News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Overcoming the threat of avian influenza is the single most pressing agricultural and public health issue facing Southeast Asia, Singapore's minister of state for national development, Cedric Foo, said yesterday in opening a regional meeting on the disease, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

(CIDRAP News) – Southeast Asian nations are mounting a two-tiered attack on the avian influenza virus that has devastated poultry flocks and raised the specter of a potential human flu pandemic.

On the pandemic front, scientific advances and policy efforts are laying the groundwork for preparedness in Hong Kong and mainland China.

(CIDRAP News) – As public health ministers and officials from 13 Asian countries conferred in Bangkok last week on how to prevent the spread of H5N1 avian influenza, experts offered troubling predictions.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization's (WHO's) top official in the western Pacific said yesterday that SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) cases may return this winter but probably not in large numbers.

"I don't think a large outbreak is likely," Dr. Shigeru Omi, director of the WHO's Western Pacific Regional Office, said in a speech in Hong Kong. Omi was quoted in a WHO news release.

(CIDRAP News) – Clinical trials of a vaccine designed to keep the H5N1 avian influenza virus from sparking a human flu pandemic will begin early in 2005, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said this week.

(CIDRAP News) – A dead gray heron found in Hong Kong had H5N1 avian influenza, according to news reports.

A railway worker in the restricted area of Lok Ma Chau found the heron and turned it over to the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department for testing Nov 1, according to Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, and Agence France-Presse (AFP).

(CIDRAP News) – Southeast Asian nations have agreed to band together to coordinate response to the deadly avian influenza outbreak that has caused 31 human deaths and widespread poultry losses.

(CIDRAP News) – In a bid to limit the threat of an influenza pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is awarding a contract to Aventis Pasteur Inc. to make 2 million doses of a vaccine for humans to protect against H5N1 avian influenza.

(CIDRAP News) – Influenza viruses in 18% of a group of Japanese children who were treated with oseltamivir (Tamiflu) developed resistance to the antiviral drug, which is viewed as one of the key defenses against pandemic influenza, according to a new report in The Lancet.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal health officials today released a lengthy plan for dealing with the potentially overwhelming threat of an influenza pandemic like those that occurred three times in the last century.