When I first started my mini 'Bird Flu Watch' in August, there was not much interest in this at all. Since then we have been overtaken by events in Turkey. If you wish to keep up with the latest, here's a short-cut to:
Siew Peng
14th January 2006
From TIMESONLINE
DUTCH poultry farmers complied with a government order to move all
their birds indoors yesterday as
On Thursday experts from the European Union’s 25 member states are
to meet in Brussels to co-ordinate contingency plans to combat the threat.
At the weekend Italy announced stricter import controls,
heightened surveillance and accelerated vaccine production.
European worries about bird flu have mounted with evidence that
H5N1, the latest strain, found in western China last month, has been moving steadily
westwards. It has now reached Siberia and experts are saying that migratory fowl could bring it to Western Europe this autumn.
Discovered in China in 1997, bird flu has infected 112 human
beings since 2003, killing 57 in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. So far human beings who contracted the
disease got it from handling birds, but the World Health Organisation fears
that it might mutate into a human strain that could cause a global pandemic.
The Dutch have taken the most drastic action in Europe so far because the country was badly hit
in the previous outbreak in 2003. The European Commission banned the import of
live birds and feathers from Russia this month. Yesterday it insisted that
its measures so far were adequate.
The Commission said: “We are following the situation closely, but
we are not alarmist.” The authorities in Siberia and Kazakhstan ordered the slaughter of thousands of
birds during the past two weeks and 142,000 chickens are being monitored as
possibly infected on a poultry farm near Omsk, western Siberia.
The Commission said that it had been assured by Russia that reports of an outbreak west of the
Urals, near the Caspian Sea, were false.
Experts have been predicting that ducks and other birds will carry
the virus as they flee the autumn
chill, heading across the Black Sea and southern Europe.
Some 850,000 reach Britain later in the autumn every year,
including the mallard and ducks that are
thought to have brought the disease from Asia to Russia.
While the EU and national officials played down the danger, some
experts are talking of potential catastrophe on the scale of the 1919 influenza
epidemic if H5N1 changes into a virus that can be transmitted from human being
to human being. Tens of millions could die and the world economy could be
pushed into its biggest slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s,
pessimists say.
The Australian Government has plans to seal off the country from
the world, closing air and sea ports, in the event of an Asian bird flu
outbreak. Its contingency plan also calls for compulsory quarantine, closing
schools, public transport and places of work.
French
environmentalists are the Government for
complacency. Delhaye,
of Cap21, a small environmentalist party, said that France was especially vulnerable because of its large number of free-range poultry farms and the popularity of shooting migratory water birds. He said: “It is vital that we
rapidly take measures like the Netherlands and Germany.”
The menace of bird flu could give a much-needed boost to the
flagging fortunes of Gerhard, the German
Chancellor, who faces a general election on September 18.
Renate, the Agriculture Minister
and a Green Party member, has been campaigning on a safety-first ticket.
“We have to proceed systematically and with an eye on the risks,”
she said. The minister sees the biggest risk coming from the illegal animal
trade.
The
customs service has tightened controls on imported birds. German have been warned against visiting bird markets
and any kind of livestock trading centre east of the Urals.
Deadly bird flu virus is closing in on
AN OUTBREAK of avian flu among wild and domestic birds in Russia is spreading west and starting to
approach Europe, public health officials said yesterday.
The first cases of bird flu have been reported in the Chelyabinsk region of Siberia, close to the Ural mountains that separate Europe from Asia, though scientists are not yet certain
that the virus found there is the deadly H5N1 strain.
Roads were cordoned off and hundreds of chickens were slaughtered
in yesterday to contain the apparent advance
of avian flu, first reported in Siberia in July and being spread westward by
migrating birds.
In a letter to Russian regional health officials, Mr Onishchenko wrote: “An analysis of bird migration routes
has shown that in autumn 2005 the H5N1 virus may be spread from Western Siberia to the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. Apart from Russia’s south, migrating birds may spread the
virus to nearby countries (Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Georgia, Ukraine, Mediterranean countries) because bird migration routes
from Siberia also go through those regions in autumn.”
The virus is being carried by flocks of birds, particularly wild
geese and ducks, migrating from Siberia towards warmer regions. It has moved gradually west through the
regions of Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Omsk, Kurgan and Altai, as well as into Mongolia and Kazakhstan. Only in Altai, Novosibirsk and Omsk has the type of avian flu been confirmed as H5N1.
The latest region to be affected, Chelyabinsk, is the westernmost so far, about 600
miles (1,000km) from the first reported outbreak.
Roads leading to the infected village of Oktyabrskoye in Chelyabinsk, where 60 chickens have died, have been
cordoned off to prevent the virus spreading. “All ill and infected birds are
being slaughtered there,” the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement.
In other affected regions domestic birds were culled to block the
virus that has killed more than 10,000 birds countrywide.
Officials said that wild birds, increasingly active this month as
they prepare to migrate before winter, were to blame.
“Results of epizootic checks have shown that they (migrant birds)
are the main source of infection,” news
agency quoted an official with the Novosibirsk state consumer rights watchdog as
saying.
The
H5N1 strain of avian flu has led to the death from infection and culling of
tens of millions of birds across South-East Asia. It has also infected 112
people in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, causing 57 deaths. Russia has not yet experienced any
cases of affected human beings.
Scientists
are concerned that the H5N1 strain of avian flu could mutate so that it is
passed easily from one person to another. If that were to happen, it would have
the potential to trigger a lethal pandemic on the scale of the 1918-19 Spanish
flu in which 20 million to 40 million people died.
From the Singapore Straits Times
Bird flu outbreak reported in
China's Agriculture Ministry informed the
FAO on Thursday morning of the outbreak in the Tibetan capital, and said the chickens carried the H5N1 strain of the
virus, which has infected millions of birds in Asia, said Mr Zhang Zhongjun, an official in the FAO's
Beijing office.
There was no mention of any human cases, he
said.
A spokesman for the Agriculture Ministry
said he didn't know of any bird flu cases reported in Tibet.
Avian flu has killed more than 6,000
migratory birds in China's northern province of Qinghai and cases have been reported in the Xinjiang region in the northwest. Both areas border Tibet.
Health experts have warned that migratory
geese and gulls in Qinghai could be poised to spread the virus to
Migratory birds have not been susceptible to
bird flu in the past, and the outbreak of H5N1 among a huge population of wild
birds has raised fears that a new more virulent form of the virus has emerged.
H5N1 has devastated poultry stocks across the region, killing or forcing the slaughter of hundreds of millions of chickens and ducks since 2003.
The H5N1 virus has been entrenched in
poultry in Southeast Asia since 2003, and has infected people who came in
contact with sick chickens, claiming 61 lives. There have been no reports of
human infections in China.
Experts fear the virus will mutate into a
strain that can jump directly from person to person, unleashing a deadly
pandemic. -- AP
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