Archived News Week ending February 7th, 2005
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WashingtonPost: As SE Asian Farms Boom, Stage Set for a Pandemic
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BANGLANE, Thailand -- Prathum Buaklee stepped nimbly along the aging planks running between the cages of his chicken farm, shoveling grain with his meaty hands from a bucket into the feed trays. His feet were bare and caked with dirt. The old plaid shirt hanging on his stocky frame was soiled. And the air was rank with the smell of feathers, droppings and feed.
This soft-spoken farmer is part of an agrarian revolution in Southeast Asia and China that has more than doubled poultry production in barely a decade, bringing pickup trucks, air conditioning and other trappings of prosperity to long-destitute peasants and more protein to the diets of hundreds of millions of ordinary Asians.
But with chickens now packed into farmyards alongside other livestock, international health experts warn that conditions are set for a bird flu pandemic that could kill millions worldwide if the virus developed into a form capable of spreading among humans.
In its current form, the disease kills about three-quarters of the people who catch it from birds. Since the beginning of last year, 45 people in the region have been infected. Twelve Vietnamese and one Cambodian have died this year...
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NYTimes: A Medical Mystery Man Bounces Back From Avian Flu
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Hanoi, Vietnam: IT started as a mild fever and severe chills on Jan. 9 that made Nguyen Thanh Hung's teeth chatter even when his wife, a nurse, covered him with blankets.
But within two days, as the avian influenza virus took hold, his temperature soared to 106.7 degrees and peaked close to that level every day for the next five days as he struggled for life in one of this city's best hospitals. Most of his right lung collapsed, every joint ached and the far wall of his hospital room seemed to approach and recede before his eyes.
"My whole skull hurt," he said, gripping his temples for emphasis. "It felt like pieces of my skull were detaching."
What happened next is one of two medical mysteries in Mr. Hung's case that have caught the attention of flu experts as they try to decipher whether his illness will come to afflict millions of people, and possibly hundreds of millions, around the world. Unlike most people with confirmed cases of bird flu, Mr. Hung survived, for reasons that remain unclear but may have to do with his extraordinary physical fitness. The greater mystery is how he caught the disease, with strong evidence that he acquired it from his older brother, not from poultry, in a worrisome sign that the virus may be developing the ability to pass from person to person.
The World Health Organization has confirmed 14 cases of avian influenza in Vietnam this winter. Thirteen have died. Mr. Hung, 42, is the 14th case. Three weeks after he fell sick, he is already home from the hospital, tending his beloved bonsai trees, strumming his guitar and jogging a remarkable 14 miles a day.
International flu experts fear what could happen if the A(H5N1) avian influenza virus now circulating here were to recombine with human influenza to produce a virus capable of passing easily from person to person, causing a global pandemic...
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The Guardian: Bioterrorism agency faces 19m funding cut
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The government agency set up to lead the fight against bioterrorism and other major threats to public health is facing budget cuts of 18.9m, it emerged today.
The Health Protection Agency confirmed that the Department of Health was considering cutting its spending by 16% as part of the government's arms length bodies review by the department of health which is expected to save 500m.
In a statement, the agency said it was in active discussions with the department about the savings and where they could be made but no final decisions had been taken. The DoH confirmed discussions were ongoing and said: "No decision has been taken yet. Discussions are still on going."
The agency, which covers England and Wales, was set up in April 2003 to protect public health and leads the way in the fight against outbreaks of global diseases in the UK including Sars and Asian bird flu. The agency is also responsible for emergency planning...
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BBC Science: 'Mad cow' disease found in goat
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A French goat has tested positive for mad cow disease - the first animal in the world other than a cow to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
The European Commission says further testing will be done to see if the incidence is an isolated one. The animal, which was slaughtered in 2002, was initially thought to have scrapie, a similar brain-wasting condition sometimes seen in goats.
But British scientists have now confirmed the disease was in fact BSE.
More than 100 people in the UK have died from vCJD (variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease), the human form of BSE, after eating tainted beef.
But the EC stressed on Friday that precautionary measures put in place in recent years to protect the human food chain from contaminated meats meant there was no need for alarm over the latest finding...
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BBC Science: Bird flu 'passed between humans'
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Scientists have said a woman who died of bird flu probably contracted the disease from her daughter.
The researchers from the Thai Ministry of Public Health warn it is likely there will be more cases where the virus is passed from human to human.
Professor John Oxford, a leading UK expert, said the virus had broken down the "final door" which prevented it being spread between people.
The study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. This is a very important step towards the conclusion that we all wanted to avoid In 2004, avian flu infected at least 44 people in eight south Asian countries, killing 32.
Until the late 1990s, it had not been thought that the virus strain - H5N1 - could spread to humans. Once it did, scientists began to fear it could then be spread between people. In a "worst-case scenario", they suggested the virus could combine with a human flu virus if people were simultaneously infected with both. If the viruses then exchanged genes, a new, highly infective virus could be created and be passed from person to person...
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BBC World: Vietnam bird flu deaths increase
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A 10-year-old girl has died of bird flu in Vietnam, the country's 12th confirmed victim in a month. Medical official Ngo Van Hoang said the girl developed a high fever and bad cough a week after helping her family bury some dead chickens.
The spike in deaths has raised worries the disease, which last year hit 10 Asian countries, could re-emerge. It has also renewed scientists' fears that the virus could mutate into a form that is easily spread human-to-human.
Vietnamese officials are investigating whether a 13-year-old girl and her mother from Dong Thap province, who both died of the virus in the last two weeks, infected each other, or caught the disease from infected ducks.
They are also concerned about a 25-year-old Cambodian woman who died in southern Vietnam on Saturday from suspected bird flu. Tests are being done to confirm the cause of her death, but doctors told Reuters news agency that they were worried because her brother recently died of respiratory failure. The strain of virus causing the deaths - H5N1 - is...
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