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It's time for the world's public health officials to pay very close attention to the new bird flu outbreak in China first detected in March. To put it bluntly, there are now some seriously dangerous developments occurring around the new disease outbreak in China that infectious disease specialists and international public health specialists need to track closely. Let's start with three new developments reported on earlier this week by Jason Koebler, U.S. News & World Report's science and technology correspondent: the first reported case of the new bird flu strain outside China; the fact that any potential vaccine tests in...

Bird flu is in the news again. So consider this a public service announcement. :-)

A new bird flu strain that has killed 22 people in China is "one of the most lethal" of its kind and transmits more easily to humans than another strain that has killed hundreds since 2003, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert said on Wednesday. The H7N9 flu has infected 108 people in China since it was first detected in March, according to the Geneva-based WHO. Although it is not clear exactly how people are being infected, experts say they see no evidence so far of the most worrisome scenario - sustained transmission between people. An international team of scientists...

AFP - Taiwan on Wednesday reported the first case of the H7N9 bird flu outside of mainland China. The 53-year-old man, who had been working in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, showed symptoms three days after returning to Taiwan via Shanghai, the Centers for Disease Control said, adding that he had been hospitalised since April 16 and was in a critical condition. A passenger (right) has her temperature checked by a Centers for Disease Control staff member at the entrance of Sungshan Airport in Taipei on April 4, 2013. Taiwan on Wednesday reported the first case of the H7N9...

Officials Fear That H7N9 Bird Flu Is Spreading From Person To Person Jennifer WelshApril 19,2013 As new cases of the bird flu H7N9 continue to pop up all over China, officals are getting more and more worried that the virus can spread between humans, or that it will soon develop the ability to spread between humans. If it develops the ability to transfer easily from one human to another it could easily become a pandemic. While the virus has been circulating in the bird population, and many types of birds have tested positive for it. According to the World Health...

Around the world, scientists are now beginning to examine samples of the virus with a significant question in mind: Could this strain of the disease cause a global pandemic? This international network of scientists keeps constant watch for good reason. In 1918 and 1919, a flu pandemic killed between 20 million and 40 million people, more than the total death toll of World War I, more in a year than the Black Death of 1347 to 1351. More recently, an H1N1 swine flu pandemic was blamed for more than 284,500 human deaths worldwide between April 2009 and August 2010. So...

A new variation of bird flu that the WHO says has caused at least 11 deaths in China has genetic characteristics that make it well-adapted to infect people. In a report published late Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, samples from three patients -- all of whom died -- had mutations that have previously been shown to increase transmissibility, and to help the virus grow in a mammal's respiratory tract. The analysis comes amid a modest but steady stream of human cases since the end of March. On Friday, China reported five new laboratory-confirmed cases of the H7N9...

.... With billions of birds hosting an uncountable number of permutations of influenza strains, it’s inevitable that once in a while, one of these combinations will evolve the ability to replicate in humans. This has happened with an influenza type known as H5N1, the “bird flu” that the world has been watching since it was first isolated from human infections in Hong Kong in 1997. In the past 16 years, H5N1 has caused more than 600 infections in humans and almost 400 deaths—killing approximately 60 percent of those who are known to have been infected with this virus. Luckily, H5N1...

Colonel Dai Xu of the People’s Liberation Army wrote online that the new strain of bird flu hitting China, known as H7N9, is an American “bio-psychological weapon” meant to destabilize China. The rant, posted to Dai’s account on the Twitter-like service Weibo, had already been shared by more than 30,000 fellow users by the time that the South China Morning Post reported it on Monday. Dai now has a quarter million followers on Weibo, which is quite a platform. In general, Chinese Web users appear to have rejected Dai’s argument. In response to the criticism, though, he’s only dug in....

MAKING A MONSTER? The scientific work that can answer key risk questions is known as "gain of function" or GOF research. Its aim is to identify combinations of genetic changes, or mutations, that allow an animal virus to jump to humans. By finding the mutations needed, researchers and ultimately health authorities are better prepared to assess how likely it is that a new virus could become dangerous and if so how soon they should begin developing drugs, vaccines and other scientific defenses. Yet such work is highly controversial. When two teams of scientists announced in late 2011 they had found...

On Thursday (April 4), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it had begun work on a vaccine against H7N9, a new bird-flu virus causing illness in China. So far, health officials have reported that 16 people have become sick with the virus, six of whom died. Currently, the virus does not appear to spread between people. The CDC plans to "build" the virus to use it in its vaccine, rather than wait for a sample to ship from China, the New York Times reported. Using the H7N9 genetic sequence as a blueprint, CDC researchers will synthesize genes...

While everyone is fascinated by the unraveling slow-motion North Korean theatrical trainwreck, which is nothing but a desperate attempt by a broke "leader" to get paid some "nuisance" cash by the west just so he goes away, the real Asian story has been the latest outbreak of birdflu in China which has not only claimed six lives already (and many more coming), but is starting to have major spillover effects on the broader economy, such as mass slaughter of poultry at local markets - a move which will have certain inflationary effects to an economy already on the cusp of...

Bird Flu Tanks The Hong Kong Market Joe WeisenthalApril 5,2013The Hong Kong market fell 2.7% last night.Shanghai was closed, but this picture from Shanghai, via Reuters, says it all. Here's Reuters' picture description: A woman wears a face mask inside a subway station in Shanghai, April 5, 2013. Chinese authorities were slaughtering birds at a poultry market in the financial hub Shanghai as the death toll from a new strain of bird flu mounted to six on Friday, spreading concern overseas and sparking a sell-off on Hong Kong's share market. State news agency Xinhua said the Huhuai market for live...

In a worrisome sign, a bird flu in China appears to have mutated so that it can spread to other animals, raising the potential for a bigger threat to people, scientists said Wednesday. So far the flu has sickened nine people in China and killed three. It's not clear how they became infected, but there's no evidence that the virus is spreading easily among people. But the virus can evidently move through poultry without making them sick, experts said, making it difficult to track the germ in flocks. The findings are preliminary and need further testing.

New bird flu strand could be linked to dead pigs in Shanghai river: expert Staff Reporter2013-04-0115:37 (GMT+8) A worker cleaning up dead pigs out of the river. (Photo/Xinhua) The new strand of the bird flu that has already killed two people and left another critically ill in eastern China could be linked to the thousands of dead pigs found floating in a Shanghai river last month, according to a Hong Kong infectious disease expert. China's Ministry of Health and the National Health and Family Planning Commission announced on Sunday the world's first reported cases of the H7N9 virus, a new...

China's commercial hub Shanghai is stepping up monitoring after a new strain of bird flu killed two people, state media said Monday, as Taiwan announced it would screen travellers from the mainland. More than 16,000 pig carcasses were fished out of the Yangtze River Delta, after they were sickened, there might be a link between the sickened pigs and the bird flu deaths. Virologists also study pigs because they can serve as hosts for bird viruses and human viruses to mix and mutate... Bird flu strain, H5N1, may mutate to spread more easily. It has decimated poultry stocks mostly in...

Enlarge Image Risky science. The U.S. government is proposing special reviews for experiments that might increase the risk posed by the H5N1 avian influenza virus (brown). Credit: Wikimedia Researchers are giving mixed reviews to a draft U.S. government plan to subject some grant requests for studies involving the H5N1 avian influenza virus to special reviews—and perhaps even require the work to be kept secret. Elements of the plan have been "very controversial within [the] U.S. government" committee that developed it, Amy Patterson, associate director for science policy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, told a...

(WASHINGTON) -- A vaccine for the H5N1 avian flu, or bird flu, has been approved by a panel of experts to be stockpiled for emergency use in case of a pandemic. A U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted 14-0 in favor that the vaccine, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in Quebec, was in compliance with licensing standards under accelerated approval regulations, reports MedPage Today. H5N1 currently does not spread as easily among humans as it does among domestic foul, but flu experts have feared it could mutate and potentially lead to a pandemic. In infected humans, the virus is...

Chinese bicycle past a few chickens feeding on on a city farm in Beijing April 22, 2009. (UPI Photo/Stephen Shaver)  BEIJING, April 18 (UPI) -- An outbreak of bird flu was reported in northwestern China, resulting in the slaughter of 95,000 chickens, the Ministry of Agriculture said Wednesday. The epidemic H5N1 bird flu virus was discovered Friday at several farms in the village of Touying in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, Xinhua reported. More than 23,000 chickens showed symptoms of bird flu on Friday, which was then confirmed by the National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory as H5N1 bird flu after...