Bird Flu Pandemic Coming This Year?

The "Bird Flu" is getting scary! Take a look at a few articles I came across today. I can see a major panic happening soon across America and Europe - once people start realizing that it could be here as soon as this fall and winter and there's no vaccine.

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Recombinomics Commentary
August 9, 2005

535 poultry heads in the village Ushsar and 345 poultry heads in Vinogradovka settlement of Akmola oblast have been infected with the bird flu during the recent weeks.

The above report indicates H5N1 is being detected further south in Kazakhstan, in the Akmola region. The village seems to be 80 miles southwest of the capital, marking the most southern and western location reported in Kazahkstan. As the weather turns colder, many birds migrating westward towards Europe will begin to turn south toward the Black and Caspian Seas.

The northern portion of the Caspian Sea is almost due west from Tacheng in Xinjiang and the above locations are almost half way from Tacheng on a line connecting to the Caspian Sea. This distance of less than 1000 miles can be covered in a few days or less by many species of migrating birds, so new reports of H5N1 in Europe and points south should begin to appear in the next few weeks.
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/08...azakhstan.html

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Britain prepares for bird flu death toll of thousands

Jonathon Carr-Brown, Health Correspondent
THE government is to mount an exercise to help emergency services prepare for any potential bird flu pandemic that could kill thousands of people in Britain.

The disease has already jumped species, leading to three human outbreaks, the most serious of which killed 23 out of 34 people infected in Asia last year.

Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, has said that the question "is not if the pandemic comes, but when".

The exercise in September ?- a table-top simulation in a bunker beneath Whitehall ?- will be co-ordinated by Cobra, the cabinet civil emergencies committee, and will involve the army, police, health department and other key government organisations.

The aim is to gauge how the country would cope if a mutation of the virus affecting chickens and ducks in Asia were to sweep the human population in a global pandemic.

According to the health department's contingency plan, the healthcare system could be overwhelmed. Estimates of deaths in the first six weeks of the outbreak range from 20,000 up to 710,000, after which the disease would begin to subside. About 20m people could suffer serious breathing problems.

The young would be hit hardest because older people have some immunity left from the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968. Officials are looking for sites for mass mortuaries. The global death toll could make the pandemic more serious than the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, the worst infection since mass statistics have been gathered.

In Britain the virus killed 228,000 people. Worldwide, about 50m died, more than in the first world war.

If bird flu strikes Asia, international travel would virtually cease and health checks would be carried out at every British sea and airport as the government tried to prevent the infection spreading to the UK.

The health department's strategy calls for infected people, along with anyone with whom they have come into contact, to be quarantined, although under existing laws this could only be voluntary.

Schools would be closed, large public gatherings banned and travel around the country restricted to essential journeys only.

Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, announced last month that the government intended to buy up to 3m doses of a vaccine that protects against H5N1, the flu strain currently killing chickens and ducks in Asia.

In the event of an outbreak these doses will be given to health staff, key workers needed to keep the country running, and then people most at risk from infection.

However, if a bird flu pandemic strikes, the virus is likely to be an as yet unknown mutation of H5N1, meaning existing vaccines would offer only partial protection.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...724318,00.html
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Bird flu vaccine requires huge doses; stretching strategies critical: experts
Helen Branswell
Canadian Press

Monday, August 08, 2005

TORONTO (CP) - Enthusiasm over the news that U.S. researchers have proven a vaccine is effective against the H5N1 avian flu strain was tempered Monday with word that it took massive doses - roughly 12 times the normal amount - to produce a protective response in humans.

With global vaccine production capacity already falling far short of what would be needed in a flu pandemic, experts suggested it is critical to ramp up research into ways to produce the same response with smaller doses of antigen, the substance in a vaccine that activates the immune system.

"I think these results suggest the world is even less prepared than more prepared," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

"And unfortunately many policy makers might take this announcement as being 'We've hit the gold mine' - when in fact I would suggest we are having a hard time even finding water."

In light of the American findings, federal Health officials said studies into a yet-to-be-made Canadian H5N1 will key in on the role antigen-sparing techniques could play in pandemic vaccine production. It's hoped those studies will begin late next summer.

"It's something that we are definitely considering in the design, because of what we know, that it could take lots of doses," said Dr. Theresa Tam, associate director of respiratory diseases at the Public Health Agency of Canada.

"It's of great interest to us to look at these types of antigen-sparing strategies, whether it be adjuvants or whole viruses."

Adjuvants are chemicals that, when mixed with vaccine, kick the body's immune response up several notches, allowing a smaller dose of vaccine to produce a bigger effect. Vaccines made of whole viruses, rather than viral particles, are known to provoke greater immune responses as well but are also known to produce more side-effects on administration.

February's federal budget set aside $34 million for production of trial batches of an H5N1 vaccine. But Canada's flu vaccine manufacturer, ID Biomedical, has still not been given the go-ahead to do the work.

"We're close to entering into a contract. Hopefully it will be done shortly," Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh said Monday.

The company has said it would take 12 months from contract signing to vaccine delivery, because it must build and licence a special high-biosecurity facility within its existing vaccine plant.

http://www.canada.com/health/story....3f-4fd64bf0ad54

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