died.
There’s a lot of debate about precisely how bad H5N1 is. It’s possible that a lot of people are getting sick with H5N1 without making it onto the official records. They’re crawling off to bed for a week, recuperating, and then getting on with their lives. So the 59 percent death rate you get from the official numbers (what’s known as the case-fatality rate) may be a serious overestimate. Still, even if the true rate was only half as high, H5N1 would not be a virus you’d want to cross paths with. The most famous flu outbreak of all, the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, is estimated to have killed 50 to 100 million people worldwide. But it infected billions, with a death rate of roughly 2 percent. If H5N1 could somehow take off and become a global pandemic, it would become an unparalleled catastrophe even if its official 59 percent case-fatality rate was chopped down by a factor of ten.
full article
phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/07/the-future-evolution-of-bird-flu/
Deadly Flu of 1918 Spurred Denial, Then Drastic Action
(cottontop here-the CFR in the 1918 Pandemic was 2% to 5%. Even if H5N1 was as low (and none of us believe it will be a low CFR) as 10% to 20%, it will change the world for a very long time. Since we have no resistance to H5N1, it will be more than likely be a high CFR.)
The near-closure of the entire city, mandatory face masks and hundreds of deaths were just weeks ahead, along with an epic battle of commerce versus public health.
But nobody in the coastal town by the border was too worried about a deadly flu rampaging across the world in September 1918. "San Diego is full of colds just now," a local newspaper noted, but that wasn't even in a story. It was just an advertisement for something called Dover's Powders.
Things changed almost instantly. Within days, camps of World War I soldiers were quarantined, the local health board president warned of a disease "more murderous than any epidemic the nation has yet experienced" and officials shut down schools, theaters, churches and more.
The deadliest epidemic to ever hit the nation had come to San Diego, where it would take the lives of 368 people, or about one in every 200 residents. Many of those stricken were young and strong, unlike the victims of this year's flu season in the county. (So far, 14 people have died, their ages ranged from 46 to 92, and all but one were already weakened by existing illnesses.)
From Kansas to the World
The epidemic of the Spanish flu didn't start in Spain. The first reports in the world came from a military camp in Kansas, where dozens of men died after struggling to breathe amid fever, headaches, chills and fluid-filled lungs.
Other soldiers survived to be shipped out to Europe to fight in World War I in Europe. They almost certainly spread the illness to that continent, where hundreds of thousands fell ill and died.
As September 1918 turned into October, hundreds would die in single days in Philadelphia and Boston, and the first reported cases of the deadly flu appeared in San Diego at the Army's Camp Kearny.
By early October, four military facilities were quarantined. The "Bluejackets" training at a naval training camp at Balboa Park had to stick around and not take their usual liberty three times a week. They played sports and games instead, the San Diego Union reported.
Full article
www.voiceofsandiego.org/this_just_in/article_13941f72-6758-11e2-971d-001a4bcf887a.html
Living History: During World War I, the Spanish flu claimed 3,000 Utah lives
By pat bagley
| The Salt Lake Tribune
First Published Jan 26 2013 04:49 pm • Last Updated Jan 26 2013 07:18 pm
The 1918 Spanish influenza hit people just as flus do today. There would be fever and aches, accompanied by a cough.
But the Spanish flu was no ordinary seasonal malady. Things often took a turn for the worse; fevers would spike to 104 degrees and breathing would become labored, sometimes accompanied by explosive nosebleeds.
Starting at the ears, the face would turn blue as infected lungs strained and failed to oxygenate blood. The end was near when the sufferer began hacking up a pink froth.
It probably should have been called the Kansas flu, or the Chinese flu, places where it likely originated. The Spanish flu didn’t start in Spain, but the millions who died in Iberia alarmed the world and gave the pandemic a name. In any case, worldwide, 50 million people would die before it ran its course.
In 1918, armies were slugging out World War I across Europe. The concentration of troops, along with increased transatlantic traffic, provided an ideal incubator for a global killer.
The disease was almost certainly brought to Utah by a soldier. Outbreaks were first reported in early October in both Salt Lake’s Fort Douglas and Ogden, a central railroad hub for transporting troops.
The flu spread rapidly. A soldier on leave to visit family in Ogden infected 17 people in a matter of days, including everyone in the barber shop where he’d stopped for a haircut.
As had been done elsewhere as the pandemic surged across the globe, Utah cities and towns declared themselves off-limits. It had worked elsewhere. American Samoa didn’t suffer a single death, whereas Western Samoa, which had been late to blockade contact, lost a horrifying 20 percent of its population.
Some Utah burgs were successful at hermetically sealing themselves off and escaped unscathed. However, some towns, like Tremonton and Brigham City, were especially hard-hit. Ogden pointlessly tried to shut off traffic from Salt Lake; the virus was already on the loose in Utah’s major cities.
The stories were harrowing, especially among Utah’s native populations. Marie Lehi, a Paiute Indian, later recounted that she entered a village and found only a single baby still alive.
www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55659616-78/flu-utah-spanish-lake.html.csp
NY declares public health emergency due to flu epidemic
13 January, 2013
New York State has become the latest US region to declare a health emergency due to a flu epidemic, with the number of confirmed cases already four times higher than last year.
"We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City," said governor Andrew Cuomo.
More than 19,000 cases of flu have been confirmed in laboratory analysis, up from 4,404 last year. But these numbers are thought to represent just a tiny fraction of those affected, as only the most severe cases usually get clinically tested.
At least two children and ten adults have died from influenza this season in New York City alone.
To combat the spread of disease, Cuomo has authorized pharmacists to vaccinate children as young as six months for the next 4 weeks. Usually, drug store staff can only give shots to adults.
“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, said in a statement to the media.
“We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”
The vaccine used this year prevents flu in only 62 percent of cases, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and is likely to be less effective in those already weakened by other conditions.
continued
rt.com/usa/news/new-york-flu-emergency-917/
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