India Influenza Outbreak Portends Pandemic

An epidemic of avian influenza in West Bengal, India has the Indian “government in panic mode”, according to the Times of India Web site.

And with good reason: 15 million of West Bengal’s 80 million people are crammed into its capital city, Kolkata (Calcutta), which is a petri dish of poverty, pollution, political intransigence and hopeless public health. It is the city where Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity order.

If the infection reaches Kolkata’s poultry markets, there is a much greater risk of animal-to-human transmission than there has been in Indonesia or Vietnam, where infections of H5N1 influenza have already crossed species from animals to humans.

There have been many more human infections of highly-pathogenic influenza in Indonesia (120 cases, 98 deaths) and Vietnam (102 cases, 48 deaths) than in India. There were three outbreaks of avian influenza in India in 2006, but there have been no human deaths there, yet.

But Kolkata is a whole other miasma of misery. The population density of Kolkata is 24,000 people per square kilometer (62,000 per square mile), the second highest in the world. In comparison, the population density of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest city, is only 3,000 per square kilometer (8,000 per square mile), a fraction of Kolkata’s. Even the density of Jakarta, Indonesia, at 12,500 people per square kilometer (33,000 per square mile), is just half that of Kolkata.

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Bird Flu – Bangledesh Considers Red Alert

The government has been carrying out allout efforts to resist the bird flu throughout the country.

A number of steps have already been taken to face the probable menace. Sources said monitoring cell has been opened at the office of the Deputy Commissioner in each district.

Special task force has been formed. BDR patrol in the border areas has been geared up, importation of all kinds of poultry through India and Myanmmar borders has been prohibited, propaganda to create awareness among the people is being made and the masses are being urged not to be panicked.

Besides, the government is mulling to declare red alert as a drastic measure to face this catastrophe if necessary. According to the official figure the country has 1.50 lakh poultry farms and a panic of bird flu has been spread all over, although, infection of bird flu in hundred farms has so far been informed.

About 3.50 lakh cocks in 134 farms have already been killed and as a result the poultry farmers who invested a huge amount are being frustrated. If it is not controlled now, it would be spread all over the country in an epidemic form.

And at the same time it would not only cause a huge economic loss but also thousands of people involved in this industry would be jobless. Ministry of Livestock sources said the price of cock, duck and pigeon has been reduced in the market.

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Bird flu: India Asks For All Possible Help

The Indian state of West Bengal, battling the country’s worst outbreak of deadly bird flu, appealed on Saturday to the federal government to send “all possible help to defeat” the virus.

The call by state animal resources minister Anisur Rahaman came as authorities struggled to stop the disease spreading beyond the 12 out of 19 state districts already affected.

“We have to control the disease immediately as the deadly H5N1 virus has been spreading fast,” Rahaman said, adding “avian flu is knocking on the doors of Kolkata,” the eastern state’s congested capital of 13.5 million people.

“I’m urging the federal government to send all possible help to defeat the virus before it affects the humans,” he told AFP.

New Delhi has already sent some medical teams and other assistance to the state.

Three days of heavy rains have held up efforts to slaughter poultry, turning some rural dirt roads into muddy rivers and making it impossible for health teams to reach chicken farms in the poverty-ridden state.

Rahaman said he was deeply concerned by reports some villagers in rural areas were eating slaughtered chickens.

“We don’t understand why people do not understand the dangers of the disease despite repeated warnings,” he said, adding children were still playing with chickens.

Humans typically catch the disease by coming into direct contact with infected poultry, but experts fear the H5N1 strain may mutate into a form easily transmissible between people.

Panic about bird flu has gripped Kolkata after news spread that the disease had reached the outskirts of the city on Friday.

Few shops were selling poultry on Saturday in the city.

“Not a single customer has come to my shop since the morning,” said Malati Mondal, a store owner.

The government has raised the number of chickens to be slaughtered to 2.5 million from 2.2 million, Rahaman said, adding 1.3 million had been killed so far.

Workers at entry points to Kolkata were disinfecting vehicles entering the city.

India has not had any human cases of bird flu. But Rahaman said he feared the disease would spread to humans with hundreds of people reporting flu symptoms.

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Pandemic Bird Flu Warnings Not In The News But It’s Still A Threat

Last year, for the first time since avian flu emerged as a global threat, the number of human cases was down from the year before. As the illness receded, the scary headlines with their warnings of a pandemic that could kill 150 million people all but vanished.

But avian flu has not gone away. Nor has it become less lethal or less widespread in birds. Experts argue that preparations against it have to continue, even if the virus’s failure to mutate into a pandemic strain has given the world more breathing room.

There were 86 confirmed human cases last year compared with 115 in 2006, according to the World Health Organization, and 59 deaths compared with 79. Experts assume that the real numbers are several times larger, because many cases are missed, but that is still a far cry from a pandemic.

Dr. David Nabarro, the senior United Nations coordinator for human and avian flu, recently conceded that he worried somewhat less than he did three years ago. “Not because I think the threat has changed,” he quickly added, but because the response to it has gotten so much better.”

The world is clearly more prepared. Vaccines have been developed. Stockpiles of Tamiflu and masks have grown. Many countries, cities, companies and schools have written pandemic plans. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, created in Stockholm in 2005, just estimated that the European Union needed “another two to three years of hard work and investment” to be ready for a pandemic, but that is improving because previous estimates were for five years.

In the worst-hit countries — all poor — laboratories have become faster at flu tests. Government veterinarians now move more quickly to cull chickens. Hospitals have wards for suspect patients, and epidemiologists trace contacts and treat all with Tamiflu — a tactic meant to encircle and snuff outbreaks before the virus can adapt itself to humans.

Bernard Vallat, director general of the World Organization for Animal Health, recently called the virus “extremely stable” and, thus, less likely to mutate into a pandemic form. Many prominent virologists would vehemently disagree. But others who argued three years ago that H5N1 would not “go pandemic” are feeling a bit smug.

Avian Flu – H5N1 Pandemic – Bird Flu – New York Times

Vaccines and Drugs Will Not Be Enought To Stop Flu Pandemic

Vaccines and drugs will not be enough to slow or prevent a pandemic of influenza, according to a U.S. government report released on Tuesday.

The report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office confirms what most experts have been stressing for years — that the pharmaceutical industry cannot be relied on alone to protect the world from bird flu.

The GAO, the investigational arm of Congress, reached its own conclusion independently.

“The use of antivirals and vaccines to forestall the onset of a pandemic would likely be constrained by their uncertain effectiveness and limited availability,” the GAO report reads.

Health experts almost universally agree that a global epidemic — a pandemic — of influenza is inevitable and even overdue. Flu is always circulating but, every few decades, a completely new strain emerges and makes millions sicker than usual.

One prime suspect is the H5N1 strain of avian influenza. It is entrenched in poultry across much of Asia, the Middle East and Africa, pops up regularly in Europe and has forced the slaughter of hundreds of millions of birds.

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Bird Flu Still a Simmering Biological Bomb

For many years, Donald G. McNeil has been covering the grim toll wrought by infectious diseases in developing countries, and the global threat some pathogens pose in our increasingly interconnected world. In Science Times this week, he provides a valuable update on the H5N1 virus behind recent outbreaks of avian flu.

While out of the headlines, it remains a simmering threat that, experts say, needs far more attention than it is getting. He took some time to explore the issue with me for Dot Earth readers. Please feel free to post any additional questions you may have, or comments, and I’ll forward them to him.

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Ukraine Hit By New Bird Flu Outbreak

The Ukrainian government has confirmed a new outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus in poultry in the Crimean peninsula.

The virus was found in dead chickens from a battery farm in the village of Rivne, a spokesman for the emergency situations ministry, Volodymyr Ivanov, told AFP.

More than 150 birds at the farm had died from bird flu earlier in the week, the ministry said, with Ivanov adding that the village had been cordoned off.

Crimea’s first outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, which is deadly if contracted by humans, occurred in December 2005.

On that occasion the virus was eliminated after the authorities swept through farmsteads on the peninsula destroying tens of thousands of domestic birds kept for food by local residents.

H5N1 has claimed more than 200 human lives around the world, mostly in Asia. In Ukraine there have been no human casualties,

Scientists worry that the virus could mutate into a form directly transmissible between humans and cause a devastating pandemic.

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ACLU Questions U.S. Pandemic Response Plans

U.S. policy in preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic is veering dangerously toward a heavy-handed law-enforcement approach, the American Civil Liberties Union said on Monday.

The group, which advocates for individuals’ legal rights based on the U.S. Constitution, said federal government pandemic plans were confusing and could emphasize a police and military approach to outbreaks of disease, instead of a more sensible public health approach.

“Rather than focusing on well-established measures for protecting the lives and health of Americans, policymakers have recently embraced an approach that views public health policy through the prism of national security and law enforcement,” the ACLU report reads.

But the U.S. Health and Human Services Department (HHS) said the group had misunderstood the government’s approach and said current plans already incorporate many of the ACLU’s recommendations.

Infectious disease experts agree that a pandemic of some sort of influenza is inevitable, and most worries focus on H5N1 avian influenza. Although it mainly attacks birds, the virus has infected 349 people since 2003 and killed 216 of them.

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India: Bird Flu Spread Alarming

India’s third outbreak of avian flu among poultry is the worst it has faced, the World Health Organization said. The chief minister of West Bengal State, which is trying to cull 400,000 birds, called the virus’s spread “alarming.”

Uncooperative villagers, angry at being offered only 75 cents a chicken by the government, have been selling off their flocks and throwing dead birds into waterways, increasing the risk. New outbreaks were also reported this week in Iran and Ukraine.

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India Sounds Bird Flu Alert After Chicken Deaths

Preliminary results of tests taken after thousands of backyard poultry died in eastern India over the past 10 days showed they were infected with bird flu, but it was unclear if it was the H5N1 virus, officials said.

More than 10,000 birds died in Margram village of Birbhum district in West Bengal state.

“The preliminary tests showed the birds have died from bird flu, but we still dont know whether it is the deadly H5N1 strain,” Sunil Kumar Bhowmik, chief medical officer of Birbhum, told Reuters.

“We will quarantine people if we find anybody sick and intensify culling tomorrow morning until we get the confirmation in a few days,” Bhowmik said.

Thousands of birds in India were culled in 2006 following three separate outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 virus in the western state of Maharastra.

Neighbouring Bangladesh is still reeling under bird flu with around 21 of the countrys 64 districts affected by the deadly virus.

Experts fear the H5N1 virus might mutate or combine with the highly contagious seasonal influenza virus and spark a pandemic that could kill millions of people.

Bird flu has killed more than 210 people in 12 countries since 2003, the World Health Organisation says.

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