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In daylong drill, U.S. agency prepares for avian flu By Donald G. Mcneil Jr. Published: February 1, 2007Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the disease centers in Atlanta. (Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times) ATLANTA: This is not a real article. This is an exercise. Patient Zero in the 2007 avian flu pandemic died at 9:25 this morning. It caused little fuss in the war room of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when it was announced. In part, the death was expected — there had been hints of what was coming in this first avian flu...

OKAYAMA (Kyodo) The agriculture ministry announced Saturday that bird flu is suspected in the deaths of 22 chickens at a poultry farm in Takahashi, Okayama Prefecture. Workers bury bags of slaughtered chickens from the Sato Broiler farm at a mountain near the farm in Hyuga, Miyazaki Prefecture, on Saturday. KYODO PHOTO The word came just hours after the ministry confirmed that the deadly H5N1 strain was detected in the second outbreak of bird flu this month in Miyazaki Prefecture. The farm in Takahashi raises around 12,000 chickens. Two died Friday and 20 died Saturday, according to the ministry. It is...

Questions raised over safety of revived microbe.Kerri Smith   Natural Museum of Health and Medicine The 1918 influenza virus, which killed some 50 million people worldwide, has proved fatal to macaques infected in a laboratory. The study follows Nature's controversial publication1 of the virus's sequence in 2005, alongside a paper in Science that described the recreation of the virus from a corpse and its potency in mice2. Some scientists question the wisdom of reconstructing such a deadly virus. Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Those who carried out the macaque study say yes, as a better understanding of how it...

HONG KONG -- Although fears of an avian-flu pandemic among humans have subsided, experts warn that the risk hasn't vanished. Less than a year ago, flocks of poultry, swans and wild birds were contracting the disease in Europe and Africa. The spread into the U.S. bird population seemed just a matter of time, and some people rushed to stockpile antiviral drugs. It has been relatively quiet since then, and some of the fears now seem overblown. Still, evidence continues to trickle in that the virus hasn't gone away. Birds continue to die from the disease in countries such as Vietnam...

MIYAZAKI -- The farm ministry ordered nationwide checks of poultry farms Friday after about 750 chickens died earlier this week at a farm in the town of Kiyotake, Miyazaki Prefecture. The Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry and the Miyazaki Prefectural Government said late Thursday night that a highly pathogenic bird flu is suspected as the cause of the deaths. This is the first domestic bird-flu outbreak since June 2005, when the H5N2 strain spread to 40 farms in Ibaraki Prefecture, forcing 5.7 million chickens to be culled, the agriculture ministry said. The ministry said the presence of the bird-flu virus...

(CP) - The new head of the World Health Organization took office Thursday, urging the world to remain vigilant against the threat of H5N1 avian influenza and warning that complacency endangers efforts to prepare for the next influenza pandemic. Dr. Margaret Chan also said WHO will review its polio eradication strategy with scientists, financial donors and affected countries in coming months to try to determine how to finally complete the 18-year-old campaign to drive the polio virus out of humankind worldwide. "We need to have a balanced view," Chan said of the threat that H5N1 might trigger a flu pandemic....

As flu season arrives in North America, the media and their anointed health experts are squawking once again about how we could be blindsided by an avian flu pandemic that some have estimated could kill a billion persons worldwide. New books like The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic join last year's The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. A year ago I wrote in the Weekly Standard that it was time to stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Yet even as conservative commentator Mark Helprin has called for spending a massive 2.5 percent...

Flu fearmongers must be quite depressed these days. Seasonal flu is late. Bird flu -- despite all the headlines -- hasn't gained much traction among humans. And we haven't had pandemic flu in 36 years. (snip) A new study in the Dec. 23-30 British medical journal the Lancet estimates a global pandemic flu could kill 62 million worldwide, mostly in poor nations. (snip) ...while there's no sure-fire cure or preventative measure for the flu, modern medical care and public health practices have dramatically improved since 1918. So any flu epidemic is likely to be far less severe... (snip) There were......

Publication permit No. 14/GP-BC, granted by Press Department, Vietnam Ministry of Culture and Information. Hot News:  Last Updated: Tuesday, January 2, 2007 12:13:39 Vietnam (GMT+07) Bird flu raging in Vietnam's Mekong delta More poultry deaths and infected sites have been reported in Vietnam's Hau Giang, Ca Mau and Bac Lieu provinces in the last two days. Nguyen Hien Trung, head of Hau Giang's animal health department, said a new site had been identified in Vi Thuy district yesterday after a dead bird had tested positive for the deadly H5N1 virus strain. A total of three communes in two districts had...

Avian flu strikes back in Vietnam Saturday 30th of December 2006 02:3 On December 23, the family comprising of 36-year old woman and her three children of age range from three to thirteen, ate one ill chicken of the four and fell ill. They were admitted with the symptoms of bird flu in Nam Can Hospital of Ca Mau province this past week. According to the doctor Ho Van Van at the hospital, they had fever, coughing, decreased white blood cells and damaged lungs. He also added that the hospital is testing the swab samples from the patients for the...

The Chicken Littles Were Wrong The bird flu threat flew the coop. by Michael Fumento 12/25/2006, Volume 012, Issue 15 It's that time of year again--avian flu panic season. As the weather turns colder in the northern hemisphere and the flu starts making its annual rounds, the media and their anointed health experts are chirping and squawking once again about how we could be blindsided by a pandemic that some have estimated could kill a billion persons worldwide. New books like The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic join last year's The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian...

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - Officials scrambled on Wednesday to determine what has caused the deaths of thousands of mallard ducks in south-central Idaho near the Utah border. Although wildlife experts are downplaying any links to bird flu, they have sent samples to government labs to test for the deadly H5N1 flu strain, among other pathogens. Officials with the federal Bureau of Homeland Security have been also called in to help with the probe. Reuters Pictures Editors Choice: Best pictures from the last 24 hours. View Slideshow "We think the possibility of avian flu is very remote but we're not ruling...

An experiment to reconstruct the deadly 1918 flu virus has given a new insight into how the infection took hold. Scientists discovered a severe immune system reaction was triggered when mice were infected with the recreated virus. The US team believe the extreme immune response could have provoked the body to begin killing its own cells, making the flu even deadlier. The study, published in Nature, may aid the hunt for new treatments. The 1918 pandemic took about 50 million lives. The devastating infection, which is thought to have originated in birds, left young adults worst hit. Scientists in the...

See for example this thread first. We were to be shipped some bird flu (Chinese samples--NOW what do we do?) It shows we have "pluck" in the face of bad luck Let's hope that we don't catch it too!

U.S. finds low-risk H5N1 bird flu strain in ducks Fri Sep 1, 2006 5:43pm ET By Charles Abbott WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mallard ducks in Maryland have tested positive for bird flu, apparently a common, less pathogenic strain that poses no risk to humans, the U.S. Agriculture and Interior departments said on Friday. The H5N1 avian influenza virus was found in fecal samples from "resident wild" mallards in Queen Anne's County in Maryland, on the U.S. central Atlantic coast. "Testing has ruled out the possibility of this being the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain that has spread through birds in Asia, Europe...

Hospital vet calls on public not to panic or abandon pets after Suphan Buri case A dog in Suphan Buri contracted bird flu after eating infected ducks, new findings show. Prof Dr Yong Pooworawan, a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Medicine, released the findings at a seminar at the university yesterday. According to Yong, a researcher at Kasetsart University's Kamp-haengsaen campus found that a dog had contracted bird flu. The findings will be published in a foreign journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, soon, Yong said. He declined to elaborate on the findings. Since 2004, Thai researchers have studied the genetic...

For years, the world's vaccine companies have labored in the shadows of the pharmaceutical industry, vilified by parent groups who claim childhood vaccines can cause neurological disorders like autism. Now, almost overnight, these same companies have been thrust to the forefront of a massive campaign to produce a vaccine against pandemic flu. Not since Jonas Salk's work to find a cure for polio in the 1950s have vaccine scientists been so squarely in the vanguard of medicine. The challenges are vast. The unanswered questions surrounding the influenza virus are profoundly difficult, the process for producing vaccines is slow and unwieldy,...

<p>VINALHAVEN, Maine - Idyllic here, with long lazy days by the sea. Sophia, 6, and Lila, 4, splash in the plastic pool in front of the house. Their parents are going for a row. I am the presiding grandmother in this faraway place of peace and beauty, so protected from the gathering storm of world events.</p>

WASHINGTON -- Scientists have discovered the possible presence of bird flu in wild mute swans in Michigan -- but it does not appear to be the worrisome, highly pathogenic strain, the White House announced Monday. "They believe it is a strain of low pathogenicity, similar to strains that have been seen before in North America," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. Testing still is being done to confirm the presence of the virus and its type, officials said. Scientists had feared that the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu would reach North America sometime this year. Just last week, the...

<p>Dow Jones- U.S. government officials are waiting to see whether the discovery of bird flu in a pair of Michigan swans will disrupt exports by the U.S. poultry industry.</p> <p>While genetic screening by U.S. government scientists has determined that the virus found in the wild birds isn't the deadly Asian form of the H5N1 virus, countries such as Russia and Japan have clamped down before on imports of U.S. chickens when other forms of bird flu were detected in the U.S. These countries want to protect their domestic flocks from the highly-contagious respiratory disease.</p>