Dead aristocrat may hold key to bird flu

Digging up the past to solve the bird flu...

2/28/2007 — Scientists want to exhume the body of a British diplomat who died of Spanish flu during the 1919 pandemic in hopes of discovering clues to fight a possible future global outbreak sparked by the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus.

Sir Mark Sykes, best known for his work dismantling the Ottoman Empire, was buried in a lead-lined coffin, which may have preserved enough human tissue to yield useful information on how he died and the nature of the avian flu that killed him. "We're after an intact body," said John Oxford, a professor of virology at Queen Mary's College. "Sometimes people who have been buried in lead are very well preserved. If we obtain (the body), then we can ask a lot of important questions about the way that Sir Mark died."

Understanding more about the Spanish flu might help scientists design better treatments for H5N1. Victims of Spanish flu frequently experienced an overly aggressive immune response, which began to attack their own bodies. The same phenomenon has been seen in human H5N1 cases. "The first thing we'll be looking at is the pathology of the lung — whether he was overwhelmed by his own immune response," Oxford said.

Spanish flu victims have been studied before — including Inuit bodies recovered from the Arctic permafrost and corpses of World War I soldiers. Experts estimate the Spanish flu killed more than 40 million people worldwide. Oxford said it was extremely difficult to locate flu victims who were buried in lead-lined coffins, in part because few records were kept about coffins. In addition, it can be difficult to find the descendants of victims.

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Researchers hopeful of new H5N1 vaccine
March 05, 2007 - RESEARCHERS in the US believe they have found an easily-produced vaccine for the killer H5N1 bird flu that could halt a feared pandemic.

Dr David Ho of the Aaron Diamond Aids Research Centre in New York said the vaccine would be "easy to produce, fast to produce and as broadly protective as possible", according to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper. Dr Ho spoke to the English-language daily during a lecture visit to Hong Kong, where the first human cases of H5N1 infection were recorded in 1997, when six people died.

The report said tests on mice had shown the animals had produced the antibodies necessary to fight the disease, which has killed more than 160 people since outbreaks in Asia in 2003 spread throughout the world. While the virus has decimated poultry flocks, it cannot yet transfer efficiently enough between humans for it to spark a pandemic.

But as the virus is mutating all the time, health experts fear the day when it does become easily transmitted is not far off. A pandemic would then claim millions of lives, they warn. The report said Dr Ho claimed to have overcome the problem of manufacturing enough of the vaccine to get it out fast enough to halt a pandemic.

More http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...-23109,00.html

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Close call...

World 'dodged bullet' in bird flu spread
August 29, 2007 - A MATHEMATICAL analysis has confirmed that H5N1 avian influenza spread from person to person in Indonesia in April, US researchers reported today.

They said they had developed a tool to run quick tests on disease outbreaks to see if dangerous epidemics or pandemics may be developing. Health officials around the world agree an influenza pandemic is overdue, and are most worried by the H5N1 strain of avian influenza that has been spreading through flocks from Asia to Africa. It rarely passes to humans, but since 2003 it has infected 322 people and killed 195 of them.

Most have been infected directly by birds. But a few clusters of cases have been seen and officials worry most about the possibility that the virus has acquired the ability to pass easily and directly from one person to another. That would spark a pandemic. Ira Longini and colleagues at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle looked at two clusters - one in which eight family members died in Sumatra in 2006, and another in Turkey in which eight people were infected and four died. Experts were almost certain the Sumatra case was human-to-human transmission, but were eager to see more proof.

"We find statistical evidence of human-to-human transmission in Sumatra, but not in Turkey," they wrote in a report published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. "This does not mean that no low-level human-to-human spread occurred in this outbreak, only that we lack statistical evidence of such spread." In Sumatra, one of Indonesia's islands, a 37-year-old woman appears to have infected her 10-year-old nephew, who infected his father. DNA tests confirmed that the strain the father died of was very similar to the virus found in the boy's body.

"It went two generations and then just stopped, but it could have gotten out of control," Mr Longini said. "The world really may have dodged a bullet with that one, and the next time, we might not be so lucky." The researchers estimated the secondary-attack rate, which is the risk that one person will infect another, was 20 per cent. This is similar to what is seen for regular, seasonal influenza A in the United States.

World 'dodged bullet' in bird flu spread | NEWS.com.au

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Faster and cheaper than current tests...

New Quick And Cheap Bird Flu Test
24 Sep 2007 - Scientists in Singapore say they have invented a quick and cheap bird flu test in a hand held kit that can detect the deadly H5N1 virus in under 30 minutes.

The innovation is reported in the journal Nature Medicine and is the work of Dr Juergen Pipper and colleagues at Singapore's Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. The device relies on two technologies. One is a microfluid platform that manipulates a droplet from a throat swab using magnetic forces that act on paramagnetic particles in the droplet, and the other is a lab technique called real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCT).

Combined in a easy to use hand held device, the two technologies allow the scientist to take a throat swab, isolate, purify and amplify the viral RNA, and then scan it to see if it contains H5N1. Successful containment of a potential global bird flu pandemic will depend, said the researchers, on rapid diagnosis of the first clusters of cases. But this would be virtually impossible in countries lacking basic public health resources, where samples would have to sent to centralized labs for testing.

A handheld device that is cheap, reliable and easy to use would enable local testing for H5N1. The researchers concluded in their study that the "minilab" prototype is just as sensitive as the commercially available tests, about 440 per cent faster, and between 2,000 and 5,000 per cent cheaper. The device could also be adapted to detect HIV, Hepatitis B and SARS, wrote the scientists.

More New Quick And Cheap Bird Flu Test

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Drug-resistant bird flu???

Tamiflu may create resistant bird flu
October 03, 2007: TAMIFLU - the frontline weapon in any bird-flu pandemic - cannot be broken down by sewage systems and could help the virus mutate dangerously into a drug-resistant strain, Swedish scientists say.

Countries around the world are stockpiling Tamiflu in the belief it will help curb any future outbreak of H5N1 avian flu among humans. Tamiflu, whose lab name is oseltamivir, is not a cure for flu but can ease its symptoms, thus aiding vulnerable patients such as the elderly, and reduce the time of illness, thus easing the burden on caregivers. Scientists led by Jerker Fick, a chemist at Umea University, tested the survivability of the Tamiflu molecule in water drawn from three phases in a typical sewage system.

The first was raw sewage water; the second was water that had been filtered and treated with chemicals; the third was water from "activated sludge," in which microbes are used to digest waste material. Tamiflu's active ingredient survived all three processes, which means that it is released in the waste water leaving the plant. The finding is important because of the risk that Tamiflu, if overprescribed, could end up in the wild in concentrations high enough to let H5N1 adapt to this key drug, the authors say.

Flu viruses are common among waterfowl, especially dabbling ducks such as mallards which often forage for food near sewage outlets. "The biggest threat is that resistance will become common among low pathogenic influenza viruses carried by wild ducks," said co-author Bjoern Olsen, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Uppsala and University of Kalmar. These avian viruses could then recombinate with ordinary human flu viruses, creating new strains that are resistant to Tamiflu, he said.

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Gettin' closer to humans...

Bird flu virus mutating into human-unfriendly form
Fri Oct 5, 2007 - The H5N1 bird flu virus has mutated to infect people more easily, although it still has not transformed into a pandemic strain, researchers said on Thursday.

The changes are worrying, said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans," said Kawaoka, who led the study. "The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus," Kawaoka said.

Recent samples of virus taken from birds in Africa and Europe all carry the mutation, Kawaoka and colleagues report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens. "I don't like to scare the public, because they cannot do very much. But at the same time it is important to the scientific community to understand what is happening," Kawaoka said in a telephone interview.

The H5N1 avian flu virus, which mostly infects birds, has since 2003 infected 329 people in 12 countries, killing 201 of them. It very rarely passes from one person to another, but if it acquires the ability to do so easily, it likely will cause a global epidemic.

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New cold bug kills 10, scores sickened...

New cold bug kills 10 over last 18 months
15 Nov. 2007 - Scores sickened as mutated virus becoming more common, CDC says

A mutated version of a common cold virus has caused 10 deaths in the last 18 months, U.S. health officials said Thursday. Adenoviruses usually cause respiratory infections that aren’t considered lethal. But a new variant has caused at least 140 illnesses in New York, Oregon, Washington and Texas, according to a report issued Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

CDC officials don’t consider the mutation to be a cause for alarm for most people, and they’re not recommending any new precautions for the general public. “It’s an uncommon infection,” said Dr. Larry Anderson, a CDC epidemiologist. The illness made headlines in Texas earlier this year, when a so-called boot camp flu sickened hundreds at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. The most serious cases were blamed on the emerging virus and one 19-year-old trainee died.

“What really got people’s attention is these are healthy young adults landing in the hospital and, in some cases, the ICU,” said Dr. John Su, an infectious diseases investigator with the CDC. There are more than 50 distinct types of adenoviruses tied to human illnesses. They are one cause of the common cold, and also trigger pneumonia and bronchitis. Severe illnesses are more likely in people with weaker immune systems.

More New cold bug kills 10, scores sickened - Cold and flu - MSNBC.com

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Adverse juvenile effects of flu medicines...

FDA: Flu drugs affecting kids' behavior
Sat Nov 24, 2007 : WASHINGTON - Government health regulators recommended adding label precautions about neurological problems seen in children who have taken flu drugs made by Roche and GlaxoSmithKline.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday released its safety review of Roche's Tamiflu and Glaxo's Relenza. Next week, an outside group of pediatric experts is scheduled to review the safety of several such drugs when used in children.

FDA began reviewing Tamiflu's safety in 2005 after receiving reports of children experiencing neurological problems, including hallucinations and convulsions. Twenty-five patients under age 21 have died while taking the drug, most of them in Japan. Five deaths resulted from children "falling from windows or balconies or running into traffic."

There have been no child deaths connected with Relenza, but regulators said children taking the drug have shown similar neurological problems. While FDA said it isn't clear whether the problems are directly related to the drugs, it recommends adding language about the possible side effects to labeling for physicians who prescribe Tamiflu and Relenza.

Besides being a drug side effect, the agency said the behaviors alternately could result from an unusual strain of flu or a rare genetic reaction to the drug. Company representatives were not immediately available for comment.

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China developes bird flu vaccine...

China's bird flu vaccine for humans 'safe and effective'
Dec 24, 2007 - China announced Monday that its human-use bird flu vaccine had proved 'safe' and 'effective' during the second phase of clinical tests.

The vaccine was jointly developed by the Beijing-based vaccine producer Sinovac Biotech, the first in the world to develop a SARS vaccine, and the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. China's ministry of science and technology and the ministry of health have also supported the programme. Zhang Jiansan, vice-general manager of the Sinovac Biotech, said the second phase of clinical tests was carried out from September to November with approval of the Chinese state food and drug administration. A total of 402 people aged 18 to 60 participated in the test.

Test results showed that the major index of the vaccine reached international standard and performed well in the human body. None of the test takers were found with serious negative reaction, which proved that the vaccine was safe. Zhang said test participants of different ages were given different dosages of vaccine, and the result was also positive. 'It means the vaccine could give multiple choices in treating flu-infected people.

'We were able to control the dosage and immunization procedure during the second phase of clinical tests, which also provided us scientific and effective methods to combat highly infective influenza,' Zhang said. Observers said China has completed its technological preparation to combat influenza with the success of human-use bird flu vaccine research and clinical tests. 'China is also capable of producing human-use bird flu vaccine in appropriate quantity,' Zhang stressed.

China's bird flu vaccine for humans 'safe and effective'

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Granny says, "Get yer flu shot!"...

Regular flu vaccine may help against bird flu
Wed., Dec. 26, 2007 WASHINGTON -- Annual shot could provide some protection against H5N1 virus, study finds

Ordinary seasonal flu vaccines may provide a small amount of protection against bird flu, Italian researchers reported on Wednesday. Their study is among the first to support the idea that getting an annual flu shot may help people’s bodies fight off the H5N1 virus, which has killed 210 people in 13 countries and infected 341.

Cristiana Gioia, Maria Capobianchi and colleagues at the National Institute for Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani in Rome tested the blood of 42 volunteers who had been vaccinated against seasonal influenza. In the laboratory, they added H5N1 virus to the blood and found that in some of the volunteers immune system proteins called antibodies acted against the bird flu virus.

They also found a few immune cells called CD4 T-cells seemed to recognize and act against H5N1 virus “and seasonal vaccine administration enhanced the frequency of such reactive CD4 T-cells,” they wrote in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. “Our findings indicate that seasonal vaccination can raise neutralizing immunity against (H5N1 avian influenza) virus,” the researchers concluded.

More Regular flu vaccine may help against bird flu - Cold and flu - MSNBC.com