WHO waarschuwt voor Killer Flu

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Nobel scientist warns on bird flu

Wednesday April 13, 2005

Avian flu - caught directly from birds, and which kills in seven cases out of 10 - could suddenly sweep through the human population, killing 70 million people according to World Health Organisation estimates, a Nobel laureate warned yesterday.
Peter Doherty, of the University of Melbourne, who shared the 1996 Nobel prize for medicine, was speaking at an assembly of laureates in Lyon, France, 50 years to the day after the first announcement of an effective vaccine against the crippling disease poliomyelitis. World health teams hope to eliminate polio altogether by the end of 2005. But, Prof Doherty warned the Biovision conference, there were more immediate hazards.

Avian flu has killed people who worked with poultry in south-east Asia. Prof Doherty warned that a simultaneous epidemic of human and bird flu could prove a lethal mix, opening the way for the two viruses to mutate into a dangerous infection that could spread swiftly through the human population.

"If it comes, it will probably come out of somewhere like south-east Asia and it will probably come very fast," he said. "It is highly lethal in birds, and in humans, when they catch it, it is something like 70% lethal. So it is very dangerous."

The Guardian
 

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WHO waarschuwt voor pandemie

De WHO heeft de sterkste waarschuwing tot nog toe uitgevaardigd over de gevaren het vogelgriep-virus in Azië. Er bestaat volgens de wereldgezondheidsorganisatie een zeer groot risico dat er een wereldwijde epidemie uitbreekt.

Dat zei het hoofd van de WHO, dr. Shiguru Omi, op een persconferentie in Vietnam. Zo'n wereldwijde epidemie - een pandemie - doet zich om de 20 à 30 jaar voor. De laatste was 40 jaar geleden.

De WHO is bang dat de ziekte dodelijker wordt als deze muteert. Het kan dan een virus worden dat heel makkelijk overgedragen wordt tussen mensen.

NOS
 

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Op woensdag 13 april 2005 07:03 schreef indahnesia.com het volgende:

[..]

Aan SARS gaat zo'n 15% dood
Aan de vogelgriep schijnbaar zo'n 30 - 50 %

Maar wat denkt men van Marburg, wat nu in Angola uitgebroken is? 90 tot 95% dood. ook prettig als dat zich gaat verspreiden.

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Op woensdag 13 april 2005 10:27 schreef Tennis-boy het volgende:
Als dit echt gaat gebeuren.... hoe kan je jezelf beschermen? Een maand geen contact in de buitenwereld lijkt me moeilijk, want je moet ook boodschappen doen in de supermarkt. In de supermarkt of op straat kan je immers elkaar makkelijk besmetten.
En gaat men toch naar het werk?
Zou een mondkapje helpen? Ik vrees van niet.

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Bush Order Allows Isolation of Those with Bird Flu

Fri Apr 1, 2005

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush issued a directive on Friday allowing authorities to detain or isolate any passenger suspected of having avian flu when arriving in the United States aboard an international flight.
The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed 49 people in Asia since 2003, 35 in Vietnam, 12 in Thailand and 2 Cambodians, while millions of birds have been slaughtered to contain the disease.

Even so, the World Health Organization has said it had seen no evidence so far to suggest the bird flu virus was changing into a form that could be easily transmitted from one human to another.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy called the directive a precautionary measure.

"There's no evidence of any risk of avian flu to the American people at this time. But in an abundance of caution, this is a pragmatic step to ensure the government has the authority it needs to protect the American people as best it can," Duffy said.

The Bush order added pandemic influenza to the list of diseases for which quarantine is authorized. Pandemic flu is considered a novel or re-emergent strain to which there is little or no population immunity.

Under the directive, the Health and Human Services Department is given legal authority to detain or isolate any passenger suspected of having the avian flu to prevent the person from infecting others.

Quarantine and isolation were last used during the outbreak of SARS in 2003.

Reuters
 

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Labs told to destroy deadly virus

Wednesday, 13 April, 2005

The US government has told more than 3,700 laboratories in 18 countries to destroy potentially lethal influenza samples sent out in testing kits.
The samples are of "Asian flu", which killed between one and four million people in 1957 but disappeared by 1968.

If the virus is not handled properly, "it can easily cause an influenza epidemic", Klaus Stohr of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned.

The virus was sent to Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America.

The full list of countries and areas where laboratories received the virus is: Bermuda, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and the US.

Hong Kong radio announced on Wednesday that the virus had been destroyed there.

Because the virus has not been in circulation since 1968, people born after that do not have antibodies against it - and current vaccines do not guard against it.

"If this virus were to infect one person, it would spread very rapidly," Dr Stohr, the WHO's influenza expert, told the BBC.

BBC
 

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Scientists rush to destroy flu strain

Countries around the world were destroying vials of a nearly 50-year-old killer influenza virus Wednesday that were sent to thousands of labs as part of a routine test kit, raising fears of a global pandemic.

The World Health Organization said Canada, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore had already destroyed their samples, while laboratories in Japan were doing the same. Germany said all its vials had been destroyed through exposure to extreme heat.
 
Belleville.com
 

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Asian Lab Worker Opened Flu Vial

Hong Kong media is reporting a lab worker in that city opened vials containing a fatal flu strain before health experts worldwide were warned to destroy the sample.

The worker is reportedly in good health but is being monitored.

The World Health Organization said earlier this week that thousands of labs were accidentally sent vials containing the Asian Flu. The disease is believed to be responsible for as many as four million deaths in 1957.
 
CFRA
 

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Op vrijdag 15 april 2005 08:08 schreef Ghostbuster het volgende:
Dat zei het hoofd van de WHO, dr. Shiguru Omi, op een persconferentie in Vietnam. Zo'n wereldwijde epidemie - een pandemie - doet zich om de 20 à 30 jaar voor. De laatste was 40 jaar geleden.

En welke epedemie moet dat geweest zijn dan ?

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History suggests that influenza pandemics have probably happened during at least the last four centuries. During the 20th century, three pandemics and several "pandemic scares" occurred.

1918: Spanish Flu
1957: Asian Flu
1968: Hong Kong Flu

bron
 

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Deadly virus samples unaccounted for

The World Health Organisation says two-thirds of the samples of a potentially fatal flu virus sent to laboratories around the world by mistake have now been destroyed but two shipments are still missing.

The College of American Pathologists sent samples of the H2N2 virus to almost 4,000 laboratories around the world this month, apparently for routine testing.

The virus claimed at least 1 million lives in the flu pandemic of 1957 but it has since died out, making it especially dangerous because most people have no immunity to it.
 
ABC News
 

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Killer flu mysteries

Among influenza researchers, the well-worn question is not 'if' but 'when' a flu pandemic will happen. With bird flu ongoing in Asia, scientists from around the world are racing to answer a host of unanswered questions about the influenza virus.
As spring enlivens the Northern hemisphere each year, health authorities the world over turn their attention away from influenza to other scourges. But not this year.


A dozen Asian countries, with North Korea the most recent, are still battling avian flu caused by the influenza A virus H5N1. Hundreds of millions of chickens and ducks have been culled in an effort to curb the outbreak, which began in 2003. Of 88 infected people 51 have died.

Radio Netherlands
 

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The threat of a global flu epidemic in Britain should be taken seriously, a doctor warned yesterday.

Dr Nigel Higson from Hove, believes that Britain has become complacent to the threat, and refers to a recent report that avian flu (H5N1) has jumped from human to human for the first time.

medical news
 

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Recent clustering of human cases suggest there could be human-to-human transmission of the virus occurring rather than just people catching the disease from birds.

The Sydney Morning Herald.
 

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Marburg haemorrhagic fever in Angola

As of 10 May, the Ministry of Health in Angola has reported 316 cases of Marburg haemorrhagic fever in Uige Province, the epicentre of the outbreak. Of these cases, 276 were fatal. The municipality of Uige remains the most severely affected in the province.

New cases have continued to be identified in Uige in the last few days. As some chains of transmission are still ongoing, mobile teams are investigating suspect cases and following contacts.

ReliefWeb
 

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Study shows stronger human-to-human bird flu transmission

The UN health agency has called on countries around the world to press ahead with their preparations for a threatened flu pandemic after a study in Vietnam showed signs of greater human to human transmission of bird flu.

"If somebody should need warnings that another pandemic is coming, we've had enough and we should continue very intensively with preparations for pandemic preparedness," the World Health Organisation's top influenza expert, Klaus Stohr.

Fears that a new deadlier strain of flu might spread rapidly around the world on a similar scale to pandemics in the last century have been revived with the emergence of the H5N1 bird flu virus among humans in Asia.

The study of bird flu outbreaks in people in Vietnam until April 2005 suggested an evolution of infections by the H5N1 virus.

The WHO, which examined the findings with experts from Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam earlier this month, also called for an immediate boost in monitoring for possible pandemic influenza in all countries affected by H5N1 in birds.

"The changes in the epidemiological patterns are consistent with the possibility that recently emerging H5N1 viruses may be more infectious for humans," a report on the study said.

While that meant a greater number of people might be infected by poultry, there was also evidence that human-to-human infections, which have been found several times since the strain was first detected in Hong Kong in 1997, was strengthening, the UN health agency said.

"It is possible that avian flu viruses are becoming more capable of human-to-human transmission," the report said.

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