Avian Influenza (Bird Flu)

(CIDRAP News) – Indonesia's health ministry announced today that a 21-year-old man who lived near Jakarta died of H5N1 avian influenza, according to media reports.

(CIDRAP News) – Officials in Bangladesh and Thailand recently reported new H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks on chicken farms, and Canadian authorities today confirmed an outbreak of H7N3 influenza on a commercial poultry farm in Saskatchewan.

The outbreak in Bangladesh occurred in the country's northwestern Bogra district, about 105 miles from Dhaka, the capital, according to a report yesterday from Xinhua, China's state news agency.

(CIDRAP News) – An Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee that studied issues concerning personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers in an influenza pandemic is calling for renewed efforts to learn how influenza viruses spread, promote proper use of PPE, and improve the equipment itself.

(CIDRAP News) – Close to 10,000 ducks died recently of H5N1 avian influenza in a village in southern China not far from Hong Kong, and a local official said the ducks had been vaccinated against the virus, according to news reports.

(CIDRAP News) – A government official in Bavaria said today there was a chance that some frozen duck meat contaminated with the H5N1 avian influenza virus made its way to consumers' tables, according to a German news agency.

The virus was found in 18 frozen ducks from a batch sample at a poultry company slaughterhouse, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reported today.

(CIDRAP News) – Indonesian health ministry officials today reported a fatal H5N1 avian influenza infection in a 33-year-old man from the island of Sumatra.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday released a lengthy list of safety violations it found in an investigation of a biodefense laboratory at Texas A&M University, where research on dangerous pathogens was suspended 2 months ago after problems came to light.

(CIDRAP News) – Russian officials announced today that hundreds of chickens at a farm in southern Russia died of H5N1 avian influenza, as international experts met in Bangkok to discuss how to better monitor the spread of the disease in Asia.

The poultry deaths were discovered in the town of Razdolny in Krasnodar territory on Sep 2, RIA Novosti, Russia's state news agency, reported today. The disease struck about 500 chickens.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today recognized five human H5N1 influenza cases from Vietnam dating back to late May, after publishing formal criteria for accepting positive test results for H5 flu viruses from national laboratories.

The five cases include four fatal ones, which pushes Vietnam's H5N1 toll to 100 cases with 46 deaths. The country has the second highest number of avian flu cases, after Indonesia.

(CIDRAP News) – The full results of a trial of GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK's) H5N1 influenza vaccine were released recently, showing that the vaccine in combination with an adjuvant produced an acceptable immune response at a low dose and may provide cross-protection against nonmatching H5N1 strains.