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Bird flu in U.S.A. now!
alledan
Member Posts: 19,541
(AP) Officials in Delaware ordered Friday the destruction of some 12,000 chickens after confirming that the flock was infected by bird flu. The birds have a milder form of the virus that has devastated poultry stocks in Asia.
Still, South Korea's Agriculture and Forestry Ministry said in a statement that it will indefinitely halt customs inspections of U.S. poultry "as a precautionary measure." Last year, South Korea imported 40,107 tons of chicken meat and 87 tons of duck meat from the United States.
Singapore also stopped U.S. poultry imports, the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority said in a statement. The city-state imported 19,300 tons of frozen chicken meat worth about $19.5 million from the United States last year.
Health officials have said the bird flu is contracted through direct contact with infected birds, but experts have said it's possible the virus jumped to humans through a mammal, like pigs, which have been implicated in past human flu outbreaks.
Swine often are housed with poultry in traditional family farms in Asia, and are more genetically similar to humans than birds are.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said the bird flu virus that killed two Vietnamese sisters did not contain human genes, meaning there is still no sign the virus sweeping Asia has mutated into a new, more contagious form.
The women's blood was tested because experts suspected they might have caught the disease from their brother, who also died; but that link could not be proven because the brother's body was cremated. So far, there have been no known cases of person-to-person transmission in the current bird flu outbreak.
Health experts have been most worried about the possibility of the disease combining with the human influenza virus to create a more lethal version that could be spread between people - giving rise to a global pandemic.
The new data is "reassuring" evidence that the H5N1 bird flu virus that's hitting Asia has not acquired that ability, the WHO said in a statement posted on its Web site late Friday.
Vietnamese officials, meanwhile, denied claims that pigs have been infected with the disease that has forced the slaughter of millions of chickens throughout Asia and killed at least 18 people.
China's Agriculture Ministry reported bird flu in three more provinces on Saturday.
The cases were in the provinces of Hubei, Henan and Jiangxi and quarantine measures were imposed, the ministry said in a statement released through the official Xinhua News Agency. Both Hubei and Jiangxi have reported previous cases in fowl in recent days.
The WHO was investigating Cambodia's first suspected human case - a woman who fell ill in Takeo province and died in a hospital in neighboring Vietnam, said Sean Tobin, a WHO medical epidemiologist in the capital, Phnom Penh.
Vietnam's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, which has run separate, extensive tests on pigs in bird flu-affected areas, said their findings have all turned up negative for the H5N1 flu virus, said Bui Quang Anh, director of the ministry's Veterinary Department.
"I can formally announce that no bird flu virus has been found in pigs in Vietnam," he said Saturday.
Anh said 179 samples were taken from pigs in the country's north and south. The samples were then sent to the WHO's Hong Kong laboratories.
He also criticized an announcement Friday by Anton Rychener, Vietnam representative of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, who said preliminary tests on nasal swabs taken from pigs in and around Hanoi showed the presence of the H5N1 strain.
"I don't know on what justification FAO made such a statement," Anh said.
Officials at the Rome headquarters of the U.N. agency later downplayed the findings, saying that the results do not necessarily mean the pigs are infected.
The tests may merely be confirming the presence of infected chicken droppings on their snouts. Rigorous tests look for the virus or antibodies in the blood, the agency said.
The avian influenza has killed 13 people in Vietnam, and five in Thailand. More than 50 million chickens have been slaughtered in Asia to stem the spread of the virus.
Still, South Korea's Agriculture and Forestry Ministry said in a statement that it will indefinitely halt customs inspections of U.S. poultry "as a precautionary measure." Last year, South Korea imported 40,107 tons of chicken meat and 87 tons of duck meat from the United States.
Singapore also stopped U.S. poultry imports, the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority said in a statement. The city-state imported 19,300 tons of frozen chicken meat worth about $19.5 million from the United States last year.
Health officials have said the bird flu is contracted through direct contact with infected birds, but experts have said it's possible the virus jumped to humans through a mammal, like pigs, which have been implicated in past human flu outbreaks.
Swine often are housed with poultry in traditional family farms in Asia, and are more genetically similar to humans than birds are.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said the bird flu virus that killed two Vietnamese sisters did not contain human genes, meaning there is still no sign the virus sweeping Asia has mutated into a new, more contagious form.
The women's blood was tested because experts suspected they might have caught the disease from their brother, who also died; but that link could not be proven because the brother's body was cremated. So far, there have been no known cases of person-to-person transmission in the current bird flu outbreak.
Health experts have been most worried about the possibility of the disease combining with the human influenza virus to create a more lethal version that could be spread between people - giving rise to a global pandemic.
The new data is "reassuring" evidence that the H5N1 bird flu virus that's hitting Asia has not acquired that ability, the WHO said in a statement posted on its Web site late Friday.
Vietnamese officials, meanwhile, denied claims that pigs have been infected with the disease that has forced the slaughter of millions of chickens throughout Asia and killed at least 18 people.
China's Agriculture Ministry reported bird flu in three more provinces on Saturday.
The cases were in the provinces of Hubei, Henan and Jiangxi and quarantine measures were imposed, the ministry said in a statement released through the official Xinhua News Agency. Both Hubei and Jiangxi have reported previous cases in fowl in recent days.
The WHO was investigating Cambodia's first suspected human case - a woman who fell ill in Takeo province and died in a hospital in neighboring Vietnam, said Sean Tobin, a WHO medical epidemiologist in the capital, Phnom Penh.
Vietnam's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, which has run separate, extensive tests on pigs in bird flu-affected areas, said their findings have all turned up negative for the H5N1 flu virus, said Bui Quang Anh, director of the ministry's Veterinary Department.
"I can formally announce that no bird flu virus has been found in pigs in Vietnam," he said Saturday.
Anh said 179 samples were taken from pigs in the country's north and south. The samples were then sent to the WHO's Hong Kong laboratories.
He also criticized an announcement Friday by Anton Rychener, Vietnam representative of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, who said preliminary tests on nasal swabs taken from pigs in and around Hanoi showed the presence of the H5N1 strain.
"I don't know on what justification FAO made such a statement," Anh said.
Officials at the Rome headquarters of the U.N. agency later downplayed the findings, saying that the results do not necessarily mean the pigs are infected.
The tests may merely be confirming the presence of infected chicken droppings on their snouts. Rigorous tests look for the virus or antibodies in the blood, the agency said.
The avian influenza has killed 13 people in Vietnam, and five in Thailand. More than 50 million chickens have been slaughtered in Asia to stem the spread of the virus.
Comments
Boomer
"Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as it is by the obstacles which one has overcome while trying to succeed"
NRA Life Member
I hope you're not insinuating that they're engineering germs to f&^! with us, because that's giving them a lot more credit for bioengineering techniques than they deserve.
New strains of everything come out of China because, biologically speaking, it's one big Petri dish. It's got the largest clump of humanity inside one national border and even though it's still a mostly agrarian society, their urban minority beats out the entirety of the U.S. in terms of sheer numbers.
And to add fuel to the fire, China's urban population is incredibly dense (no, not "stupid"... I'm talking people per square mile here). Under these conditions, any sort of viral or baterial disease has ample opportunity to spread and mutate. Hence SARS and various types of flu.
And of course since any new variety of disease will find a population without the prerequisite antibodies, of course it will have a higher-than-normal lethality.
The spread of such diseases can be boiled down to one factor: air travel. Airplanes and air travelers can spread diseases faster and more reliably than any missile or bomb. A sick traveler is an incubator, a carrier, and a delivery vector all in one.
So no Blofeld/Dr. No-esque super villains' minds at work here. Just another facet of life in modern times.
Another thing for us to worry about. Meanwhile, people are dying from the regular old flu, tobacco flu, cholesterol flu, alcohol flu, driving unsafely flu. Sometimes I think the media has an agenda to keep the general populace in a constant state of fear. We haven't even recovered from SuperBowlBreast flu and now we have to be afraid of birds.
Don't underestimate influenza. Modern medicine has made us complacent on many diseases that were once major killers. Did you know that the flu epidemic of 1918 killed more people than WWI did? For that matter WWII was the first war where diseases such as the flu didn't kill more soldiers than bullets and bombs.
Woods
During the 1918-1919 fall period the number of Americans who died from influenza is estimated at 675,000. Of those, almost 200,000 deaths were recorded in the month of October 1918 alone. Worldwide, the mortality figure for the full pandemic is believed to stand somewhere between 30 to 40 million. So, with the world population today having more than tripled in the intervening years, what is to stop a modern flu pandemic from claiming upwards of 100 million lives? The answer, it seems, is nothing at all.
Hooboy... paranoia anyone?
There are about fifty different easier ways to bring the United States down than giving us all the flu. Biological warfare has always been unreliable at best since you can't order a virus around like you can a soldier. Even chemicals can be designed to have a limited lifespan once they've been deployed. Germs, on the other hand, will keep on spreading until it runs out of hosts.
And that they covet what we have is by no means an indicator that they want to murder us in our sleep and steal our stuff. Heck, what happens when someone admires your car? Do you report them to the police?
So I wouldn't lose too much sleep over China. It's propaganda from right-wing pundits who miss the good ol' days when the Cold War gave them a reason for living. They may not be our friends, but they're far from being our enemies.