NEW Bird Flu

[Abby2006]

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[Abby2006]

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[agate]

This new bird flu was on the national TV news tonight.

[Abby2006]

I am not going to rehash this from 2006/07 just wamted you guys to be aware and take precautions like carrying mask and staying away from crowds[, I know alot of people that are sick right now said its like the flu they had this winter back tracked and thus felt worse - one was a neighbor (nurse( we talked by phone and she said she had been home so far 5 days from work

Abby

Scientists race to gauge pandemic risk of new bird flu

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LONDON (Reuters) - Genetic sequence data on a deadly strain of bird flu previously unknown in people show the virus has already acquired some mutations that might make it more likely to cause a human pandemic, scientists say.

But there is no evidence so far that the H7N9 flu - now known to have infected nine people in China, killing three - is spreading from person to person, and there is still a chance it might peter out and never fully mutate into a human form of flu.

Just days after authorities in China announced they had identified cases of H7N9, flu experts in laboratories across the world are picking through the DNA sequence data of samples isolated from the patients to assess its pandemic potential.

One of the world's top flu experts, Ab Osterhaus, who is based at the Erasmus Medical Center in The Netherlands, says the sequences show some genetic mutations that should put authorities on alert and entail increased surveillance in animals and humans.

"The virus has to a certain extent already adapted to mammalian species and to humans, so from that point of view it's worrisome," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"Really we should keep a very close eye on this."

China's National Health and Family Planning Commission confirmed on Sunday that three people had been infected with the new H7N9 flu, with two deaths of men in Shanghai aged 87 and 27 who fell sick in late February. Chinese authorities have in the past two days confirmed another six cases, including another fatal one.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says the cases of H7N9 are "of concern" because they are the first in humans.

"That makes it a unique event, which the World Health Organization is taking seriously," the Geneva-based United Nations health agency said on Wednesday.

Other strains of bird flu, such as H5N1, have been circulating for many years and can be transmitted from bird to bird, and bird to human, but not from human to human.

So far, this lack of human-to-human transmission also appears to be a feature of the H7N9 strain.

Flu viruses are classified based on two types of protein found on their surface, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, which are abbreviated to H and N.

Although it is very early days, scientists says initial analysis also suggests H7N9 does not appear to make birds particularly ill - in other words it is what is known as a low pathogenic avian influenza, of LPAI.

Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean it will be mild in humans, says Wendy Barclay, a flu virology expert at Britain's Imperial College London.

FINDING THE SOURCE

"We can't be complacent. We have to be cautious," she said, stressing that other H5 and H7 flu subtypes have been able to mutate from LPAI to the more dangerous highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) as they circulate in various hosts, particularly in chickens.

Its mildness in birds could also mean H7N9 is a "silent spreader" - harder to detect than highly pathogenic flu strains such as H5N1 that can wipe out entire flocks of wild birds or domestic poultry and are therefore far more visible.

"It's a sort of double-edged sword, because if and when it becomes highly pathogenic and all the chickens start dying, that's very bad for the poultry farmers, but it means we can see much more easily where the virus is," Barclay said.

"At the moment, we can't see where this virus is coming from. We don't know yet what animal source is feeding this."

Finding that source, and tracking the genetic mutations to see if, how and when this new strain might gain the ability to spark a human pandemic are now the priorities for researchers in China and around the world, Barclay and Osterhaus said.

The WHO praised the Chinese government, saying it was responding to the situation with various important measures such as enhanced surveillance, detailed case management and treatment, tracing contacts of all those known to have been infected so far, and training healthcare professionals.

Experts said the fact that H7N9 had been identified and swiftly reported, and that genetic sequence data was already available for researchers around the world to analyze, was a sign of how things have changed.

In 2003, China initially tried to cover up an epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged in China and killed about a tenth of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

Ian Jones, a professor of virology at Britain's University of Reading, said the heightened awareness of flu and of the possibility that unusual respiratory diseases may turn out to be new strains of flu means more cases get referred to hospitals.

"It's quite possible these cases ... are being detected because flu is way up there" on disease priority lists, he said.

(Editing by Ben Hirschler and Will Waterman)

...

[Abby2006]

.Could new bird flu strain spread across the globe?

Fox News

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[renee]

Oh great.
I heard about this one.

Just let me check out fast after a very good meal.

[Abby2006]

Don't panic over new bird flu outbreak, CDC cautionsBy JoNel Aleccia, Senior Writer, NBC News

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A deadly outbreak of a new kind of bird flu has now sickened 16 people in China and killed six, but U.S. health officials on Friday cautioned that there’s no cause for widespread alarm.

The new influenza A H7N9 virus has not been seen before in humans, but it doesn’t appear to be transmitted easily among people, and there have been no cases detected in the United States, said Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There are no specific steps people in this country can take. People can go about their daily lives,” he said.

Still, he said CDC officials are in close contact with Chinese authorities as they track the spread of the novel virus, which has been found in people from four Chinese provinces.

Advertise | AdChoicesVictims have included 15 adults and a 4-year-old child, all of whom appeared to have clear ties to live poultry markets. They all became ill between Feb. 19 and March 31. Two of the 16 had other people in their families fall ill, but whether it was related is still being assessed.

“At this point, there are several things that give us confidence that this is not spreading widely from person to person,” Frieden said.

For example, Chinese authorities have tracked 100 close contacts of people who got sick, and none of them became ill. With typical influenza, perhaps 20 percent to 30 percent of family members could be expected to develop the flu, Frieden said.

CDC is working with vaccine manufacturers to develop a seed strain to produce a vaccine to protect against the H7N9 virus, but that would only occur if there appeared to be widespread transmission. If that were necessary, it would not disrupt production of the seasonal vaccine, CDC officials said.

The agency issued a health alert for U.S. clinicians urging them to be alert for recent travelers from China who could show signs of the novel flu. CDC is also developing a diagnostic test that could quickly detect the virus.

No travel advisories have been issued, but CDC officials are reminding U.S. tourists in China to stay away from live poultry markets. That's the same advice the agency has issued for about a decade, since outbreaks of SARS and H5N1 flu. The World Health Organization said it was not advising screening at points of entry or any trade restrictions in connection with the outbreak.

China's neighboring countries are closely monitoring people for signs of flu. A 7-year-old girl in Hong Kong was being tested Friday in a local hospital for signs of the virus, according to the official Chinese news outlet Xinhua. Tougher surveillance also has started in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Taiwan, CDC officials said.

Though no source of the outbreak has been identified, Chinese officials have detected the virus in chickens and in pigeons and are now culling flocks to prevent further spread of the virus.

Health officials can't yet say whether this virus is especially virulent. Wider population tests will need to be conducted to tell whether many people may have become infected with virus without becoming seriously ill, or whether those who got infected developed severe illness.

The virus appears to be common in animals, where it causes only mild illness. Doctors closely monitor cases of animal flu that pass into humans. Seasonal flu kills tens of thousands of people globally every year. But a new virus that starts passing from animals to people could cause far more serious disease.

For instance, H5N1 bird flu kills about 60 percent of the people it infects. But it doesn't pass easily among people, either, and most of those who've gotten appeared to be directly infected by sick chickens.

Still, Frieden noted that flu can mutate very quickly and there's no way to tell whether this new virus will soon become more transmissible. The H1N1 swine flu in 2009 didn't cause serious illness, but it spread very quickly. And that bug was a descendant of the 1918 "Spanish flu," which killed between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide.

[Abby2006]

Flu Prevention Video

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Abby

[Abby2006]

Never mind until I read the whole thing
Abby

[Abby2006]

SARS

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New SARS-Like Coronavirus Suspected at New York Hospital



LONG BEACH, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 05/18/13 -- AvianFluTalk.com, an online discussion forum created in 2005 to track the potential threat of an avian flu pandemic, has been the venue for a serious discussion regarding the new SARS-like coronavirus infecting patients at a New York Hospital leaving several in critical condition and resulting in 3 deaths.

The new SARS-like coronavirus recently emerged in the Middle East infecting 41 total worldwide resulting in 20 deaths and is primarily spread by limited human-to-human transmission. Experts fear that the virus' early ability to transmit among humans could spark a global pandemic should the virus mutate further and achieve sustained human transmission.

Nurses working at a St. Luke's hospital in New York have claimed that there are several cases of the new SARS-like virus in the hospital's ICU, which have gone misdiagnosed and that are in fact the new deadly virus.

A nurse who works at the hospital believes there is a potential outbreak of this new SARS-like virus and she too has now been hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Although hospital administrators have made no comment about this matter, posters on the online message board at avianflutalk.com have indicated through research that it is influenza B. The nurses are disputing that claim stating that in fact the new coronavirus is the culprit.
The nurses feel that they have an obligation to speak-out about their suspicions in this matter.

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__________________

[Abby2006]

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agoH7N9 bird flu spreads much like ordinary fluBy Maggie Fox, Senior Writer, NBC News

The H7N9 bird flu can spread from one mammal to another – meaning it could also spread person to person, an international team of researchers reported Thursday.


Researchers haven’t been exactly sure how H7N9 is spreading. They know it can infect people – it’s infected more than 130 people and killed more than 30 of them – but they have suspected most of the victims had some sort of contact with infected poultry.

The research team, led by Yi Guan of the University of Hong Kong, tried infecting ferrets – the animals closest to humans when it comes to catching flu.

The animals could infect one another by direct contact in cages. And one ferret kept in a separate cage was infected as well, they report in this week’s issue of the journal Science.

“Under appropriate conditions human-to-human transmission of the H7N9 virus may be possible,” they wrote.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says he is not too worried by the findings. “We already know you can infect mammals,” said Fauci, who was not involved in the research.

“That is what influenza does. We know that. You are talking about a handful of ferrets. You can’t make major extrapolations.”

Officials are keeping a close eye on H7N9 because it has the potential to cause a human pandemic. So far, it doesn’t seem to infect people easily and people who are infected do not seem to spread it to others much, if at all. But influenza viruses change quickly and unpredictably and if one starts passing easily from one person to another, it could spread.

The experiment also showed that the ferrets could pass the infection before they started showing symptoms. Human flu does this too – that’s why it spreads so quickly and easily every year, because people are out and about, touching others, before they know they are sick.

“If this virus acquires the ability to efficiently transmit from human-to-human, extensive spread of this virus may be inevitable, as quarantine measures will lag behind its spread,” the researchers wrote in Science.

“Assuming that poultry is the source of the H7N9 virus, continued prevalence of this virus could lead to it becoming endemic in poultry as has occurred with the Asian highly pathogenic H5N1 and H9N2 virus lineages," they added. Endemic viruses are established and cause constant outbreaks.

"If so, the opportunities for the H7N9 virus to evolve to acquire human-to-human transmissibility, or to be introduced to pigs, would greatly increase. To prevent this happening, it may be advisable to reconsider the management of live poultry markets, especially in the urban areas.”

New H7N9 infections appear to have trailed off in China. World Health Organization officials say it might be because officials are closing poultry markets and cleaning them. Or it could be because it’s spring and influenza tends to die down in the spring.

Marc-Alain Widdowson of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the virus doesn’t make poultry sick, so it could spread quietly and easily.

“One thing that we are particularly worried about is there is a tremendous amount of poultry that goes from China into Vietnam,” said Widdowson, who visited China with a CDC team to investigate the outbreak.

“One of the things we are looking at is ramping up surveillance in bird markers and in the population.”

People who buy an infected chicken won’t know, because H7N9 doesn’t make the birds sick they way H5N1 does, Widdowson says. “It worries me substantially,” he said.

“There’s absolutely no doubt it has got some very concerning mutations which suggest it may be adapting to human receptors. These make it closer to what we are all fearing, which is a virus that can spread sustainably humans to human and cause severe disease.”

Related:

Mystery illness in Alabama mostly colds and flu

H7N9 has cost billions

US safe so far from two new viruses
.

[Abby2006]

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The New Bird Flu Will Spread More Easily Among Humans Than Other Bird Flu Strains
Jennifer Welsh | May 23, 2013
i
REUTERS/Stringer

A girl, who was previously infected with the H7N9 bird flu virus, waves as she is being transferred to a public ward from the ICU at Ditan hospital in Beijing, April 15, 2013.
Close contact with someone infected with the new bird flu strain, H7N9, is likely to get you sick, according to a new study published today, May 23, in the journal Science.

The virus isn't that great at passing through the air, though, so in order to contract the virus you would need to stand and talk with the sick person for about 15 minutes.

Currently, 131 people have gotten sick with the new virus, and 36 have died. Hong Kong researchers are guessing that 90 to 120 more cases could exist, though cases have slowed in recent weeks.

"This study was designed to give us clues about the transmission of H7N9 which has affected some humans in China," study researcher David Kelvin, of the University of Toronto, said in a statement.

That study included infecting ferrets with the virus in the lab. They use ferrets as the animal model for human flus because they are mammals like us, they get the same viruses, and they show symptoms of the infection.

They also tested the virus on pigs, because they are often incubators for influenza viruses. It didn't pass between them as well as it did in the ferrets, though.

"The animals used in the study had very mild clinical symptoms as a result of their exposure to the virus and it was clear that very close contact was required for transmission. It also appears that this virus in its present form does not transmit very well through the air."

Scientists are worried that it could mutate and gain that ability, since it's already more evolutionarily adapted to spread among humans than other bird flus they've seen. They've already started seeing changes to the molecules on the outside of the virus that control how it enters cells, according to NPR's Shots blog.

"These findings suggest that the novel virus had been evolving and might, with a few amino acid mutations, adapt to humans," write the authors of the report in the New England Journal of Medicine, published May 22.

These "stepwise" adaptations — where small mutations happen over time — are similar to the way the 1918 and 1957 flu viruses adapted and caused pandemics. These mutations happen as the virus lingers in animal populations. Though there are fewer new human cases, the virus needs to be wiped off the face of the Earth, and quickly.

"There's a bit of a worry in my mind that the urgency to do something about this will drop," study researcher Richard Webby, of St. Jude Children's Hospital and the Word Health Organization, told Shots. "We really need to get on top of this virus and get it out of animal populations. Otherwise it's just not going to go away."

SEE ALSO: The Frightening Story Of A Man Who Bought A Chicken And Then Died Of Bird Flu


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[SalpalSally]

What can we do to prevent us from getting this awful flu, Abby?

[Abby2006]

I would stay away from crowds (even though they have not gone public with the human to human YET) stock up on flu meds (beat the rush) and lots of surgical makk ans gloves I have some clorex wipes whixh I am using for door knobs and stuff get some water and food put back for an emergency in case of worse case.
I'm feeling better and better about spending the vbg bucks on this IQ Air filter

Just use good sense do some planning and not worry about it. thats what I am doing but to do nothing is really stupid!

Abby

I'm still looking for that perfect D3 I really feel thats important

[agate]

get some water and food put back for an emergency in case of worse case.

Very good idea anyway even without flu to worry about.

In earthquake areas like the one I live in, people are advised to do this. That's a lot of water to store if you don't have much space, and so I haven't been good about storing water. I used to keep it on hand but sometimes the plastic containers spontaneously broke, and space was a problem.

I always try to have enough food on hand to get through several days even if it's mainly peanut butter and crackers.

Anyone have suggestions about types of food that are good for storing? Canned goods, pasta, rice?