Avian Influenza (Bird Flu)

(CIDRAP News) – US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Mike Leavitt, in Vietnam today on the second leg of a 10-daytour of Southeast Asia, revealed new details on his blog today about his talks with Indonesian officials on two controversial issues: the country's refusal to freely share H5N1 virus samples and the status of the US Navy's medical laboratory unit, NAMRU-2.

(CIDRAP News) – Japan's health ministry today said it was on the verge of approving a plan to administer prepandemic vaccine to healthcare workers, which would make it the world's first country to tap its national stockpile for this purpose.

(CIDRAP News) – Animal health officials in South Korea yesterday said an H5N1 avian influenza outbreak was confirmed at a fourth farm, amid reports of several more suspected outbreaks, a day after Russia's agriculture ministry said the virus had struck birds in the far eastern part of the country.

(CIDRAP News) – Egypt's health ministry announced today that a 30-year-old woman has died of an H5N1 avian influenza infection, the country's second fatality from the disease in less than a week.

(CIDRAP News) – A 52-year-old Chinese man probably caught H5N1 avian influenza from his dying son while caring for him in a hospital last December, but others who had close contact with both patients were not infected, Chinese researchers reported this week in The Lancet.

(CIDRAP News) – A 19-year-old Egyptian man died of H5N1 avian influenza Apr 5, raising the country's H5N1 toll to 48 cases with 21 deaths, according to news services.

The man was from the Nile Delta province of Beheira and had been exposed to infected poultry at home, said reports by Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Bloomberg News.

(CIDRAP News) – Veterinary officials in India recently confirmed that the H5N1 avian influenza virus has struck poultry in a second state, Tripura, as animal health authorities in South Korea announced a new outbreak at a duck farm near where the virus was confirmed a few days ago after a year's hiatus.

(CIDRAP News) – Agriculture officials in South Korea today confirmed that large numbers of chicken deaths at a commercial farm in the southwestern part of the country were caused by H5N1 avian influenza.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today confirmed two more cases of H5N1 avian influenza from a family cluster that surfaced in Pakistan last fall, supporting the previous finding that the virus probably spread among four brothers but went no further.

(CIDRAP News) – China's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA) yesterday approved the country's first prepandemic H5N1 influenza vaccine, an inactivated whole-virus product made by Sinovac, a Beijing-based biotechnology company.