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October 31, 2005
Ministers 'not grasping seriousness of bird flu'
Political considerations are creeping in on the flu watch - not necessarily helpful or useful.
ePolitix.com - Ministers 'not grasping seriousness of bird flu'The Opposition warned on Monday that lax quarantine procedures could be putting Britain at risk of an avian influenza epidemic.
Shadow agriculture minister Jim Paice welcomed plans for a review of avian quarantine arrangements and procedures for captive birds.
But he said that the Essex centre at the heart of the latest fears had prompted wider questions over whether other birds may have been infected.
"Whilst a review of quarantine rules and procedures is necessary it must not obscure the urgent questions surrounding birds which may have been in the quarantine centre in Essex," he said."The fact that Margaret Beckett has not taken this opportunity to provide further information or answers shows that Defra really does not understand how serious the situation is."
Paice urged the government to "explain if any birds shared the premises whilst the parrots and the birds from Taiwan were present".
"If they did, what efforts are being made to trace them?" he asked.
"Has contact been made with cage bird clubs, societies; show and fair organisers, magazines and journals?
"Have Defra contacted environmental health officers in local authorities?
"Has Defra considered offering amnesty if necessary to encourage anyone to report buying or selling these birds?
"If the stories that other birds went through the quarantine centre at the same time are untrue, then the government should say so."
The environment secretary, meanwhile, detailed the terms of reference for the independent review of avian quarantine arrangements.
Beckett said: "I recognise that the public is concerned about avian flu. As a result of existing quarantine procedures disease was identified and eradicated in a quarantine facility in Essex.
"However, we want to ensure that in this evolving disease situation our quarantine rules and procedures are as secure as possible.
"That is why we want an independent assessment of the quarantine system's effectiveness against avian flu.
"The importation of wild birds is currently suspended and all birds currently in quarantine are being assessed on a case by case basis. This review will be carried out during that suspension."
October 31, 2005 at 01:14 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 30, 2005
Iraq progress
Fasciinating account on the ground during the Iraq elections. I particularly liked the photo of the Iraq Communist Party office - democracy!
Michael Yon : Online Magazine: Purple FingersIt had been quiet from my perch. The guns had been silenced long enough that we could hear the Iraqi voice speak for a second time. The voice was louder, stronger, and prouder than it had been in January.
October 30, 2005 at 11:32 AM in Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
MDs reveal worst-case scenario
And here Toronto predicts the impact of the pandemic.
TheStar.com - MDs reveal worst-case scenarioWhen the next pandemic hits Toronto, more than 900,000 people will fall ill and 5,000 residents will probably die despite today's arsenal of antivirals and antibiotics
RITA DALY STAFF REPORTERA 70-year-old man arrives in an emergency room vomiting.
Across town, a three-month-old girl suffering from a soaring fever is brought to a walk-in clinic. And downtown, a lab technician, peering at a microscopic viral sample from a recent traveller who died of pneumonia, sounds the alarm. The flu pandemic has arrived in Toronto.
That's a likely scenario when a medical disaster strikes this city. No one knows when that will be, but health experts say the world is overdue for a pandemic.
Southeast Asia is expected to be the epicentre when the next pandemic strikes, but cases will start showing up in places around the world, including our city, in a few weeks or even days.
The Spanish flu, which killed up to 40 million people worldwide, hit Toronto in September 1918. Hospitals were soon teeming with the sick, morgues overflowing with the dead.
What can we expect next time around?
"It depends how serious the illness is," says Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Toronto's associate medical officer of health. "There have been pandemics that were extremely serious, like the 1918-1919 pandemic, and others less serious."
The first hospital patients will be put in isolation and their families and close contacts quarantined at home. But quarantine methods won't be used for long. Experts know the virus will spread regardless, and it will move quickly.
As germs multiply in subway trains, offices and classrooms, it is expected that thousands of Torontonians will fall ill with the highly infectious flu strain within days. Officials say they are preparing for the worst — in which case, schools, churches and day cares could close. (An entire high school was shut down during SARS in 2003 when one student became infected.)
But whereas influenza was not a reportable disease in 1918, today's sophisticated tracking will quickly show who is getting sick and where, and will indicate the best ways to contain it.
"If it's affecting school-aged children the most, then it might make sense to close schools," says Yaffe. "If it's affecting mostly seniors, that may involve a different approach."
Theatre performances, sporting contests and other events could also be cancelled to curb social contact. (Four major conventions were cancelled with SARS.)
But buses, subways, grocery stores, banks and other businesses will attempt to keep going. In some cases, hours of operation may be scaled back as high numbers of employees remain at home sick or caring for the sick. In other cases, however, the Internet will allow people to do their jobs from home.
"In a pandemic, there are two major goals — to reduce illness and death, and to reduce and minimize societal disruption," says Yaffe. "We don't want society to grind to a complete halt. People still have to eat, they have to keep going."
With the city set to release its pandemic plan next month, medical and emergency officials have been scrambling to prepare for a worst-case scenario.
It is expected that more than 5,000 people could die in Toronto, despite today's arsenal of antivirals and antibiotics. More than 900,000 could fall ill.
"You can imagine how quickly this will take off. Most people talk about it taking three weeks," says Dr. Michael Gardam, director of infection control at the University Health Network and a member of the Toronto pandemic planning committee.
About 65,000 people could be hospitalized. Needless to say, private rooms will be out of the question. At the pandemic's peak, the University Health Network, the largest hospital system in the country, expects half of all admitted patients to be flu victims.
Doctors, nurses and ambulance attendants will be run off their feet as flu-stricken patients cram emergency departments. As was the case in 1918, non-urgent surgeries will be cancelled. Hospitals are already drawing up plans to redeploy staff to flu detail as colleagues fall ill despite their best defences — antiviral drugs, mandatory masks and gowns.
Hospitals will also employ "battlefront triage" as doctors make painful choices on which patients to save and which to let die. "That is a very hard message in health care to wrap our head around," Gardam says.
As the death toll rises, morgues, crematoriums and funeral homes will overflow. Refrigerated trucks will be turned into temporary morgues.
More people will stay home as a Toronto hotline and website deliver up-to-date information on the pandemic in a multitude of languages. Daily media briefings will be the order of the day.
Heather MacDougall, a medical historian at the University of Waterloo, says experiences like the 1918 pandemic and SARS are often good lessons, but there is always the new and unexpected to consider.
"The real question is: Do you take what worked from the past and replicate it or decide you need to do something different?" she says.
In 1918, for instance, there was a strong volunteer ethic in the community. Ordinary folk lined up to get on-the-spot training to care for the sick and charitable groups played a major role.
But relying so heavily on the community might not work next time. Nowadays, people like to get paid for what they do.
If schools shut, however, a lot of teachers would be available for volunteer duty, MacDougall notes.
Retired doctors and nurses could be asked to pitch in, but Yaffe says most Toronto residents won't rely on medical care, at least until a pandemic vaccine is produced six months later and mass inoculations are delivered.
"A lot of times, people will just basically have to care for themselves and others unless they're severely ill."
That's a message worth repeating, especially in a society that depends so heavily on hospital and medical care. In that sense, says MacDougall, Toronto's experiences with the next pandemic may not be so different from those of 1918.
October 30, 2005 at 09:43 AM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The Great Spanish Flu of 1919
Bit of history here - Toronto, Canada and the last pandemic.
TheStar.com - The Great Spanish Flu of 1919LOUISA TAYLOR AND KIRSTY DUNCAN
STAFF REPORTERSToronto in 1918 was a city of almost half a million people, 90 per cent of them of Canadian or British origin. An intensely imperialistic city, it had sent 70,000 men to war. Those left behind supported the war effort in any way possible — growing victory gardens, buying war bonds, knitting scarves for soldiers.
By the fall of 1918, the war was in its final stages and soldiers were starting to come home. But thousands were still abroad, fighting in the bloody final push to defeat the Germans. The First World War left six to nine million dead or wounded — but a new enemy was on its way, one that would kill four times that many around the world.
SPRING, 1918The first known case of the avian influenza that the world comes to call the Spanish flu is reported on March 4 at Camp Funston, in Kansas. Hundreds of soldiers fall ill.
AUGUST
A second wave begins as American troops move through the port of Brest. The virus spreads across Europe within a few weeks, then back to North America with the troops.
SEPTEMBER 19
Toronto newspapers report an influenza outbreak at one of several military camps in the city. The camps are quarantined, and authorities aren't overly concerned. The front pages of the newspapers are crammed with news of troop movements and battle victories, but say little about the flu, as they do throughout the crisis.
SEPTEMBER 29
It is not clear exactly when the flu leaps beyond the soldier population, as doctors are not legally required to report the flu cases to authorities, but reports claim the first civilian victim is a schoolgirl who dies on this day at Toronto General Hospital.
OCTOBER 1
Influenza peaks in Boston, and local doctors have begun reporting what they think are cases of Spanish influenza. Dr. Charles Hastings, Toronto's medical officer of health, says no cases have been confirmed beyond the outbreak at the military camp. "Just tell the people to keep as fit as possible, to avoid anything which might give them colds, and not to worry any more about it," Hastings tells the press.
Dr. Hastings led a high-profile campaign to improve the city's hygiene and public health from 1910 to 1914; by 1915 Toronto was considered one of North America's cleanest cities. He expanded the public health department, creating an army of public health nurses responsible for specific neighbourhoods, who act as the "guides and friends" to women and children. These nurses would prove indispensable in the epidemic.
OCTOBER 2
"It is here in Toronto without a doubt," says Dr. Hastings, commenting on the death of 32-year-old James Hamilton, one of the first confirmed victims. A mother and her four children are also reported to be ill.
OCTOBER 3
The military reports 500 cases of flu at the Base Hospital on Gerrard St. The hospital's commanding officer says "there have been no serious cases reported so far," but some new recruits have their deployment overseas delayed as a result, prompting The Toronto Daily Star to wonder if "the way to stay out of a draft is to stay in one."
OCTOBER 4
The provincial medical officer of health, Col. J.W.S. McCullough, reports outbreaks of the flu in several parts of the province. The worst hit is Renfrew, with 500 cases. The Ottawa Valley town asks McCullough for "four or five doctors and about a dozen nurses."
OCTOBER 5
The Star begins running a roundup of flu stories from around North America: "Pool rooms, billiard halls and soda fountains" are closed in Boston; schools and meeting halls are shut down in Ottawa; an undertaker in Sherbrooke, Que., reports having to do 15 funerals. Dr. Hastings starts a tour of cities hard hit by the flu, including Washington, New York and Boston.
OCTOBER 7
Local doctors begin reporting influenza cases more regularly; 17 new cases are reported today, along with nine deaths, including that of 17-year-old Florence Coltman, ill for two days.
Police officers fall sick and replacement teachers are in high demand. City leaders begin debating quarantine and closing schools and "places of amusement." Unhappy with Dr. Hastings' departure for the U.S., Mayor Thomas L. Church suggests Hastings would do more to stop the flu if he got warmer tents for the hundreds of soldiers staying in camps. A brief item about the flu makes the front page: "Flu sweeps Hun Armies."
OCTOBER 8
The department of health scrambles to co-ordinate medical institutions. Hospital beds are filling up with influenza cases — 80 at the Toronto General, 27 at the Western. School authorities estimate that nearly 260 teachers and 10,000 students are absent this day but have no way of knowing how many are sick. The mayor calls for quarantine of flu patients, but Hastings refuses, saying it would be ineffective given the number of cases through the city. The papers print extensive briefs on influenza, describing its spread through coughing and sneezing, and advising sick people to stay home.
Local military officials estimate 1,042 cases in the Base Hospital and various camps in the Toronto area. Among them is future Governor General Roland Michener, then an 18-year-old soldier in basic training.
Before briefly falling ill, Michener spends days working as an orderly, "stretcher-bearing the sick and carrying out the dead ... the toll one day in October was as many as twelve."
City council discusses the need to spend money to fight the flu, while Dr. Hastings organizes temporary hospitals and reassigns sanitary inspectors to help care for the sick in their homes. He also battles for more coal to be distributed, to keep the sick warm in the cold, wet weather.
Among the deaths reported on this day are Eva Williamson, 24; Margaret Kemp, 23, and George Clements, 41. Local medical staff dismiss a suggestion "emanating from Ottawa" that the prohibition laws be relaxed. "The use of whiskey does not seem to have been of much avail" in parts of the U.S. without prohibition. In South Africa, public services are severely disrupted, and mining industries are at a standstill. "A terrible toll has been taken among the native workers, and the dead are being buried in batches hourly." The Star calls for schools to be closed. "While there is no occasion for panic, there is clearly necessity for precaution."
OCTOBER 9
The flu reaches epidemic proportions. Public health nurses are busy tending to the sick in their homes, working "to the point of exhaustion." Most of the deaths result from complications, particularly pneumonia. Undertakers report difficulty keeping up with demand.
OCTOBER 10
"The experience of Europe and America shows that 40 per cent of the inhabitants have been affected by the epidemic," says Dr. Hastings, "and there is no reason for Toronto's citizens to believe that this city will be the one exception." The department of health decides to keep branch offices open day and night until the epidemic passes. The Star calls on the mayor to apologize for his public attacks on Dr. Hastings. "A weakling would have stayed home, safe in his own assurance that nobody could tell him anything. Dr. Hastings also did the right thing in using the press to enlighten the public."
OCTOBER 11
New civilian cases reported today hover around 300 in the hospitals, another 170 at homes. Among the more than 40 deaths in the previous 24 hours are Jung Lom, 38, Elsie Brennan, 11, and William J. Foster, 54. "The dove of peace hovered over the local board of health," The Star reports, as the mayor apologizes to Dr. Hastings. "There are people in the city who are almost hysterical for fear they will contract the disease," says Dr. Hastings. "For goodness sake, let everyone keep cool." His own daughter is recovering after falling ill the previous day. A baker puts an ad in The Star notifying customers half his delivery staff is down with the flu.
OCTOBER 12
While warning that Toronto had not yet reached the crest of the epidemic, Dr. Hastings pointed out that the mortality rate in Toronto is lower than that of other stricken cities. He warns the public to "beware of the fakirs" offering false remedies. The former Mossop Hotel on Yonge St. will open as an emergency hospital in a few days, with a capacity of 200. Forty-six of the 211 nurses at the General Hospital are ill.
OCTOBER 13
Fred Jenkins, a 27-year-old driver for New Method Laundry, comes home feeling ill. The next day he is admitted to the General Hospital with pneumonia. That night his wife Edith begins to feel ill; two days later, word comes that Fred has died in hospital. By then, Edith is seriously ill herself and her aunt doesn't pass on the news. Edith dies the next day, leaving their two-year-old daughter Dorothy.
OCTOBER 16
The Star reports the tale of Mrs. Ellen Neilson, who survived a severe attack of the flu only to have her husband fall ill. "Neighbours first learned of trouble when the delirious husband climbed from an upper bedroom window and asked for news of his wife and children."
The neighbours called police, who entered the kitchen and found the body of Mrs. Neilson, who had drowned herself after suffocating one of her two young sons and drowning another.
Neighbours say she was "crazed by worry over her husband's illness and the strain of nursing him."
OCTOBER 17
The Star reports that while the epidemic is waning in American cities, it is picking up steam in Toronto. About 50,000 people have been ill with the flu in the past month, marked by a big increase in the previous 24 hours. Nurses returning from Boston say Toronto is better off, and things are much worse south of the border, where, according to a Miss McMaster, the lowest death rate for a single day while she was there was 124.
Hundreds of women respond to the city's call for volunteer Sisters of Service. They receive three hours of training and a blue and white satin SOS badge, before heading out into the neighbourhoods to backstop the overtaxed public health nurses. The library stops circulating books but stays open. Salvation Army cadets help the sick in their homes, while other church groups set up soup kitchens. The University of Toronto closes and urges students to volunteer to help the sick.
OCTOBER 18
About 50 people a day are dying of influenza in Toronto now. The Neighbourhood Workers Association calls for donations of food and labour. Dozens of depots are set up around the city, and Scouts and Guides help with distribution to the sick. Cemeteries are ordered to stay open for Sunday burials. Hastings says only medical personnel need to wear masks.
OCTOBER 19
With schools already closed, the city orders theatres and movie halls and sporting events shut down or halted. The papers report a trend in women wearing the Spanish veil, a chiffon veil to ward off germs. In New York, laws against coughing in public lead to the arrest of more than 500 people this month.
OCTOBER 20
Montreal is devastated by the flu; on this, its worst day, 201 people die.
OCTOBER 21
The flu is particularly fatal among 20 to 40 year olds. Many of the dead, like Wesley Lamb, were soldiers who survived the war but not the plague: "After 10 days' illness from influenza and pneumonia, Wesley Lamb died Monday, October 21. He had just recently returned from France. He enlisted before his sixteenth birthday, was wounded, gassed, and shell-shocked, and returned four days before his eighteenth birthday." In Riverdale, pneumonia robs the Hampton family of mother and father, leaving three small children in the care of a kind neighbour "who was for a time the only friend and nurse the stricken family had."
OCTOBER 22
Prohibition is little obstacle to those eager to try the "alcohol cure." Papers report line-ups down the block at pharmacies, where people are filling prescriptions for alcohol. "There's a little list, and on it are names of doctors specializing in `alcohol' prescriptions," The Star reports. "The queues that draw attention to the official liquor dispensaries at 110 Church Street and 1271 Dundas Street bloomed vigorously as ever this afternoon. The waiting line at the Church Street address hovered around the 70 mark, and the Dundas delegation wasn't much smaller." The Star reports that "goose-grease poultices, bran poultices, lard and turpentine poultices and compresses of fir-tree spills, mutton tallow and mustard were among the concoctions applied to the chests of the sick; drinks of warm milk, ginger, sugar, pepper and soda were given to soothe the ill; and cough elixirs were administered to strengthen, heal, and make the flu-stricken well; one wholesale drug company that normally sold 6,000 bottles of cough medicine per week now faced a demand of 3,000 bottles per day." With everyone being urged to stay at home, the demand for phone service soars. Bell Telephone Co. places ads asking people to be patient — their technicians are sick.
OCTOBER 23
In the public health department, 54 of the 319 staff members are sick with the flu, including 22 nurses.
The Jewish community's services for the sick get some coverage in the paper. "Volunteer workers, both men and women, receive information concerning needy cases, and a member of the investigating committee, supplied with an automobile, makes a personal call at once ... If a doctor is not already in attendance, one is called and the fee paid by the committee provided the patient cannot afford to pay the fee himself. If there is no one in the house to look after the patient, one of a number of Jewish sisters of service is called in. The committee, in needy cases, is also supplying coal, groceries, underwear, pillow-cases, pillow-sheets, towels."
OCTOBER 24
Dr. Hastings asks for money to help families rebuild their lives. The Board of Trade soon launches a campaign to raise money to meet the emergency.
OCTOBER 25
"Rev. P. Bryce and Rev. E.C. Hunter of the Earlscourt Central Methodist Church are officiating today at no less than four funerals, all the victims of pneumonia." The dead include Mrs. Minnie Clarke, James Notley, 39, and Isabel Phillip, 22.
OCTOBER 26
Cemeteries report a gravedigger shortage, and families must dig the graves themselves. Churches in Quebec are closed, but in Toronto they are asked to reduce to one service, something that doesn't sit well with Rev. A.J. Fidler of St. Clement's Church in North Toronto. "If the Rev. A.J. Fidler cannot get near to God in any place but a church, he had better get converted," says Dr. Hastings. "He needs a truer conception of God's relationship to man and of man's humanity to man."
OCTOBER 28
The list of local dead includes many athletes. "Harry McGavin, the Broadview YMCA sprinter, was only 27 years of age. He leaves a wife and one child. Mrs. McGavin is dangerously ill from the flu and will not be able to see her husband before the remains are buried." Connaught Labs of Toronto scrambles to introduce a flu vaccine, which ultimately proves ineffective. Thousands of railway workers across Canada are sick, exacerbating the coal shortage.
OCTOBER 29
"Figures available today from the various city hospitals show conclusively that the epidemic is on the wane. Admissions in the past 24 hours have fallen off considerably and the death rate has been reduced from an average of 22 to 9," The Star reports. "We have it on the run, and victory is in sight," says Dr. Hastings, but "we must expect isolated cases, or perhaps outbreaks in certain small areas, for some time to come." Hastings urges parents to cancel Halloween parties. But tragic stories continue to flow in. "Last week Mrs. Elizabeth Duggan Howes died from pneumonia after nursing her mother, Mrs. Mary Duggan, who died one week previously ... on Sunday Mrs. Duggan's second daughter, Miss Helen, succumbed."
OCTOBER 30
"Though the total number of patients in the eight hospitals is 904, including 129 nurses, the deaths during the 24 hours ending at noon today were only 15," The Star reports. There were 1,100 more burials in October than in September.
OCTOBER 31
"The duration of the epidemic in Toronto was at least one week less than that of any other city of the same size on the continent," says Dr. Hastings, "and the mortality decidedly lower," which he attributes to Toronto's well-organized public health system.
NOVEMBER 5
School re-openings are postponed a week due to the fuel shortage. Sports events and public meetings resume. Dental college reopens.
NOVEMBER 10
Arlington temporary hospital closes.
NOVEMBER 11
Armistice Day. People pour into the streets to celebrate, prompting fears of a second wave of the flu, which doesn't materialize.
NOVEMBER 18
Dr. Hastings reports to the Board of Health, likening the flu epidemic to a "cyclone." The final tally: 1,750 deaths — now considered an underestimate, given the poor reporting practices. A nurse says in a memoir that the flu epidemic was an "unforgettable experience."
DECEMBER
Dr. Hastings makes a speech calling for a "single command" in the fight against disease — clearly a call for federal co-ordination of health matters. As a direct result of the flu epidemic, a federal department is created the following spring.
Research: Kirsty Duncan, Louisa Taylor, Toronto Star Library staff: Peggy MacKenzie, Marian Traynor, Rick Sznajder and Astrid Lange.
Sources: The Toronto Daily Star; Silent Enemy: Canada and the Deadly Flu of 1918 (Pettigrew, 1982); Toronto's Health Department in Action: Influenza in 1918 and SARS in 2003 (MacDougall); The Dead Zone (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, Sept. 29, 1997).
October 30, 2005 at 09:41 AM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 29, 2005
Trouble in "paradise"
Mr Ahmadinejad continues to talk irrationally, and there is suggestion that even the religious clerics, the real power in Iran, are unhappy with him.
The Scotsman - Top Stories - Now even the Palestinians condemn Iran leader's rant against Israel
Ultimate power in Iran rests with Mohammed Khamenei, the unelected supreme leader and heir to Ayatollah Khomeni. Mr Khamenei already has placed curbs on his president's power after Mr Ahmadinejad - a former major of Tehran with no previous diplomatic experience - was seen to have mishandled the nuclear issue and strengthened US calls for UN action.
October 29, 2005 at 09:59 PM in Moslem | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 25, 2005
Village at heart of bird flu scare was where foot-and-mouth began
Perhaps co-incidental link between the dead parrot, and the last outbreak of foot and mouth.
Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times OnlineBy David Rose and Valerie Elliott
The quarantine centre where parrots died is opposite abattoirPicture gallery
A VILLAGE sparked its second national public health scare in five years yesterday as the first case of the deadly avian flu virus found in Britain was traced to a private bird importer.
Little Warley, Essex, is home to Pegasus Birds, a tropical bird specialist which is thought to be linked to the quarantine centre where a parrot carrying the lethal H5N1 strain of the disease died on October 16.
The shop is opposite the abattoir that reported the first case of foot-and-mouth disease in the 2001 outbreak.Brett Hammond, the owner of Pegasus Birds, was convicted of VAT fraud and jailed for 18 months at Knightsbridge Crown Court in February 1997. The sentence was reduced to 12 months on appeal. He also featured in a BBC Radio 4 investigation about the importation of wild cockatoos from Indonesia that were sold in Britain as captive reared birds, which command higher prices.
Last night government vets confirmed they are investigating the possibility that H5N1 was present at the facility much earlier than thought.
On Sunday it announced its “working hypothesis” was that the bird had been infected by a batch of birds from Taiwan.
But yesterday authorities in Taiwan said there had been no reports of cases of H5N1 on the island and the British Government’s theory had no “solid evidence” to back it up.
An alternative possibility is that birds in an earlier batch delivered to the facility could have had a “subclinical” infection and began secreting virus only after the stresses of quarantine. Contaminated droppings could have released the airborne virus that may have infected subsequent batches of birds from Taiwan and South America.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is now looking at what went into the quarantine before the parrot’s arrival.
Although Defra refused to disclose the location of the avian flu case, the commuter belt village came under suspicion. Little Warley, just east of the M25, is home to numerous pet centres, kennels, catteries and aquariums, as well as farms and expensive gated homes.
Mr Hammond could not be contacted at his home in Upminster, near the centre, yesterday. Katrin Geller, his partner, said he was not in the house when The Times called.
She subsequently denied that Mr Hammond lived in the house. When asked if she could confirm that the parrot had died at Pegasus Birds, however, she said: “Defra have told us not to say anything to you about that.”
Staff at the Pegasus Centre, which is the biggest importer of birds and reptiles in Essex, denied that the parrot had died there after a transfer from Heathrow. The bird originated from Surinam, South America, and entered the country in a consignment of 148 birds on September 16.
Eleven days later a batch of 218 birds from Taiwan were also moved into the quarantine premises and two parrots were found dead last Thursday. Only one was found to contain the suspect H5 strain, though further tests on tissue samples from both birds confirmed the H5N1 strain.
Debby Reynolds, the Government’s chief veterinary adviser, confirmed that the birds had been kept in Essex and had shared air space.
The Times was told that there were no quarantine facilities at the Pegasus Centre, and was then repeatedly asked by a man who would not give his name to leave the premises.
Mr Hammond, who was later contacted by telephone, initially denied that he owned the company. “You must have the wrong Brett Hammond, a wrong number,” he said. When it was put to him that he was listed as the director of Pegasus Birds at Companies House, he put the phone down.
Defra declined to confirm or deny that Pegasus Birds was at the centre of the bird flu scare. A spokesman said: “As a matter of course we always discourage people from approaching any disease sites and will therefore not be naming the facility. It is not our practice to release personal information of the owner. Investigations continue into the circumstances surrounding the death of these birds.”
It was a routine inspection at the formerly named Cheale Meats abattoir in Little Warley on February 19, 2001, that triggered the world’s worst foot-and-mouth outbreak.
www.timesonline.co.uk/europe
Latest developments on bird flu
October 25, 2005 at 08:58 AM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 23, 2005
What does it mean to be European?
An insightful piece on the differences between being American, and European. In particular the Europeans don't wish to give up their birthright to immigrants, verus in America its encouraged.
BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | The identity crisis facing EuropeWhen we lived in Washington we used to buy our precious stocks of Marmite, rather unexpectedly, from the El Salvadorian shop on 17th Street.
"I'm not an El Salvadorian any more," the owner used to say, "I'm an El Salvadorian American."
Quite a mouthful, but there was no denying what it meant to him. Not a minority, but part of the mainstream.
In Europe we have British Asians, German Turks.
But note the difference.
In the US the emphasis is the other way around, they are not American Poles but Polish Americans.
Americans first and foremost, implying a sense of belonging and of acceptance which Europe sometimes struggles to emulate. I think it is because we live in a continent still trying to define its identity.
October 23, 2005 at 05:25 PM in UK Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Leaked Case Renews Questions on War's Rationale (highlights)
Names of the orchestrators of the rationale for the Iraq war. The Senate investigations though are politicaly motivated, and since no WMD were found, by definition the outcome will be dependant on political judgement rather than effective evaluation of the facts and situation of the time, shortly post 9/11.
Leak Case Renews Questions on War's Rationale - New York TimesMr. Libby's involvement in assembling the case that Iraq's weapons constituted an urgent threat began well before the invasion. Along with Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, then senior Pentagon officials, Mr. Libby was painting a dark picture of Iraq's capabilities and alleged that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda.
And the fight with the CIA over the rationale for war.
In late 2002 and early 2003, according to former government officials and several published accounts, Mr. Libby was the main author of a lengthy document making the administration's case for war to the United Nations Security Council. But in meetings at the Central Intelligence Agency in early February, Secretary Powell and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, rejected virtually all of Mr. Libby's draft as exaggerated.
The joke -- recounted by the aide, who no longer works in the administration -- sounded absurd at the time, given Libby's renown for canniness and prudence. He adheres to a favorite Cheney maxim that the vice president credits to the late Sam Rayburn, a longtime House speaker: "You never get in trouble for something you don't say."
Yet Libby could find himself in big trouble for saying too much. And this jibes with a lesser-known side of Libby, the audacious novelist and daredevil skier who has long been gripped with concern about exotic terrorist scenarios; who fervently argues his own viewpoints, particularly on matters of foreign policy; and who can become, friends and associates say, overly passionate in the face of opposing ones.
Libby, 55, has displayed this aspect of himself in a series of heady stations throughout his career -- at the State Department, the Pentagon and, for the past five years, in the Bush administration. Reporters have seen this side of Libby, too, in his full animated conviction. But almost always on deep background, out of public view.
Now Libby's cover of anonymity is blown -- and for possibly blowing the cover of a CIA operative. People close to Libby point out the incongruity of the whole thing.
"He's always been excruciatingly careful, which is ironic in his situation," says World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz, a former deputy secretary of defense and a longtime mentor of Libby's.
The "situation," of course, refers to the Plame case. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is said to be focused on whether Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove had a part in divulging Plame's identity in an attempt to discredit her husband, retired diplomat Joseph Wilson.
Wilson, who undertook a mission to Africa in 2002, was widely critical of the Bush administration's claims that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. Fitzgerald is investigating whether officials in the administration sought to undermine Wilson by outing his wife.
Libby has testified in at least two grand jury appearances about his conversations with reporters on the Plame matter -- including two from The Washington Post. He also spoke at least three times with the New York Times's Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail before accepting permission from Libby to tell the grand jury about their conversations. The Times published a nearly 6,000-word account last Sunday about Miller's dealings with Libby. The story revealed that the misspelled moniker "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook Miller used during an interview with Libby. (In a separate first-person article, Miller wrote she told the grand jury that she believed the name came from another source, whom she could not recall.)
The grand jury's term expires next Friday, and Fitzgerald is expected to reveal his intentions in a matter of days.
Friends describe Libby as engaging and unfailingly chivalrous; it is his habit to stand when a female dining partner excuses herself. He is diligent about returning reporters' calls, albeit on deep background and, in most cases, "telling you absolutely nothing," says William Kristol, a conservative columnist and longtime acquaintance of Libby's who served as chief of staff to Vice President Quayle. Kristol says Libby "is someone who would seem to spend a lot of effort at not getting caught up in something like this."
Libby, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is taut and compact, with small eyes and a short mop of graying brown hair. As has been the case through much of his career, he works long hours and complains that he doesn't see enough of his wife and two children. He's been hobbled after breaking a bone in his foot while running up stairs. He has looked gaunt and tired of late, according to those who have seen him, and he told at least two friends and associates that he was thinking of leaving the administration after the 2004 election to spend more time writing and skiing.
But those plans would seem to be on hold, at least until the Plame case is settled.
Among vice-presidential aides throughout history, Libby is distinctive for the power and authority he wields, a product largely of Cheney's outsize role in the Bush administration. Libby holds three titles: chief of staff and national security adviser to Cheney, and assistant to Bush. Like few other advisers, he attends the highest level of White House meetings. He attends the weekly gathering of Bush's top economic advisers and -- according to Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack," about the Bush administration's run-up to the Iraq war -- was one of two non-principals who attended National Security Council meetings with the president after Sept. 11, 2001 (the other was Condoleezza Rice's then-deputy, Stephen Hadley).
In these meetings, Libby rarely speaks. He fixes his eyes on whomever is talking and often presses his fingers over his lips. "He sits there in the background with this little half-smile," says former senator Alan Simpson, the Wyoming Republican and one of Cheney's closest friends. Cheney vacations in Wyoming, and Libby usually goes along. "He's a dissector," Simpson says of Libby. "He is the ultimate, clinical professional."
Then there is the Libby whom Cheney adviser Mary Matalin calls "the other Scooter" and "the man who you pray you get seated next to at a dinner party."
It took him 20 years to complete "The Apprentice," a soaring, erotically charged novel set in rural Japan during a blizzard in 1903. "I went out to Colorado, drank tequila and wrote," Libby told CNN's Larry King in 2002 in a rare television interview, the bulk of which he spent discussing the 1996 novel, which had just been issued in paperback.
Wolfowitz, Libby's political science professor at Yale in the 1970s, recalls Libby telling him that "The Apprentice" was originally set in Vermont, but he eventually decided it would work better in Japan. He threw 300 pages away and started again.
The author's "storytelling skill neatly mixes conspiratorial murmurs with a boy's emotional turmoil," the New York Times Book Review said of the novel.
A more recent piece of Libby's writing also drew attention, if not acclaim.
"You went to jail in the summer," Libby wrote in a letter to Miller, waxing pastoral after he freed her to speak to the grand jury about their conversations. "It is fall now. . . . Out west, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life."
The spy-novel dexterity of Libby's mind and the odd flamboyance of his prose raised questions that he might have been trying to say something more.
"How do I interpret that?" Fitzgerald asked Miller during her grand jury testimony, according to her account in the Times.
Friends say Libby cultivates an enigmatic bearing, one epitomized at the end of Miller's first-person account. She tells of her last face-to-face encounter with Libby, in August 2003 in Jackson Hole, Wyo., after she had attended a conference in Aspen, Colo. "At a rodeo one afternoon, a man in jeans, a cowboy hat and sunglasses approached me," Miller wrote. "He asked me how the Aspen conference had gone. I had no idea who he was.
" 'Judy,' he said. 'It's Scooter Libby.' "
Several aspects of Libby are subject to varied interpretations, or at the very least, casual mystery. Libby is loath to disclose -- even to close friends -- what the "I" stands for in his name. Matalin credits USA Today with "breaking" the story that Libby's first name is "Irv" (though other publications had reported "Irving" and public databases list him as "Irve").
Cheney's office would not confirm or deny what the "I" stands for.
Likewise, there are differing accounts of where "Scooter" comes from. He told the New York Times in 2002 that his father, an investment banker now deceased, coined it upon seeing him crawl across his crib. The same year, in an interview with King, Libby spoke of a childhood comparison to New York Yankees Hall of Fame shortstop Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto ("I had the range but not the arm," Libby said).
Libby was born in New Haven, Conn., raised in Florida and -- like Bush -- attended prep school at Phillips Andover and college at Yale. He lives in McLean with his children and wife, Harriet Grant, a former lawyer on the Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Until he broke his foot, Libby played in a weekly touch football game in Chevy Chase.
After graduating from Columbia Law School, Libby was practicing law in Philadelphia in 1981 when Wolfowitz, then an assistant secretary of state, recruited him as a speech writer. At the time, Libby was reading William Stevenson's "A Man Called Intrepid," which described the British and American spy operation before and during World War II. "The characters' lives seemed considerably more exciting and meaningful than Libby's work in Philadelphia," wrote James Mann in the 2004 book "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet."
Libby also worked for Wolfowitz during Wolfowitz's stint as policy undersecretary of defense during the first Bush administration. He had long been interested in unconventional warfare, particularly in the Middle East, and his portfolio included the biological and chemical capabilities of Saddam Hussein. Cheney, then secretary of defense, shared Libby's interest in weapons of mass destruction and was, according to a Pentagon official of that era, impressed by his diligence and analytical skill.
It was during the Gulf War that Miller also took notice of Libby. In a book that she co-wrote, "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War," Libby is described as "a trim, boyish lawyer" who was frustrated that intelligence reports about Iraq's biological weapons program contained words like "probably" and "possibly."
"Libby," the book said, "told colleagues that intelligence analysts had an unfortunate habit: If they did not see a report on something, they assumed it did not exist."
The Gulf War era integrated several themes that have pervaded Libby's career: his interest in Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, his frustration with the U.S. intelligence apparatus and his willingness to make leaps and support preemptive action. He shared the disappointment of his Pentagon bosses -- Wolfowitz and Cheney -- that the U.S. effort in the Gulf War had not toppled Hussein.
During the Clinton years, Libby practiced law at the Washington office of Dechert, Price and Rhoads, where he represented Marc Rich, the fugitive billionaire whom Clinton pardoned hours before he left office. Libby was called to testify before a congressional committee investigating Clinton's pardons during the first months of the Bush administration.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks confirmed Libby's long-held view that Islamic terrorism was the foremost threat of the post-Cold War era. He had studied the topic for years and had spoken often of its horrific perils to the United States. "I was hounded by Scooter about what we were doing about things like anthrax," Wolfowitz says, referring to 2002. "He was very concerned about what he saw as a general lack of preparedness."
Libby greatly admires the work of Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian who posits that warfare is an inevitable part of civilization, evil is a basic condition of humanity, and tyrants must be confronted by the harshest possible means. (In late 2002, a few months before the Iraq invasion, Cheney -- also a Hanson devotee -- invited the historian to the vice president's mansion for a small dinner gathering that included Libby.)
Hanson's stark perspective comports with Libby's view on Iraq. He was among the administration's fiercest proponents of the invasion, and his office prepared a 48-page document of intelligence on Iraq WMDs for Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in February 2003. (Powell couldn't confirm a lot of the data and wound up not using much of it.)
In his office in the Old Executive Office Building -- once occupied by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt during their respective stints as assistant secretaries of the Navy -- Libby keeps a photograph of Winston Churchill. Like Wolfowitz, Cheney and many of the Bush administration's Iraq hawks, Libby reveres Churchill for his willingness to confront evil boldly and his unwillingness to compromise. In a December 2001 interview with James Mann, Libby read from "The Gathering Storm," Churchill's memoir of the years preceding World War II. "I felt as though I were walking with destiny," Churchill wrote of the moment he became the British prime minister, "and that all my past life had been a preparation for the hour and for this trial."
That passage, Libby told Mann, could also have applied to his boss, Cheney, on Sept. 11.
In this context of urgency, Libby can be impatient. And, associates say, he could become infuriated over discordant views over Iraq, both from within and outside the administration. On Friday the Los Angeles Times -- quoting former aides -- reported that Libby became so enraged about Wilson's public statements that he monitored all of the former ambassador's television appearances and urged the administration to wage an aggressive campaign against him. (Cheney's office declined to comment on the report.)
Friends and associates say Libby remains unbowed about the U.S. action in Iraq, and despite the setbacks of recent months has shown no hint of doubt. In times of travail, Libby recalls the excitement of his job and the grandeur of his mission.
"Cheney and Scooter play chess on several different levels," Matalin says. "That's how their minds work. It's not about what's right in front of him. They look at things in the sweep of history.
"The Wilson thing was almost mosquitoesque."
Researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
October 23, 2005 at 05:16 PM in US Politics | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The Syria dilemma
This from CSM nicely sums up the opposing issues for dealing with Syria.
Bush's tipping point with Syria | csmonitor.comBut then, the alternative to Assad is difficult to imagine: The strongest opposition groups are fundamentalist Islamic, while secular opposition figures abroad are weak and splintered. The fall of Assad could bring a mess in the Arab world. It's not even clear if he's fully in charge, having taken power after his father's passing four years ago.
October 23, 2005 at 05:16 PM in Military strategy | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 19, 2005
Lessons of history
Fascianting post from someone unexpected.
Adam Bosworth's Weblog: Speaking upUnlike many of my peers in the computer industry, I was a history major in college and have loved and read history ever since. I studied, in particular, the progressive era in history, an era when the industrial revolution evolved from the grim satanic mills of England into the modern industrial world. But the understanding I always had was that none of this would or could have been possible without the renaisaance and without the slow but sure rise of secular humanism and the spirit of scientific and intellectual inquiry that started at that time. After the fall of the Roman empire, in many ways the lights went out and, in the 14th century particularly, life in Europe hit a new low stroke the the terrible plague, the start of the mini ice age, and the wars between France and England. In the 15th century we saw the Spanish inquisition and the reconquista, but really, it was the last gasp of intolerant religious fanaticism and the spirit of inquiry and discovery from art to music to science was everywhere. The lights had been turned back on. As a child, growing up in New York City, I took for granted that mankind had learned these lessons. I assumed that mankind understood that freedom to think, to reason, and to experiment were paramount and that any irrational intolerant irrational beliefs that threatened these freedoms or, even worse, abused or injured people in the name of some mystical or fanatic cause were horrific reminders of the past.
October 19, 2005 at 01:40 AM in The Future | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 18, 2005
Avian flu in Europe does not affect the possibility of a human influenza pandemic
Interesting choice of words from European Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou. One would assume that the more birds with flu, then the greater probability of the anticipated mutation to human transfer, for no other reason than sheer volume of birds. Perhaps he knows something we don't, or at least we can hope he does.
Top News Article | Reuters.comLUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - The presence of bird flu in southeastern Europe does not increase the risk of a human influenza pandemic, the European Union's health chief said on Tuesday.
European Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said after briefing EU foreign ministers at an emergency meeting that Brussels did not yet know what strain of bird flu had been detected on the Greek island of Chios.
The virulent H5N1 strain of the virus, which has killed more than 60 people in Asia since 2003, was found last week in Turkey and Romania.
"The fact we have avian flu in Europe does not affect the possibility of a human influenza pandemic," Kyprianou told a news conference.
October 18, 2005 at 08:31 AM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 17, 2005
Bird flu reaches EU as Greece finds virus
Its no longer a question of "when". Avian flu are reached the EU.
Top News Article | Reuters.comATHENS (Reuters) - Greece said on Monday it had detected one turkey with bird flu on the eastern Aegean island of Chios, becoming the first EU country where the virus has spread to.
"The Center for Veterinary Institutes has informed us that one of nine poultry samples has tested positive to bird flu (H5) antibodies," the agriculture ministry said in a statement.
The ministry said the turkey came from a small private poultry farm of about 20 turkeys on the tiny island of Inousses off Chios which belongs to the Chios prefecture.
It said it was running further tests to "to verify the correctness of the analysis".
Government officials said there was no need to cull any of the other birds.
"There has been no order for the culling of birds in the area," a high-level government official told Reuters.
"It was a small farm with about 20 turkeys. But any transport of birds, people, vehicles and eggs has been forbidden."
"The final confirmation will be made by the special laboratory in Thessaloniki (northern Greece) where special tests will take place."
The official said the government's emergency response plan had been activated.
Neighboring Turkey, only a few miles off Chios, has also detected cases of bird flu as well as Romania, both of which have culled thousands of birds in the past days.
(Additional reporting by George Georgiopoulos and Lefteris Papadimas)
October 17, 2005 at 01:48 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 16, 2005
'Super PCs' will earn £40,000
Smart move which will revolutionise policing ... falls into the category of "you only get what you pay for".
Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times OnlineBy Stewart Tendler
Wages to rise as chief constables seek to put officers on a par with commercial sector workers“SUPER PCs” earning £40,000 a year will be created under a police pay plan proposed by the Home Office and chief constables.
...
The creation of the new “advanced constables” will put top constables on a par with many professionals and junior managers. The extra pay would go to officers running the Government’s new safer neighbourhood teams, which include auxiliaries and civilian staff.The teams will eventually cover every part of England and Wales, providing the local backbone of policing.
Specialists, such as detectives working within Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch, could also earn the extra cash. The money might also be used to attract experts from finance, computing or intelligence analysis to join the police.
October 16, 2005 at 10:16 PM in Police | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
'Different times'
Words of calm from the chief UK health official.
Sir Liam said flu pandemics were things which came in "natural cycles" every 10 to 40 years, with the last taking place in 1968/69.
However he said that three decades ago there were no anti-viral drugs to combat the virus in its initial stages, as there are now.
He also said the situation was not comparable to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 which killed millions around the world, as we now lived in "different times" with great advances in hospitals and medical science.
October 16, 2005 at 02:31 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Are We Ready for the Bird Flu?
ABC News: Are We Ready for the Bird Flu?
What We Can Do if the Avian Flu Reaches the United States
Sept. 29, 2005 — ANNOUNCER: Thursday night, Sept. 15, 2005. It's time for "Primetime." Katrina's barely over. Is the worst disaster ever finally behind us? Not on your life. Tonight, "Primetime" puts you in the hot zone. But it's not just what can go wrong. It's what you can do right to save yourself in the next three big disasters experts say are just waiting to happen. A catastrophic earthquake.
FIRE AND RESCUE WORKER, MALE: Prepare yourselves. Shut off the gas and shut off electricity.
ANNOUNCER: An epidemic of avian flu, the whole world over.
MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, CENTER FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESEARCH AND POLICY: I can't imagine anything that would be closer to a living hell.
ANNOUNCER: And a nuclear bomb in an American city.
CHRIS CUOMO, ABC NEWS: I get in my car, if I have one, and I take off.
ANNOUNCER: But what if we told you your first instincts to save yourself are wrong? Tonight, the warnings are here, and so are the answers. Ready or not? The next big one. Here now, Chris Cuomo.
CHRIS CUOMO: Good evening and welcome to "Primetime." Imagine a huge bridge like the one behind me being the only way out of your town and it's crammed with desperate drivers trying to evacuate. Now, we saw something like it during Hurricane Katrina, and the problem may well arise again during the now unthinkable next big disaster. It's a subject the president addressed in his speech tonight.
PRESIDENT BUSH: I consider detailed emergency planning to be a national security priority.
CHRIS CUOMO: So what does that mean to you? What would you do in a hurricane or a manmade catastrophe like a nuclear or biological attack? These are frightening thoughts, of course they are. But tonight is not just about what can go wrong. It's about what you can do right.
We start with a virus poised to create a global epidemic. Are we ready? Here's ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross.
BRIAN ROSS, ABC NEWS: It has the potential to turn parts of major cities into ghost towns.
MICHAEL OSTERHOLM: We would expect between 1.5 and 1.7 million Americans to die.
BRIAN ROSS: Officials in London are already quietly looking for extra morgue space.
DR. IRWIN REDLENER, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: We could have a billion people dying worldwide.
BRIAN ROSS: It could hit as early as this winter, and there's no vaccine and not enough medicine to fight it.
DOCTOR, MALE: There is very much a sense of a race against time.
BRIAN ROSS: Against this, a microscopic view of a never before seen strain of the flu that scientists say could pose a much more real and greater threat than smallpox, AIDS or anthrax. Known to scientists as H5N1.
LAURIE GARRETT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects. That makes it the most lethal flu we know of that has ever been on planet Earth affecting human beings.
BRIAN ROSS: Laurie Garrett is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. The most recent issue of its prestigious Foreign Affairs journal contains a special report on what it calls the coming global epidemic, a pandemic.
LAURIE GARRETT: Each year different flues come, but your immune says, I've seen that guy before, no problem, crank out some antibodies. Might not feel great for a couple of days, but I'll recover. Now what's scaring us is that this constellation of H number 5 and N number 1, to our knowledge has never in history been in our species. So absolutely nobody watching this has any natural immunity to this form of flu.
BRIAN ROSS: This form of the flu started as do almost all flu viruses, in wild birds in Asia.
BILL KARESH, WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY: They die of pneumonia just like people. When you open them up, you do a post-mortem exam, their lungs are just full of fluid and full of blood.
BRIAN ROSS: Bill Karesh, the lead veterinarian for the Wildlife Conservation Society, has been tracking this rare flu strain since it first emerged in the 1990s, and has watched it as it's gained strength going from wild birds to chickens to humans.
BILL KARESH: The last outbreak in July that was reported was this part of China. It started in a market somewhere in the Guangdong Province. It's just packed with cages. you'll have chickens, you'll have ducks, cats, dogs, turtles, snakes. And they're all stacked in cages and they're all spreading their germs to each other.
BRIAN ROSS: Asian governments have killed millions of chickens in a futile attempt to stop the flu's spread. Dr. Irwin Redlener heads Columbia University's Center for Disaster Preparedness.
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: The tipping point, the place where it becomes something of immediate concern is when that virus mutates to something that is able to go from human to human.
BRIAN ROSS: So now, scientists in Asia and around the world, on a literally hour-to-hour basis, are watching for that tipping point to occur.
DR. MALIK PEIRIS, RESEARCH SCIENTIST: This virus is a pretty nasty piece of work.
BRIAN ROSS: Dr. Malik Peiris is the scientist who first identified the so- called SARS virus two years ago, which killed more than 700 people and triggered a worldwide scare. This, he says, is much worse.
DR. MALIK PEIRIS: Unlike the normal human flu where the virus is predominantly in the upper respiratory tract, so you get a runny nose, sore throat, the H5N1 virus seems to go directly deep into the lungs. So it goes down into the lung tissue, causes a severe pneumonia.
BRIAN ROSS: To date, there have been 57 confirmed human deaths and another suspected one just last week in Indonesia. Scientists say the humans who have been infected so far have been infected by birds, but that every infected person represents one step closer to the tipping point.
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: Once that virus is capable of not needing the bird to infect humans, so in other words, you have it, I can get it from being in contact with you, then we have the beginnings of what can turn out to be this worldwide epidemic problem that the experts call pandemics.
BRIAN ROSS: That's what happened in 1918. A shocking reminder of the worst-case scenario. It was known as the Spanish flu.
DOCTOR: It was the most horrible time. By the hundreds they were dying, and no doctor could stop the epidemic.
DOCTOR: We had little caskets for the little babies that stretched for four and five blocks.
BILL KARESH: The Spanish flu was killing people in two or three days once they got sick. It started at the end of World War I. It actually came to America with returning soldiers from Europe and then spread through the United States.
LAURIE GARRETT: In 1918, my now quite elderly uncle was a young boy, and the flu came through. And his family insisted that he could not go outside for any reason until the whole epidemic was over. He spent his afternoons looking out the window and counting the hearses going up and down the neighborhood and trying to guess which of his schoolmates had died and keeping a little scorecard.
BRIAN ROSS: That was before the international air travel routes of today with non-stop flights from flu ground zero to the United States.
BILL KARESH: So it's going to come out of Bangkok or Hanoi or Hong Kong or Shanghai, get into Japan. It'll get to New York. It'll get to San Francisco. It'll get to Vancouver. It'll get to Paris and London, all within a matter of the first week.
LAURIE GARRETT: It's on people's hands. You shake hands. You touch a doorknob that somebody recently touched.
BRIAN ROSS: And that's how this particular strain, never seen before, could spread?
LAURIE GARRETT: Absolutely. There's no reason to believe that if H5N1 manages to make that crucial punch through genetically, it won't spread like every other flu.
BRIAN ROSS: And once it hits a city like New York ...
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: It's extremely possible we'd have to quarantine hospitals, we'd have to quarantine sections of the city.
BRIAN ROSS: Dr. Redlener has been working with New York City officials to get ready for the deadly epidemic.
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: The city would look like a science fiction movie. This would look like an armed camp, basically.
BRIAN ROSS: You would ring a neighborhood in New York City with armed officers to keep people from leaving or going in?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: Yes.
BRIAN ROSS: Actually shut down parts of New York City?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: We might have to do that, correct.
LAURIE GARRETT: I could imagine that you would look at Grand Central Station and not see much of anybody wandering around at all. People would be afraid to take the subways because who wants to be in an enclosed airspace with a whole lot of other strangers never knowing which ones are carrying flu?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: We might be seeing 200 to 350 people every single day dying from the flu in New York City.
BRIAN ROSS: Every single day?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: Every single day. And a quarter to a third of those might be children.
BRIAN ROSS: And for hospitals, there would be scenes like the ones this month in Houston and New Orleans. Except the cots would be full of dying people.
LAURIE GARRETT: There wouldn't be equipment and personnel to staff them adequately that you could really call them a hospital. You might more or less call them warehouses for the ailing.
BRIAN ROSS: And as happened in New Orleans, there would be no place for the dead.
MICHAEL OSTERHOLM: If you look at the expected number of deaths that could occur in cities across the United States, we are wholly unprepared to process those bodies in a dignified and respectful way. We will run out of caskets literally within days.
BRIAN ROSS: University of Minnesota Professor Michael Osterholm is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research.
MICHAEL OSTERHOLM: That's the kind of realities that we have to start planning for now that unfortunately in most communities in this country we just haven't even begun to think about.
BRIAN ROSS: The prospects have been so bleak that in planning sessions held in New York City, some veteran emergency preparedness officials have been overwhelmed.
MICHAEL OSTERHOLM: If we have a repeat of a 1918-like experience, I can't imagine anything to be closer to a living hell than that experience of 12 to 24 months of pandemic influenza.
ANNOUNCER: Up next, some good news. There is a medicine that can help you survive. But can you get it in time? When we come back.
ANNOUNCER: "Primetime." Once again, Brian Ross.
EMCEE, MALE: Mr. George W. Bush, president of the United States of America.
BRIAN ROSS: On the same stage where he has warned the world of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, President Bush this week warned the world must prepare for a new weapon of mass destruction, a global epidemic of killer flu.
PRESIDENT BUSH: If left unchallenged, this virus could become the first pandemic of the 21st century.
BRIAN ROSS: Are we prepared in this country today?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: We're not even close to being prepared in this country. I mean, the short answer to the question are we prepared is absolutely not.
BRIAN ROSS: If that flu were to hit this country this winter, how bad?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: If we had a significant worldwide epidemic of this particular avian flu, the H5N1 virus, I think we would see outcomes that would be virtually impossible to imagine, even to a world that has just witnessed some of the most horrible scenes of a natural disaster that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes.
BRIAN ROSS: For the victims, they at first wouldn't know if it's the kind of routine flu that comes every year or the killer flu called H5N1. If it's the killer flu, the world will stop, too.
MICHAEL LEAVITT, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: We'd do all we could to quarantine. We'd do all we could -- it's not a happy thought. It's something that keeps the president of the United States awake. It keeps me awake.
BRIAN ROSS: The man in charge of making sure this country is prepared for a killer flu epidemic is Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt, who took office just this January. The plan calls for him to run operations out of this crisis center in Washington.
MICHAEL LEAVITT: This is a very serious version of a disease that can literally take lives by the millions.
BRIAN ROSS: Is this country prepared today for this epidemic?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: Not as prepared as we need to be. We're better prepared today than we were yesterday. We'll be better prepared tomorrow than we are today. But no one in the world is prepared enough yet.
BRIAN ROSS: So the answer is, no, we are not prepared?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: Not as prepared as we need to be.
BRIAN ROSS: The draft report of the Federal government's own emergency plan, examined by "Primetime," predicts as many as 200,000 Americans will die within a few months, considered a conservative estimate.
LAURIE GARRETT: Well, the first thing is everybody in America is going to say, where's a vaccine? And they're going to find out that it's really darn hard to make vaccine. It takes a really long time, and they may queue up in demand, but it's not there for them.
BRIAN ROSS: In fact, the draft report says it won't be until six months after the first outbreak that any vaccine will be available, and then only in limited supply.
LAURIE GARRETT: And even that's optimistic.
BRIAN ROSS: So if we're hit by this epidemic, there's not going to be vaccine for everybody.
LAURIE GARRETT: No.
BRIAN ROSS: But while there's no vaccine to stop the flu, there is one medicine to treat it and only one. Made at this plant in Switzerland by the Roche pharmaceutical company, it's called Tamiflu.
ADVERTISEMENT VOICE, MALE: If you feel flu-ish, see your doctor early.
BRIAN ROSS: Roche has been selling Tamiflu for years, but it was only recently that scientists realized it is the one medicine so far proven effective against the killer flu, H5N1. And that has created a huge demand and a critical shortage.
BRIAN ROSS: The whole world wants what's coming out of that one plant in Switzerland.
LAURIE GARRETT: Exactly.
BRIAN ROSS: Can they supply the whole world?
LAURIE GARRETT: No. All of the wealthiest countries in the world are trying to purchase stockpiles of Tamiflu. Our stockpile is around 2.5 million courses of treatment.
BRIAN ROSS: And the government knows that at least, or predicts, 200 million people would be infected?
LAURIE GARRETT: Looks like we have a shortage.
BRIAN ROSS: How many doses do we have of Tamiflu?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: Our objective is to have 20 million doses of Tamiflu, or enough for 20 million people.
BRIAN ROSS: Today?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: No, we don't have that today, but most ...
BRIAN ROSS: How much do we have today?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: Currently, we have about 6 million that have been both ordered and will be delivered this year.
BRIAN ROSS: On hand today?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: No, we have 2 million that are on hand today.
BRIAN ROSS: How is it that we don't have more?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: Well, first of all, no one does.
BRIAN ROSS: But officials in Australia say they do have more. And in Great Britain, officials say they will soon have enough for 1/4 of the population.
PROFESSOR JOHN OXFORD, ROYAL LONDON HOSPITAL: I think at the moment, with 2.5 million doses, it -you're pretty vulnerable.
BRIAN ROSS: European health officials at a conference this week in Malta said they were astonished at the U.S. lack of planning. Professor John Oxford of the Royal London Hospital.
PREOFESSOR JOHN OXFORD: The lack of advanced planning up to the moment in the United States in the sense of not having a huge stockpile, which I think your citizens deserve, has surprised me and I've been rather dismayed about it.
BRIAN ROSS: Faced with worldwide demand, the Roche company, which makes Tamiflu, has set up a first come, first serve waiting list with the United States nowhere near the top.
MICHAEL LEAVITT: Do we wish we had ordered it sooner and more of it? I suspect one could say, yes. Are we moving rapidly to assure that we have it? The answer to that is also yes.
BRIAN ROSS: Why didn't the U.S. order it sooner?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: I can't answer that. I don't know the answer.
BRIAN ROSS: It once again, just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, raises questions about the Bush administration and its ability to plan for a predictable natural disaster.
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: We can't just wing it. When we wing it, we get New Orleans.
BRIAN ROSS: Even the president's closest ally on Capitol Hill, the Republican leader of the Senate, Bill Frist, is now sounding the alarm about the country's lack of Tamiflu.
SEN. BILL FRIST, MAJORITY LEADER: We are way under-prepared. What if it does break out? And it could, it could be tomorrow here in the United States. So the Tamiflu is what people would go after. It's what you're going to ask for, I'm going to ask for immediately.
BRIAN ROSS: Tamiflu is already in short supply for the public, and officials of the Roche company say there could well be a run on the medicine before this winter's flu season.
BRIAN ROSS: How will it work? Who will get the lifesaving drug? Who won't?
LAURIE GARRETT: As far as I know, there is no coherent plan for who will get the meager supplies.
BRIAN ROSS: With 300 million people, how do you decide who gets the 2.5 million doses?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: Well, that's part of our planning process.
BRIAN ROSS: Won't everyone want Tamiflu for themselves, for their families, if this hits? And you're going to have to say we don't have enough.
MICHAEL LEAVITT: Well, that's not something I want to say, and that's the reason we're moving so rapidly.
BRIAN ROSS: But you're going to have to, aren't you?
MICHAEL LEAVITT: Well, it isn't going to happen tomorrow. But if it happened the day after that, we would not be in as good a position as we -- as we will be in six months.
BRIAN ROSS: So for at least this coming winter, this country will be in much the same situation as it was in 1918.
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: We didn't have Tamiflu then and we didn't have the vaccine then. And we struggled to try to save people through the medical care that we had, which was pretty good. And we had a pretty sophisticated public health system. But the fact is, a lot of people died then.
BRIAN ROSS: And this time?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER: A lot of people will die.
This "Primetime" segment aired on Sept. 15, 2005.
Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures
October 16, 2005 at 12:50 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 15, 2005
Brussels says EU unprepared for bird flu
Preparedness for the flu is complicated by the fact that we don't know which vaccine is appropriate.
However, a study in the scientific journal Nature next week says resistance to Tamiflu has appeared in a girl with the H5N1 bird flu strain.
Another complication is short shelf life of the vaccine. Here is the latest from FT on the EU situation.
FT.com / Europe / Brussels briefing - Brussels says EU unprepared for bird fluBy Andrew Bounds and Tobias Buck in Brussels and Andrew Jack and Vincent Boland in Ankara
Published: October 14 2005 22:01 | Last updated: October 14 2005 22:01Europe is not properly prepared for a flu pandemic and has inadequate supplies of vaccines and antiviral drugs, says an internal European Commission document obtained by the Financial Times.
With avian flu on its borders, the human vaccine situation in the EU is “far from satisfactory”, according to a note presented last Wednesday by Markos Kyprianou, health and consumer protection commissioner, to his colleagues ahead of a meeting of EU health ministers on October 20.Some member states have reserved all available antiviral drug supplies for years to come, leaving countries that may be first hit by the disease without any access to drugs, it adds.
The news comes as the EU sent veterinary experts and scientists to Turkey and Romania, the first two European countries to register an outbreak. At an emergency meeting of national vets in Brussels on Friday, member states were advised to keep poultry isolated from migrating birds.
The internal EU document says 16 of the 25 members have informed Brussels about their supplies of antiviral drugs, to be used if avian flu jumps to humans. There are 10m doses in the EU and European Economic Area (Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein), and a further 36m to be delivered by the end of 2007 enough for about 10 per cent of the EU population, against World Health Organisation recommendations for 25 per cent coverage.
The report said: “There are complaints from member states (and third countries) that orders from some countries have reserved all manufacturing capacity for several years to come, leaving no possibilities for others who may be hit first.”
It also said the situation was “far from satisfactory”, for pandemic vaccines. “Some member states have concluded advanced purchase agreements for the H5N1 virus vaccine”.
The EU warnings of capacity shortfalls will increase pressure on Roche, sole distributor of Tamiflu the principal flu antiviral drug as Cipla, an Indian drugs company, has said it is beginning to make a generic version in defiance of patent laws.
However, a study in the scientific journal Nature next week says resistance to Tamiflu has appeared in a girl with the H5N1 bird flu strain.
October 15, 2005 at 12:22 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Bird flu confirmed as deadly H5N1 strain
The H5N1 virus moves towards Europe proper. Still no evidence it has jumped from human to human.
Telegraph | News(Filed: 15/10/2005)
The outbreak of bird flu in Romania has been confirmed as the strain that is potentially lethal in humans.The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has confirmed that that tests in Britain have shown that three ducks found dead in the Danube delta last week had the H5N1 strain of the disease.
Turkey has also reported an outbreak of bird flu, as fears grow in Europe over a potentially deadly outbreak.Experts fear that the H5N1 strain might mutate into a virus which would then spread easily in the human population. Millions of people could be infected.
More than 60 people in Asia have died since 2003.
But Defra said more tests were needed in order to discover how similar it is to the viruses found in Turkey and Asia.
A spokesman for the department said: "The results are that it is H5N1 but further laboratory results are required in order to confirm the origin of the virus and the relationship of that with Turkey."
He added: "We have been working on the assumption that it would be H5N1 any way. It does not necessarily change our approach to preparedness. We believe that we are prepared and we urge all poultry farmers to keep vigilant."
The Danube delta in Romania is Europe's largest wetlands; playing host to many wild birds migrating from Russia, Poland and Scandinavia.
Romania has announced plans to slaughter thousands of birds to prevent the disease from spreading.
October 15, 2005 at 11:12 AM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 09, 2005
Day to day reality for the police
Fascinatingly insightful post from the "Policeman" on the reality of muslim community relations in UK.
The Policeman's Blogobserve the striking gulf between the first and second generation of Muslims and all too often I'm forced to come into contact with the best of the former and the worst of the latter
October 9, 2005 at 04:36 PM in Police | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Political reality in Indonesia
Here is a good article on the political issues within Indonesia and why they haven't banned JI, the apparent perpetrators of the 2002, and recent 2005 bombings.
Some may re-consider any vacation plans to a country that thinks this way.
The Counterterrorism Blog: Why Indonesian Authorities Cannot Come Out and Say it Was Jemaah Islamiyah: Pandering to the Islamistsno politician in the world’s largest Muslim community has the political courage to ban an organization that a) simply translates as “Islamic community,” and b) many Muslims does not believe really exists.
October 9, 2005 at 04:27 PM in Intelligence | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 08, 2005
Looking for the next outbreak
TheStar.com - Looking for the next outbreak
FluWatch a national system to detect early signs
RITA DALY
STAFF REPORTER
As one of Canada's physicians on the lookout for signs of human outbreaks of flu, Dr. Claire Nunes-Vaz holds more than a passing interest in the deadly bird flu sweeping through Southeast Asia.
Recruited as a "sentinel" physician by the College of Family Physicians of Canada, she is one of about 175 family doctors and nurses that form part of a national warning system called FluWatch that detects early signs of influenza outbreaks. Ontario has 75 sentinel physicians, half of whom practise in small towns and rural areas. While there's a slim chance any of them will see the first Canadian case of a pandemic flu, they are nonetheless the country's front-line defence against garden-variety flu and a highly pathogenic pandemic flu.
Efforts to combat the next flu pandemic have intensified in recent weeks. Officials from 80 countries, including Canada, met in Washington yesterday to discuss how to bolster surveillance. And U.S. President George W. Bush has urged drug companies to beef up vaccine production against the H5N1 bird flu virus.
Experts warn it's now the biggest health threat in the world.
"You always have to keep your radar out for something that doesn't quite fit," Nunes-Vaz said during an interview in her Lawrence Ave. office in North York. "If we get this mutated avian flu, some people will become very sick with respiratory distress and need support."
The recent outbreak at a Scarborough nursing home has driven home the challenges wrought by mysterious bugs and viruses that can't be quickly identified.
It took public health officials a week to figure out that 16 residents from the Seven Oaks Home for the Aged died from Legionnaires' disease, caused by a bacterium that often spreads through ventilation and plumbing systems. Until Thursday, lab experts were scrambling to identify the illness marked by typical flu-like symptoms of fever, chills, cough and fatigue.
With SARS still fresh in people's minds, bird flu spreading in Southeast Asia, a pandemic looming on the horizon and the latest nursing home outbreak, the role of sentinel physicians gearing up for the regular late fall flu season starting has taken on a new level of concern.
Once a week, the sentinel physicians fill out a special form noting patients who arrive in their office with flu-like illness and report to the Public Health Agency of Canada's immunization and respiratory infectious diseases division.
Some, like Nunes-Vaz, also take a viral swab from a feverish patient's nostril and send the sample to public health officials. Virus samples from sentinels, hospitals and clinics are sent to provincial, territorial and federal labs, whose findings are forwarded to Ottawa.
Their data is combined with epidemiologists who report absenteeism rates of 10 per cent or more from schools and workplaces, as well as flu outbreaks in hospitals and nursing homes in each region.
Based on these and other reports of virus strains circulating the globe, the World Health Organization's Global Influenza Surveillance Network decides on the best strains for the next year's flu vaccine.
That vaccine won't be effective against a pandemic, and there continues to be controversy about the efficacy of shots against regular flu. A recent study published in the Lancet, a prominent medical journal, suggested flu shots aren't that effective in the elderly.
Dr. Allison McGeer, director of infection control at Mount Sinai Hospital and a major player in the SARS crisis, said flu shots are "reasonably" effective — 30 to 70 per cent depending on the vaccine's efficacy that year — at preventing people from landing in hospital or dying.
"It would be very nice if we had a better vaccine. But the fact that we don't doesn't mean it is not cost-effective and doesn't save lives," she said.
This year's vaccine strain protects against three types — influenza A New Caledonia-like, A California-like, and B Shanghai-like virus strains. The federal government has ordered 11 million doses, which will arrive in doctor's offices, hospitals and public health clinics in the coming weeks.
Every flu season is a surprise. There is no way of knowing what strain of flu this year is going to hit. Or how widespread the season will be. And the problem with the influenza virus is that it is most infectious before symptoms show.
"If every sentinel in our area suddenly sent in a report one week that doubled or tripled our numbers, the flashing red warning lights would be going off," said Dr. Donald Collins-Williams, a sentinel physician in Mississauga. "It may just be a regular flu that's worse this year, or it may be something new."
The regular flu kills between 500 and 2,000 Canadians every year. Canada's pandemic plan warns that a pandemic flu — caused by an entirely new virus strain that humans will have no immunity to — could kill 11,000 to 58,000 people. Globally, it will kill millions.
The FluWatch program began in 1996, long before pandemic planning began. It was designed to monitor each year's flu season. SARS, and now the threat of a pandemic, has since led to year-round reporting.
McGeer says the program works well for monitoring regular flu, but it won't help much in detecting a pandemic.
Health experts predict the next pandemic will likely originate in Southeast Asia, where the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus is threatening to mutate and spark human-to-human transmission. It has resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of birds and has made the jump to humans, killing at least 60 people.
October 8, 2005 at 05:48 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Bird flu strikes in Danube delta
Bird flu edges closer to Europe.
BBC NEWS | Europe | Bird flu strikes in Danube delta
Romania has reported its first bird flu cases but it is unclear if the strain found in the Danube delta is the deadly H5N1 virus which hit parts of Asia.
Scientists in Bucharest discovered flu antibodies in three domestic ducks found dead in a remote village late last month, the government said.
The exact strain is to be determined by a lab in the UK in the next few days.
According to an unconfirmed report, three more cases of bird flu have since been found and a cull has begun.
The first three cases were found in the village of Ceamurlia de Jos, Agriculture Minister Gheorghe Flutur said.
Access to the village near the Black Sea has been restricted.
Analysts say the Danube delta is particularly vulnerable because it lies along a route taken by migratory birds, which often mix with domestic ducks and geese.
Romanian monitors had been collecting samples for months and planning for such an eventuality, the minister said.
At least 60 people died after contracting H5N1 bird flu across Asia in the last two years although there is no evidence so far of the strain being passed between humans.
Fears rose that it was travelling west after poultry farms in eastern Russia reported numerous cases of bird flu in the summer.
'Second village'
Reuters news agency reported on Saturday that three more cases had been discovered in a different Danube delta village, Smardan.
Ion Agafitei, a senior veterinarian, was quoted by the agency as saying that the birds had tested positive for a flu virus.
In Ceamurlia de Jos, he said, 220 domestic birds had been culled in a bid to stamp out the virus.
Ceamurlia de Jos, Smardan and five other villages had been placed under quarantines, he added.
"The process is ongoing and will continue," he told Reuters.
Local farmers have been telling Romanian media that they recorded dozens of poultry dying in recent days.
October 8, 2005 at 02:53 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 06, 2005
Mystery virus kills another 6
The local authorities in Toronto, Canada, assure everyone this is not Avian Flu, nor SARS, and that respitory illness is normal in Nursing Homes. However they also note that "normal" respitory illnessness result in almost no deaths.
The handling of this situation given the international concerns about flu, leaves a lot to be desired. As a minimum one would assume that a quarantine would be required, and that has not yet happened.
We should all note that all situations of epidemic (let alone pandemic which hasn't happened yet) always begin innocently with assumptions of localisation, and remonstrations to "not be concerned".
TheStar.com - Mystery virus kills another 6Nursing home illness not SARS
But global media quick to condemnISABEL TEOTONIO AND ROB FERGUSON
STAFF REPORTERSSix more residents of a Scarborough nursing home are dead from a mysterious flu-like virus, raising the death toll to 16, health officials said yesterday.
The cause of the outbreak at the Seven Oaks Home for the Aged remains unknown, but the outbreak has already garnered international headlines, evoking memories of the deadly SARS outbreak that crippled the city two years ago.
Despite the rising death toll, making it the city's worst respiratory outbreak at a long-term care facility in five years, Toronto's medical officer of health said the outbreak is under control. As of yesterday afternoon, he said, there had been no new cases reported in the previous 24 hours."The trend is in the right direction," said Dr. David McKeown at a news conference. "The outbreak is confined to residents and staff and people closely associated with this one facility. It's not a general health risk but it is a problem for these populations."
Since the illness was discovered on Sept. 25, five visitors, 13 employees and 70 residents have been affected. Thirty-four residents, two staff and two visitors are in seven hospitals in the city. All are in isolation.
The latest fatalities are three women aged 85, 92 and 96, and three men, 75, 84 and 89. All had underlying medical conditions that made them more susceptible to contracting the virus.
Officials have spoken with 170 people who had been in the facility, such as volunteers, visitors and staff. But because there's been no evidence of transmission, McKeown said he's not worried about contacts any of those individuals may have had with others.
While the deaths have shocked a city still reeling from the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003, respiratory outbreaks in long-term care facilities are common, said Dr. Barbara Yaffe, director of communicable disease control with the city's public health department.
In Toronto each year, there are up to 200 respiratory outbreaks in long-term care facilities, she said, adding that over the past five years the city has experienced 500. The average death per outbreak has been fewer than one. Until this, the highest number of deaths had been 15.
While the death rate in Toronto is low, provincial rates show that in 4 per cent of these outbreaks, 20 per cent or more of those affected die.
While such outbreaks are common, the response to this one has been anything but routine, she said. "We are taking this as the highest priority and putting many, many staff hours into the investigation, control and management of this outbreak."
Although the deadly virus may never be determined, health officials have ruled out avian flu and influenza. They've also confirmed it is not SARS, which killed 44 people in 2003.
"The outbreak is confined to residents and staff and people closely associated with this one facility."
Dr. David McKeown, Toronto medical officer of health
Nonetheless, Toronto's image has been unjustly tarnished in international news reports, Health Minister George Smitherman said yesterday. "This is not SARS, this is not the beginning of a new pandemic."
News reports have shown up on CNN and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, been picked up by news services including The Associated Press, Bloomberg, Pravda in Russia and a Chinese agency, and appeared in major newspapers in New York, Florida and Seattle.
The Australian story notes the Scarborough bug is "similar to SARS but which officials insist is not" and adds, "this ailment develops more quickly than SARS, as patients go from healthy to dead in just a few days." It also notes there was no quarantine at the nursing home and "Canadian authorities had been criticized during the SARS outbreak for being too slow to impose quarantine."
SARS hit Toronto in two waves during the spring of 2003, leading to warnings from the World Health Organization for people to avoid travel to the city, hurting tourism and convention bookings.
The government must closely monitor the tone of coverage, said a Progressive Conservative MPP who was tourism minister in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
"I know how much of an impact international perceptions can have on our economy," said Tim Hudak (Erie-Lincoln).
"Information travels internationally very quickly, particularly to people considering travel to another jurisdiction," he said, calling on Smitherman to concentrate on "solving the problem here at home and perceptions internationally."
New Democrat MPP Marilyn Churley said it is "worrisome" how the Scarborough outbreak has grown despite the precautions in place.
Smitherman said any fears of a SARS-like outbreak are unwarranted because there is "no evidence" the flu outbreak has spread beyond the nursing home, thanks to precautions taken to isolate patients and the medical staff treating them.
"I can't take responsibility for how the media characterizes a story," he said. "Lessons that have been learned from SARS have been well applied here ... I'm very, very confident that the steps that have been taken are appropriate ones."
He noted deadly flu outbreaks in nursing homes are "regrettably not a new story."
Asked if the province needs to do a better job of getting that message out beyond Canada's borders, Smitherman said, "I'm conveying this to Ontarians. This is, I think, our primary responsibility."
"We're sticking to our knitting and doing all of those things locally that are prudent in the circumstances with city officials, through the public health unit and my ministry working together."
The outbreak shows the importance of getting a flu shot, which the government will again provide free to all residents starting in the next few weeks, and frequent hand washing in fall and winter to stop flu from spreading, he said.
October 6, 2005 at 08:50 AM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 05, 2005
British flu pandemic 'will kill 50,000'
UK estimates 50,000 dead when the pandemic hits.
Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times OnlineBy David Sanderson
A British flu pandemic is inevitable and will put the lives of tens of thousands of people at risk, according to the country’s top medical officer.
Sir Liam Donaldson said today that it was a "biological inevitability" that when the pandemic arrives, it would have a "serious impact".
The Chief Medical Officer for England said that the government’s contingency plans were looking at 50,000 deaths in the UK from the pandemic. He added that a pandemic could arrive at any time and that it was impossible to state that Britain was ready to cope.Experts have said that avian flu will eventually mutate so that it can spread easily between humans, leading to a pandemic strain.
The H5N1 strain of Avian flu has killed over 60 people in south-east Asia in the last two years including, it is believed, five people in Indonesia who came into contact with affected poultry in the last month. The disease is believed to have been transmitted through the droppings or saliva of sick birds.
Dr David Nabarro of the World Health Organisation - which has already said a pandemic is only a matter of time - said today that a pandemic could kill between five million and 150 million people worldwide, depending on action taken now.
Questioned on what Britain was doing to prepare for the pandemic, Sir Liam Donaldson told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One that anti-viral drugs were being stockpiled. It is understood that about 14.6 million courses of Tamiflu - enough to protect a quarter of the population - have been stored.
Sir Liam added however: "Those won’t eliminate the problem but for people who get it, it should reduce the severity of the attack and it should prevent many people from dying."
Asked if he thought Britain was ready to face a pandemic he replied: "I don’t think I would ever want to be as bold as to claim that.
"It’s inevitable that when the flu pandemic comes, and we don’t know whether that will be next winter or even in five or 10 years’ time, that it will have a serious impact on the health of our country. That’s a biological inevitability."
Health authorities believe that if the bird flu virus mutates in Asia and cases start spreading, Britain will only have weeks - if not days - to prepare.
Travel restrictions, airport screening and other strategies would be of little use to stop cases multiplying rapidly, according to statistical models carried out by the Health Protection Agency.
Last month the experts from the European Union’s 25 member states met in Brussels to coordinate contingency plans to combat the threat. Their worries had mounted after the H5N1 strain was found to be moving westwards and had reached Siberia.
Amid fears that migrating birds arriving from the east could be carrying the virus, German and Dutch poultry farmers complied with government orders to move all their birds indoors.
After the recent outbreak in Indonesia, the United Nations warned its government to start a mass slaughter of poultry in affected areas.
Indonesian health minister Siti Fadilah Supari said last week it was an epidemic adding that there would be more deaths unless they could pinpoint the source. She later toned down her comments but the government has declared it an "extraordinary situation". It has given itself the powers to confine and forcibly treat anyone showing bird flu symptoms.
Australia has given the government 10,000 doses of Tamiflu but there are concerns there is not enough of the drug being produced.
About 300 million doses of vaccine are produced annually, but demand still exceeds supply. Flu affects between 5 per cent and 15 per cent of the world's population, resulting in between 3 million and 5 million cases of severe illness and 250,000 to 500,000 deaths each year.
First discovered in China in 1997, bird flu has infected more than 100 humans since 2003. It has a high mortality rate, with more than 60 dead in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia.
October 5, 2005 at 10:43 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Bird flu reminds scientists of virus that killed 50m people
An analysis of the re-created pathogen has shown that, like its modern cousin, it began as a bird virus and jumped species into humans with mutations that made it peculiarly virulent and lethal.
World news from The Times and the Sunday Times - Times OnlineBy Mark Henderson
It is mutating in the same way as the germ that cause the 1918 pandemic
FEARS that avian flu will trigger a global pandemic that could kill up to 150 million people intensified yesterday after research revealed similarities between the virus and possibly the deadliest germ in history.Scientists have re-created the “Spanish flu” virus that killed up to 50 million people in 1918-19 and shown that it shared traits with the H5N1 strain of avian flu.
An analysis of the re-created pathogen has shown that, like its modern cousin, it began as a bird virus and jumped species into humans with mutations that made it peculiarly virulent and lethal.A related study has identified that several of these mutations are also present in the H5N1 strain that has killed at least 60 people in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. This could mean that the contemporary strain is starting along the evolutionary pathway that transformed a bird virus into a human-killer in 1918.
Jeffrey Taubenberger, of the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who contributed to both studies, said: “This suggests that these H5N1 viruses might be acquiring the ability to adapt to humans, increasing their pandemic risk.” Insights from the work promise to assist the development of drugs against highly virulent forms of flu, and could provide a “checklist” of dangerous genetic traits that would improve surveillance of hazardous strains.
The research also indicates that the Spanish flu jumped species directly from birds to humans. The less serious pandemics of 1957 and 1968 began when an avian virus first mingled its genes with those of a flu strain that could already infect people, either in a human or in animals such as pigs that can harbour both varieties.
If a direct jump has occurred once, it could occur again, providing a fresh route by which modern avian flu could evolve. “For H5N1, it could go either way,” Dr Taubenberger said. “There is still a risk that H5N1 could become pandemic through reassortment with a contemporary human flu strain, but it’s also possible that it could completely adapt to humans like the virus did in 1918.”
The discoveries come a week after David Nabarro, who was appointed last Thursday as the UN co-ordinator for avian and human influenza, said that avian flu had the potential to kill 150 million people.
Sir Liam Donaldson, Britain’s chief medical officer, then said that this country’s contingency plans assume that at least 50,000 people would die here in such an outbreak.
Indonesia, the fourth country to suffer human cases of H5N1 flu, reported a seventh death yesterday, of a 23-year-old man, though only three of these are confirmed to have been caused by the virus.
Dr Taubenberger’s study, published in the journal Nature, has mapped the genetic code of the H1N1 Spanish flu strain, using viral material from a female victim preserved in permafrost in Alaska. Another group, led by Terrence Tumpey, of the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC), advised by Dr Taubenberger, used this information to reconstruct the H1N1 virus. These results are published in the journal Science.
Vials of the re-created virus are stored in a secure CDC laboratory. Julie Geberding, director of the CDC, said that producing the virus carries little risk to the public as human populations have a residual immunity to the H1N1 strain, making it unlikely that an accidental release could itself start a pandemic.
Dr Taubenberger said: “In the case of the H5N1 viruses we do find some parallels. This suggests the possibility that the H5 viruses are being exposed to some human adaptive process and might be acquiring these changes, in the sense that they might be going down a similar pathway that led to 1918.”
PANDEMICS PAST
# “Spanish flu” is thought to have killed as many as 50 million people
# It began early in 1918, and reached its peak towards the end of that year. The pandemic subsided in 1919
# The pathogen that caused the virus was not known at the time. The influenza virus was identified in 1933, and the Spanish flu strain is now known to have been the H1N1 variety
# Particularly virulent, it caused lung inflammation and haemorrhaging, and an exceptionally high number of deaths among adults aged between 18 and 34
# Other flu pandemics struck in 1957 (the “Asian flu”) which killed about four million, and in 1968 (the “Hong Kong flu”) which killed about one million
October 5, 2005 at 10:41 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
1918 killer flu 'came from birds'
Its appears birds have been the culprits before in the incidence of Flu pandemics.
BBC NEWS | Health | 1918 killer flu 'came from birds'
The Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918-19 was probably a strain that originated in birds, research has shown.
US scientists have found the 1918 virus shares genetic mutations with the bird flu virus now circulating in Asia.
Writing in Nature, they say their work underlines the threat the current strain poses to humans worldwide.
A second paper in Science reveals another US team has successfully recreated the 1918 virus in mice.
The virus is contained at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under stringent safety conditions.
It is hoped to carry out experiments to further understand the biological properties that made the virus so virulent.
The virus was recreated from data produced by painstaking research by a team from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
Lung tissue samples
Working on virus samples from the remains of victims of the 1918 pandemic, the researchers were able to piece together the entire genetic sequence of the virus.
They found the virus contained elements that were new to humans of the time - making it highly virulent.
And analysis of the final three pieces of the virus' genetic code has revealed mutations that have striking similarities to those found in flu viruses found only in birds, such as the H5N1 strain currently found in south east Asia.
This strain has so far killed at least 65 people.
Many experts believe it is only a matter of time before H5N1, or a similar strain, causes many deaths in humans - possibly after combining with a human flu strain.
Crucially, the mutations identified by the US researchers were found in genes which control the virus' ability to replicate in host cells.
The researchers say these mutations may have helped the 1918 virus replicate more efficiently.
At this stage, they say the H5N1 strain shares only some, and not all, of these mutations.
Increased virulence
But these mutations may be enough to increase the virus' virulence - and give it the potential to cause serious human infection without first combining with a known human flu strain.
The researchers believe the two other major flu pandemics of the 20th century - in 1957 and 1968 - were caused by human flu viruses which acquired two or three key genes from bird flu virus strains.
But they believe the 1918 strain was probably entirely a bird flu virus that adapted to function in humans.
Julie Gerberding, director of the US Centers for Disease Control, said: "By unmasking the 1918 virus we are revealing some of the secrets that will help us predict and prepare for the next pandemic."
And Dr Jeffery Taubenberger, lead researcher of the Nature study, said: "Determining whether pandemic influenza virus strains can emerge via different pathways will affect the scope and focus of surveillance and prevention efforts."
Warning
Professor John Oxford, an expert in virology at Queen Mary College, London, said the suggestion that the virus had the potential to jump between humans without first combining with a human virus made it even more of a threat.
"This study gives us an extra warning that H5N1 needs to be taken even more seriously than it has been up to now," he said.
Dr Terrence Tumpey, of the US CDC, defended the decision to recreate the 1918 flu virus.
He said: "We felt we had to recreate the virus and run these experiments to understand the biological properties that made the 1918 virus so exceptionally deadly.
"We wanted to identify the specific genes responsible for its virulence, with the hope of designing antivirals or other interventions that would work against virulent pandemic or epidemic influenza viruses."
October 5, 2005 at 02:51 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Flu Pandemic awareness week ..
Just came across this site ... seems the week is over, and I just found it now. But they are to be applauded for trying to raise this awareness of this critical issue for the world.
Flu Wiki - Main - Pandemic Flu Awareness WeekContinuing the public health experiment, Flu Wiki in association with the blogosphere will use October 3–9 as Pandemic Flu Awareness Week.
October 5, 2005 at 01:56 PM in Flu pandemic watch | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
October 02, 2005
Dh35m contingency plan to block bird flu
UAE is one of the first unaffected countries to be openly pro-active, in advance of the pandemic.
Khaleej Times OnlineBy Atef Hanafi
2 October 2005
ABU DHABI — The Emirate of Abu Dhabi has earmarked Dh35 million as a contingency plan to block the bird flu virus from entering the country, Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Mohammed Saeed Al Raghabani told a seminar yesterday.A decision to this effect, he said, had been taken by the Executive Council in a meeting chaired by General Shaikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces.
At a recent meeting headed by Shaikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Environmental Agency, the cabinet endorsed a package of measures designed to prevent penetration of the disease into the country."Due to the perilous nature of the pandemic, the United Nations has named Dr David Nabarro as its coordinator for bird flu. He, in turn, recommended that an urgent strategy be hammered out to prevent the spread of the epidemic and warned that between 5 and 150 million may fall victim to the disease," Raghabani noted.
The seminar was held at the Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority, organised in conjunction with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
Raghabani said the avian influenza was a reminiscence of a pandemic in 1918 and 1919 that claimed the lives of 40 million in Europe alone.
He went on to say that according to (the Animal Health Organisation) OIE's reports the disease is now spread in ten south and east Asian countries as well as Russia. This, he added, is an indication of how the pandemic can move from one place to another.
He pointed out that his ministry had imposed a ban on the import of live birds and their products from countries where cases of the diseases had been detected. Import of ornamental birds from all over the world have also been banned, he added.
"The Ministry has further prevented consignments of poultry and their products from entering the country unless they are accompanied by veterinary certificates issued by an approved lab stating that they are disease-free, 15 days before the date of shipment," the minister told the gathering.
FAO's resident representative in Abu Dhabi, Kayan Jaff, said in his address at the seminar that the Agriculture Minister had taken the initiative and sought the advice of the Food and Agriculture Organisation's experts on ways to combat the disease and to acquaint themselves of steps taken by the UAE in this regard.
A FAO expert said there were different kinds of the bird flu, the most important of which is H5NI. "The pandemic broke out first in China in 2005 and then in Mongolia and Russia before it spread to most northern parts of Kazakhstan," said Dr