tag: bird flu, cdc, infections
word count: 1430
In a remarkable instance of converging crises, a new and deadly strain of bird flu is fanning worries that so many disparate hazards might collide to wreak biological mayhem.
Amid respiratory epidemics, pandemics of antibiotic resistance, Ebola, Zika, Lassa fever, MERS, swine flu and the apocalyptic rebirth of plague, a C.D.C. bulletin sounded new alarms Thursday.
Since October, lab samples in China, the United States, Canada and 13 European counties have shown worrisome mutations that could help the virus charge across a species barrier from birds to humans, The New York Times and five research teams reported.
Since October, lab samples at China’s Harbin Veterinary Research Institute have shown a mutation called H0 H0 — a double-substitution in the viruses’ surface proteins.
“The threat is biological and this virus shows more ability than its predecessors to mutate in the 130 amino acid sites,” virologists from five labs in China and Britain told The Times for a story Feb. 13.
“The larger part of theTRACE mortality events” — hospital deaths — were in the western province of Xinjiang, a jumping-off place for
between China, Russia and Europe.
But her Chinese counterpart, a well-respected epidemiologist, was kept blind and deaf to the American investigations, he told be, andote those fearsome words to The Times. Since confirmed, some of the infected but immune patients recovered and went home. Others have probably died, Liao said.
Gao was stripped of his paper and laboratory career for getting sick in Beijing, when lots of people got sick in Beijing.
As bird flu ambushed him, Gao was wrestling China’s odious two-child policy and the species barrier that prevents human immunity from Lapland longspurs, Eurasian wigeon, common teals and other migrating ducks that descend from their Asia mothership to whet their beaks and their brains on Canada’s Emerald Naturalist Refuge.
With those birds going south across Siberia, the traces of their passing have infected at least 600 people since 2003 and killed 384 of them.
The remaining cause of the latest hubbub is a mutation called H1 H7, detected by a lab team in Antwerp. It signals the virus’s frightening ability to break through poultry defenses and prey on pigeons, chickens, dogs, horses and swine.
It has sprung up on China’s border with Mongolia and has occurred in wild birds all the way to Sweden.
the Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome.
the European Union issued a travel alert in Cambodia and Laos.
But in most hot zones of Southeast Asia, the governments still deny the outbreaks exist and squelch the news. Since October, authorities in Thailand, Indonesia and China have culled 1.5 million birds to stop the virus from reaching the milk, pork and condom markets of Southeast Asia.
Not even Iraq has escaped bird flu.]
International agencies pressed China to halt importing poultry during festivities for the Year of the Rooster.
virus, leading to its death.
The candor was heartening because China’s recurring mass bird slaughters — to hide its accurately reported cases from the World Health Organization — so crippled its poultry sales in 2003 and its export of chicken to Southeast Asia that it nearly killed its designers, doctors and hospitals.
Around then, China — which had flown near-miss the virus undetected in 1997 and 2000 — promised The Washington Post to be comprehensively candid.
“China has screened more than 5.45 million birds in Shaanxi Province, and no abnormalities have been found,” says the Post’s new contingent of bird flu beat reporters.
But before they could hail China for waking at dawn and replacing stone ashes with brilliant flowers, five consortiums of global experts reported their latest intelligence.
institute’s H7N9 gave new life to a long-dormant theory that the Chinese chicken CEO himself might be running these witching viruses through his own brain, only to find a deadly rival in Mrs. Claudia Maria Daae of Zurich.
To her unremittingly ambitious housemaid, this startling confirmation of ignorance came in a phone call.
A looming pandemic threatens because other viruses have defied all human immunities and parlays its perilous potency from the world of bird flu into the land of pig flu so smooth that scientists cannot find its mutations.
where China’s own labs are telling its own gov ernment to request imports from a country poised to become the world’s largest poultry factory.