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Biotech / Medical : SARS and Avian Flu -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Henry Niman who wrote (1261)	1/23/2004 8:46:25 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 4232

Threat of mutation worries bird flu experts By Bayan Rahman in Tokyo Published: January 23 2004 12:49 \| Last Updated: January 23 2004 12:49 [same message, just the FT has the story too] news.ft.com Hong Kong banned imports of Thai chicken on Friday, joining the flurry of cross-border exclusions that have swept Asia since bird flu was first found in South Korea in December. The European Union also announced an immediate import ban. Guandong province in southern China has stepped up controls on exports of live birds and is monitoring chicken farms. South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia and now Thailand have all admitted they have poultry infected with the H5N1 virus, while Taiwan has been struck by the H5N2 strain of the disease. Bird flu has jumped species from birds to humans in Vietnam, where it has killed five people, and Thailand, where it has claimed two lives. It killed six people in Hong Kong in 1997 during a separate outbreak. Strains known to infect humans are influenza A subtypes H5N1 and H9N2. The World Health Organisation said there was a risk the disease could mutate and that some developing countries could have difficulty bringing it under control. It warned that bird flu may be more established in bird populations and in the environment across Asia than currently realised. The simultaneous occurrence in several countries of large outbreaks of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza in domestic poultry is historically unprecedented and the present situation may grow worse, the UN agency warned. "The threat is that it could mutate but this is a threat that we know how to deal with," said Dick Thompson, spokesman in Geneva. "The way to eliminate the risk is to cull the infected birds and it has to be done safely, which needs resources. In places like Vietnam, those resources are scarce so it's going to be much more difficult than it was in Europe [where bird flu was found] last year." Mr Thompson said that there was no evidence of human-to-human infection and that when it had happened previously the transmission "wasn't very efficient". But a leading medical journal in the UK, the Lancet, has painted a more dramatic picture of the risk of infection. "The fear is that a strain such as H5N1 might reassort with a human influenza virus to become contagious among people. In view of the high mortality of human influenza associated with this strain, the prospect of a worldwide pandemic is massively frightening. The possibility of a human pandemic with a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus must be taken very seriously indeed," the Lancet said in an editorial.