bird flu China epidemics health
An emerging bird flu that is mysterious and deadly is haunting China. With four fresh H7N9 cases reported in Jiangsu Province and no indication as to how three Chinese adults caught the littlenoted avian flu virus that killed two of them in March, the global medical community is hoping the new flu will calm down until China's health system can determine how it spread.
"I can tell you this thing is real and definitely has the markings of being a killer," says Jason Tetro, coordinator of the Emerging Pathogens Research Centre in Ottawa, which on Monday examined gene sequences from three ugg boots outlet location of China H7N9 cases.
"I don't wish to cause panic," Tetro said in an interview, noting that if the subtype were proven to have emerged from a small farm, he wouldn't be much alarmed. Infecting a big poultry reservoir, on the other hand, might well enable H7N9 to access Asia's wild bird population. The upstart subtype could then become as menacing as H5N1, which since 2005 has officially taken 371 lives in 622 cases, mostly in China, Southeast Asia and Egypt, according to the World Health Organization. The additional Chinese cases have convinced Tetro that "close contact with birds" has been involved. "And I think ugg outlet online the CAFOs [industrial chicken farms] have definitely contributed to the evolution of this virus," he says.
Already, "the internal genes of H7N9 are very close to those of H5N1," says Mike Coston, a widely read American flu blogger, in an interview. (Local health officials announced on Monday that the dead pigs contained no bird flu virus.)
Memories of China's repression of news during its tumultuous 200203 SARS outbreak could fuel panic and unrest at home and suspicion in the West. website that hosts a global volunteer diseasesurveillance network, has been suffering renewed denialofservice attacks that it says are originating in China. The Floridabased site first noted server overloads in April 2011 and was told by its server provider in midDecember 2012 that page views from China were running at an "astonishing" level that closed the month at almost 10 million, said Sharon Sanders, FluTrackers' president and editorinchief, in a series of email exchanges.
After FluTrackers banned Chinese IP addresses that were sending thousands of requests, traffic slowed by more than twothirds, only to rebound in March to almost 6.7 million page views from China. An item Sanders posted on March 7 seems to have constituted the first overseas mention of the Shanghai H7N9 cases. While journalists in China and Hong Kong dig for stories there, FluTrackers has about 50 regular posters and several hundred intermittent volunteers tracking and documenting threats to public health particularly emerging diseases around the world. The site, which Sanders founded with some fellow H5N1 watchers in 2006, publishes daily in English, French, Dutch and Italian, biweekly in Spanish, and occasionally in German, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "No one is paid. Everyone is a volunteer," she wrote. The story tells of unusual pneumonia cases afflicting four men and a woman in a Shanghai hospital all aged 60 to 70 and with no history of interpersonal contact. Speaking anonymously, a doctor is quoted as saying the hospital annually copes with about three cases of "unexplained severe pneumonia," but that all five of the special cases are being labeled as such, though they have not been isolated. A second report indicated that three of them may have died.
So does H7N9 have pandemic potential? "I'd say that the majority of virus comes from H9N2, which many researchers have suspected could be the next pandemic. The makeup of this virus is similar to one that researchers have suspected could be the next pandemic. However it's not quite there yet," says Tetro. "We know that it is not spreading from human to human, but we know that in some cases, direct or close contact with poultry or birds is a route of infection."
On the other hand, he finds the revelation of fresh cases in Jiangsu comforting: "This is actually an official statement. I'm more optimistic that we're going to have a better epidemiological understanding of what is happening in China."
"Many epidemics break out, spread and burn themselves out all the time in China. We just never hear about them," says Coston. "But I think it's already in the birds."
PHOTO: French doctor Alix GrederBelan shows a protective face mask to be used by hospital staff in case of a bird flu pandemic at the Mignot Hospital in Versailles October 10, 2005. REUTERS/Franck Prevel
Hmmmm. Lots and lots of dead pigs thousands of them in Chinese rivers. Hmmmm.
A virus experiment temporarily gone wrong and now being controlled as well as possible until the research to find just the right genetic strain accomplishes its mission and it is unleashed on an unsuspecting world including the 700 million or so Chinese who that are seen as surplus?
The Chinese have built several modern new cities, currently called ghost cities because they are empty, for those made immune to the virus cities that select people will be sent to inhabit while the rest of the world crumples into rotting flesh.
Sounds like bad science fiction but, unfortunately, a probability that will kill most of us, unless you are among the select Chinese chosen to do what Jews and Christians and other faiths never could actually be the chosen people.
