H5N1 Avian Flu: New Outbreak in Romania

A suspected bird flu outbreak has been reported in a remote Romanian village, the Sanitary and Veterinary Authority said Saturday.

Samples of two dead hens were sent for confirmation of the potentially deadly H5N1 virus to the Animal Health Institute in Bucharest and on to the Weybridge laboratory in Britain, the Authority said.

The poultry in the small private farm at a village on the Danube Delta were slaughtered and the area disinfected.

"There is currently no risk of the disease spreading," the Authority said.

Two weeks ago, a bird flu outbreak was reported in the nearby village of Letea close to the Ukrainian border, the first case in Europe for a year.

The previous case in the European Union had been confirmed in March 2009 in a wild duck shot during a hunt near Starnberg, in Bavaria, southern Germany.

Romania was hit by massive bird flu outbreaks in 2005 and 2006, when more than a million poultry were slaughtered.

Avian influenza or "bird flu" is a highly contagious viral disease which primarily affects birds, but on rare occasions can also be contracted by humans and other mammals.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organisation said the H5N1 virus remains a threat to humans, after bird flu outbreaks killed seven people in several countries since the beginning of the year.

H5N1 Bird flu virus linked to inflamation of the brain

As if fever, aching muscles and a sore throat were not enough, researchers have found that flu may also lead to chronic neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Most influenza infections affect the respiratory system, but there have long been suspicions that they are also linked to neurological disorders. The H1N1 flu pandemic in 1918 was followed by an outbreak of encephalitis and later by an unusually high number of cases of Parkinson's disease.

Hard evidence of such a link has been hard to find, however. So Richard Smeyne of the St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, sprayed a solution containing a highly pathogenic subtype of H5N1 avian flu into the noses of 225 mice. The team found that the virus infected nerves in the gut, then entered the brain stem and finally reached the brain. In the brain, it led to chronic activation of the immune system, even long after the viral infection had been cleared.

This immune system activity later led to protein aggregation and neuron loss in the brain, and to symptoms like tremor and loss of coordination – the hallmarks of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Brain strains

"Infection with influenza virus might leave the brain vulnerable to damage from future infections with new influenza strains," says Smeyne, adding that this is more likely to happen in young children or during an flu pandemic.

Smeyne suspects that all flu viruses, including the current H1N1 swine flu pandemic, could cause symptoms of encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain. But he says that there is currently no proof that flu viruses other than the H5N1 he worked with can enter the central nervous system.

Reports of extra encephalitis during outbreaks of seasonal flu in Japan and the US, and most recently of swine flu-infected children hospitalised with neurological symptoms in Dallas, Texas, hint at a related mechanism, however.

"The link between flu infection and neurological disorders has been the elephant in the room [ever since 1918]," says virologist John Oxford, a virologist at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900096106

H1N1: Egypt pig slaughter prompts religious discourse

Egyptian police have clashed with pig farmers after announcing a cull to allegedly combat swine flu. Egypt has ordered the slaughter of 300,000 to 400,000 pigs as a so called, "precaution" against the effect of H1N1 virus, a move the United Nations said was "a real mistake"

These drastic and extreme measures have been taken by the north African country, although it has yet to report any H1N1 cases. This over-reaction could be due to the fact that Egypt was hit hard by bird flu in 2005/6 or there could be different, more fundamental reasons.

In Cairo, police fired tear gas at farmers and protesters who pelted them with rocks and bottles over fears they had come to seize their pigs. At least ten people were injured in the clashes in Manshiet Nasr, a shantytown on the outskirts of the capital city. Residents burned tyres and rubbish in the street to keep police at bay. Three officers were also injured in clashes with pig farmers in other areas of the capital.

The sad truth is that the H1N1 virus is being spread by people, not pigs. Destroying innocent and valuable livestock and the devastating effect this will have on the owners and their families, is beyond measure. In this poverty stricken area, these people are fighting for their lives.

Some political commentators say that culling swine, which are mainly raised by the Christian minority and viewed as unclean by Muslims, could have different and more sinister undertones, rather than simply being an extremely puzzling and foolish measure to quell rising public panic.

If this is the case, then a more severe backlash will develop over the coming days and weeks. Loosely targeted at the pigs, their owners and their livelihood, it may well plunge Egypt into increased levels of civil disobedience, fueled by bigotry, extremism and political unrest.

H5N1 (Bird Flu) virus - Risky move

IT'S emerged that virulent H5N1 bird flu was sent out by accident from an Austrian lab last year and given to ferrets in the Czech Republic before anyone realised. As well as the risk of it escaping into the wild, the H5N1 got mixed with a human strain, which might have spawned a hybrid that could unleash a pandemic.

Last December, the Austrian branch of US vaccine company Baxter sent a batch of ordinary human H3N2 flu, altered so it couldn't replicate, to Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, also in Austria. In February, a lab in the Czech Republic working for Avir alerted Baxter that, unexpectedly, ferrets inoculated with the sample had died. It turned out the sample contained live H5N1, which Baxter uses to make vaccine. The two batches seem to have been mixed in error.

Markus Reinhard of Baxter says no one was infected because the H3N2 was handled at a high level of containment. But Ab Osterhaus of Erasmus University in the Netherlands says: "We need to go to great lengths to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen."

H5N1 Pandemic Flu - breakthrough research

From my previous article on the H5N1 Pandemic flu virus, you will know that the flu virus constantly alters its surface proteins and constantly mutates into variant forms. This means that we can be infected many times over a lifetime and a flu vaccine made last year has but a short period of effectiveness.

Now studies show that this behaviour is just a decoy to guard the virus's more vulnerable parts; a fact that might enable us to make drugs, or a vaccine, that will work on all kinds of flu, year after year.

Flu's main surface protein, haemagglutinin, looks like a lollipop. Our immune systems mostly produce antibodies to its rounded head, and it is this part that changes every year, making immunity short-lived. But in a large library of human antibodies, Wayne Marasco at Harvard University and colleagues found very few that bind its "stalk", which barely changes at all, either through time or between different flu viruses.

To see if this might provide a way to attack the virus, they produced large amounts of the antibodies that home in on the stalk and found that they cured and protected mice from two kinds of H5N1 bird flu, as well as many other flu families including H1N1 pandemic and ordinary flu. The researchers now want to develop the antibodies as a flu drug, possibly to stockpile for pandemics.

The team also plans to test the stalk antibody as a vaccine, so that people produce more of these antibodies themselves. They suspect haemagglutinin's big head is a decoy aimed to attract the immune system's attention and to stop us making many antibodies to the stalk – a delicate bit of molecular machinery that not be so easy to change to evade our immune attacks. In tests on mice, they found that the flu viruses did not evolve to escape the treatment.

Another benefit is that such antibodies stay effective for more than three weeks when injected into people, and in a pandemic could keep people alive long enough to produce their own antibodies to the virus.

H5N1 Bird Flu - Pandemic preparation?

UK to double pandemic flu drug stockpiles in a futile attempt to prepare for a an epidemic of Bird Flu (H5N1) in the UK. I carried out a research project for the European Space agency in 2006 and published a paper of the findings. I still retain an interest in the subject and my attention was drawn to a recent move by the UK government.

Pharmaceutical vaccines
Tamiflu (Oseltamivir) - 1st line vaccine is ineffective against new strains of emerging bird flu

Relenza (Zanamivir) - common flu vaccine, may dampen down the effects or the symptoms of a flu virus

UK Government statement

The UK has awarded contracts to double emergency supplies of flu drugs, promising to treat ‘everyone who is predicted to fall ill in a pandemic’. The government claims that this makes the UK one of the most prepared countries in the world. This will please the pharmaceutical lobby more than the National Health Authority.

Pharmaceutical lobby

The agreements with Roche and GlaxoSmithKline will double antiviral stockpiles, which are expected to be in place by April 2009. The contracts will deliver an additional 7.6 million treatment courses of Tamiflu (Roche) and 10.6 million treatment courses of Relenza (GlaxoSmithKline). Once the extra capacity is in place, there will be 33.5 million ineffective treatment courses of antivirals, with limited shelf life.

High mortality rates

The government states that without antiviral treatment, estimates suggest that up to 750,000 people could die in the UK during a pandemic. Antivirals will play a key role in the clinical response, reducing the severity of the illness and reducing the chance that complications such as pneumonia will set in.The onset of pneumonia is more likely to be a bacterial infection due to the immune system being seriously compromised and the treatment for bacterial pneumonia is antibiotics.

Current status

There are currently enough drugs for a quarter of the population, but the latest cross-government pandemic plan aims to cope with the worst-case scenario of an infection rate that could hit up to half the UK population. The new contracts awarded by the Department of Health is said to ensure that that aim can be met. Unfortunately that is not the case.

H5N1 mutations

The bird flu virus mutates regularly through its RNA and for it to become a pandemic affecting humans, it needs to develop the capability of crossing the species barrier, from birds to humans. It has yet to do this, as far as we are aware. Bird flu has mutated and crossed from birds to other mammals e.g. mice, rats, cats, pigs, etc. The greatest risk will come if the virus mutates from bird to human, using another mammal as an interim host.

Maybe the UK government know better. Because the bird flu has not yet mutated, it has not yet been forensically examined. Therefore, a matching vaccine has not yet been developed i.e. one that specifically targets, a yet to be mutated flu virus. In average, and with maximum effort, it takes scientists and pharmacologists 6 months to develop a new anti-viral vaccine. So we are still in danger, when the time comes, despite noises to the contrary.

UK Public Health Minister

Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo said:

"The UK is already widely recognised as one of the best prepared countries in the world. The increased flu-drug stockpile means that we should be able to treat everyone who falls ill in a pandemic." I think the key word here is 'treat' not cure. You can treat a broken leg with a band aid but it doesn't help and will not 'cure' it.

Broken umbrella
Dawn continues "Antivirals are an important part of our robust countermeasure strategy and will ensure we respond effectively in the event of a flu pandemic." Nice speech Dawn but a think you had better look behind the pharmaceutical companies' curtains and see the truth for what it is, scary!

Further Information is available from; Roche Pandemic Preparation Toolkit AND GSK Pandemic Preparation page