BBC News Austria detects bird flu in cats

"Austria says it has detected the potentially lethal strain of bird flu in several live cats.

The discovery, in the southern state of Styria, follows the detection of H5N1 in a dead cat in Germany last week.

That case was thought to be the first example outside Asia of the virus crossing species to infect a mammal."

ABC News WHO: Bird Flu Bigger Challenge Than AIDS

"The lethal strain of bird flu poses a greater challenge to the world than any infectious disease, including AIDS, and has cost 300 million farmers more than $10 billion in its spread through poultry around the world, the World Health Organization said Monday.

Scientists also are increasingly worried that the H5N1 strain could mutate into a form easily passed between humans, triggering a global pandemic. It already is unprecedented as an animal illness in its rapid expansion."

redux [02.17.06]
The Mercury News Venture fund first to back biodefense

"One of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture-capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has raised the nation's first fund to invest in companies developing drugs and technologies to prevent and combat pandemics."

"The [ $200 million ] pandemic fund, formally called the ``KPCB Pandemic and Bio Defense Fund,'' is significant because it comes at a time of heightened public awareness about the risks of a breakout of avian flu and other diseases. The bird-flu virus now spreading in Asia and Turkey can infect humans who come into contact with infected birds. If the virus mutates into a human-transmitted disease, it will move around the world with shocking speed, experts and governments have warned."

Forbes Bird flu epidemic could kill 142 mln, cost 4.4 trln usd - Australian academics

"A global bird flu pandemic could kill as many as 142 mln people and wipe some 4.4 trln usd from economic output, according to a worst-case scenario published by Australian academics.

The study, released today by independent policy body the Lowy Institute, found that even a mild outbreak would have a sustained impact on the world economy."

redux [01.27.06]
National Post Bird flu's deadly shadows of 1918

"More similarities have been found between the bird flu creeping into Eastern Europe and the 1918 Spanish flu that decimated populations worldwide -- including the discovery of an entirely new way bird flu may kill human cells.

Researchers from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., have found that bird flu viruses carry a gene that can latch onto many crucial proteins inside human cells, presumably disrupting their function and causing far more severe disease than human viruses."

redux [01.06.06]
NPR Seattle at Forefront of Planning for Flu Pandemic

"The researchers provided NPR with numbers showing how the pandemic would unfold in the Seattle area. Eighty thousand people would be sick in the Seattle area within two months of an outbreak, according to the projections. And 1-in-10 of them might need to be hospitalized."

"On day 68 of a pandemic, Seattle-area hospitals might have to take care of 1,900 flu patients."

"Martin's pretty confident the area's hospitals could handle that number of patients. But on Day 78, there might be 6,300 people needing hospital care. And on Day 86 -- the peak -- it could be 9,000, just on that one day alone.

"Clearly, we could not take care of 9,000 patients and support them from a ventilatory standpoint," Martin said of those peak numbers."

redux [12.23.05]
International Herald Tribune Limits found in bird flu drug's use

"The first scientific study of humans with bird flu who have received the anti-viral drug Tamiflu has found that the bird flu virus can rapidly become invulnerable to the medicine.

If the drug is overused, used improperly or even used very widely, the current research suggests that Tamiflu - also known as oseltamivir - will quickly become impotent against the disease, leaving doctors with little else to offer ill patients."

redux [12.05.05]
WorldNetDaily Has feared mutation of avian flu arrived?

"Officials in at least two nations now suspect the avian flu bug has mutated into a virus that is being transmitted from human to human – a development world health authorities have estimated could result in the deaths of tens of millions.

Thai health officials have expressed concern that the country's two latest confirmed victims may be the beginning of the much feared human-to-human transmission."

All Headline News U.S. Prepares Local Governments For Flu Pandemic

"With the threat of the avian bird flu and Europe reeling with the effects of the disease, U.S. policy makers are stepping up their efforts to prepare the nation for a pandemic.

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt met today with senior state and local officials to establish a uniform federal-state influenza-pandemic planning process. Officials from every U.S. state, territory, Puerto Rico and tribal governments participated. The officials were advised to plan broadly."

NPR Grim Scenario Predicted for Pandemic Flu

"A federally financed study used supercomputers to predict what might happen if a virulent and easily spread new strain of flu entered the United States. The study was done by researchers at Emory University and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

They assumed the pandemic virus would leak into the country despite efforts to screen travelers for flu symptoms. If each infected person spread the virus to two others, large outbreaks of flu would occur all over the country within about two months after the virus began to spread. The national epidemic would peak around day 85, with about 4.5 million people falling ill that day. In the end, 122 million Americans may have gotten sick, more than four times the toll in a usual flu season."

The Sunday Times Doctor says bird flu drug is ‘useless’

"A VIETNAMESE doctor who has treated dozens of victims of avian flu claims the drug being stockpiled around the world to combat a pandemic is “useless” against the virus.

“We place no importance on using this drug on our patients,” she said. “Tamiflu is really only meant for treating ordinary type A flu. It was not designed to combat H5N1 . . . (Tamiflu) is useless.”"

"Van, who has also treated patients with Sars, the respiratory condition linked to birds, said avian flu had a frightening effect on its victims and the only way to keep patients alive was to “support” all their vital organs, including the liver and kidneys, with modern technology such as ventilators and dialysis machines."

Chicago Sun-Times Many companies admit no planning for pandemic

"If a super-flu sweeps the globe, who will haul away the garbage? Keep the factories running? Stock and sell groceries? Keep electricity flowing?

Most U.S. companies haven't planned for how to stay in business during a flu pandemic, when their workers might be too sick or scared to show up and their supply chains disappear, a major new survey of some of the nation's largest companies shows."

redux [10.17.05]
The Economist The spreading bird-flu menace reaches Europe

"European countries are introducing emergency measures to contain the spread of a deadly strain of bird flu—which has already led to the deaths of millions of birds and 60 people in Asia—after confirmation that it has arrived inside the EU's borders. The disease is a serious threat to the world’s sizeable poultry industry but its spread round the globe also increases the chances of it mutating into a form that causes a human pandemic.

Guardian Unlimited Bird flu could kill more than 50,000 in UK, warns chief medical officer

"A bird flu pandemic is inevitable but unlikely to strike Britain this winter, the chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, said yesterday in an attempt to talk up the government's preparedness for the infection, but talk down its imminence.

He said contingency planning was based on an estimate that a new strain of flu mutating from infection in the bird population could kill about 50,000 people in the UK, compared with about 12,000 flu-related deaths in a normal winter."

redux [10.10.05]
Times Online America 'faces worst disaster in its history'

"A PLAN drawn up by the Bush Administration to combat a pandemic bird flu outbreak reveals that America is grossly unprepared to deal with what would likely be the worst disaster in US history.

The 381-page draft plan, leaked by health officials who claim that it contains fundamental failures, predicts that a full-scale outbreak could kill as many as 1.9 million Americans and put 8.5 million in hospital at a cost of more than $450 billion (£256 billion)."

The Boston Globe Europe bracing to battle bird flu

"Europe is bracing for bird flu and the potentially catastrophic pandemic the virus might bring.

Public health officials on the continent, spurred by grim warnings from the World Health Organization, are hoping that the disease spreading westward from Asia will afflict only domestic poultry. But as a strain of the avian disease was detected in Europe for the first time over the weekend, governments were seeking ways to cope with a virus that epidemiologists consider likely to transform into a human pathogen that could trigger a global outbreak of deadly influenza similar to one that killed millions in 1918."

USA Today U.S. health secretary warns of future bird flu pandemic

"Leading a multinational team of medical experts to mobilize Southeast Asian nations against bird flu, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said Monday the likelihood of a flu pandemic in the future is "very high."

Leavitt, accompanied by the director of the World Health Organization and other top health professionals, is visiting Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to seek their collaboration in preparing for the anticipated public health emergency."

CNN Bush military bird flu role slammed

"A call by President George W. Bush for Congress to give him the power to use the military in law enforcement roles in the event of a bird flu pandemic has been criticized as akin to introducing martial law.

Bush said aggressive action would be needed to prevent a potentially disastrous U.S. outbreak of the disease that is sweeping through Asian poultry and which experts fear could mutate to pass between humans."

The Boston Globe Bush's risky flu pandemic plan

"Of all these proposals, the use of the military to attempt to contain a flu pandemic on US soil is the most dangerous. Bush says he got the idea by reading John Barry's excellent account of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, ''The Great Influenza." Although quarantine was used successfully in that pandemic, on the island of American Samoa, Barry in his afterword suggests (sensibly) that we need a national plan to deal with a future influenza pandemic."

"Planning makes sense. But planning for ''brutal" or ''extreme" quarantine of large numbers or areas of the United States would create many more problems than it could solve."

The New York Times Danger of Flu Pandemic Is Clear, if Not Present
[requires 'free' registration]

"But scientists say that although the threat from the current avian virus is real, it is probably not immediate.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said a bird flu pandemic was unlikely this year."

"Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, chief of the molecular pathology department at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, said, "I would not say it's imminent or inevitable." Dr. Taubenberger said he believes that there will eventually be a pandemic, but that whether it will be bird flu or another type, no one can say."