Avian Influenza (Bird Flu)

(CIDRAP News) – The specter of pandemic influenza raises a raft of questions for businesses, and businesspeople who gathered in Bloomington, Minn., today urged their peers to quickly seek answers to those questions.

(CIDRAP News) – The World Health Organization (WHO) today raised the possibility that Indonesia's latest confirmed case of H5N1 avian influenza was part of a family cluster of three cases.

(CIDRAP News) – More than a third of the human cases of H5N1 avian influenza that occurred over a 19-month period were clustered within families, suggesting the possibility that some family members caught the virus from others, according to a recent report.

(CIDRAP News) – Two more human cases of H5N1 avian influenza have been confirmed in recent days in Vietnam and Indonesia, while poultry outbreaks are spreading in China and Romania.

(CIDRAP News) – A 35-year-old woman who died Tuesday in China's Anhui province had the third confirmed human case of H5N1 avian influenza in China, according to Xinhua, the country's government news service.

(CIDRAP News) – About 250 wild swans died of an H5 avian flu virus infection on the Volga River delta in southern Russia, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report yesterday that cited Russian news agencies. Tests to determine if the strain was H5N1 had not been completed.

As a result of the swan die-off, a quarantine was being enforced in an area near the city of Astrakhan, AFP reported.

(CIDRAP News) – China's ambitious goal of vaccinating all its poultry against H5N1 avian influenza may be impossible and could even backfire by helping to spread the virus, according to experts quoted in recent news reports.

Chinese officials announced Nov 15 the aim of vaccinating the country's estimated current stock of 5.2 billion poultry, most of which are in small backyard flocks. Officials said China raises 14 billion birds annually.

(CIDRAP News) – Canadian officials said yesterday they would destroy all the poultry on a British Columbia farm where a duck was found to be carrying a low-pathogenic H5 avian influenza virus.

That announcement came 2 days after the Canadian government reported the identification of a low-pathogenic strain of H5N1 virus in wild birds in Manitoba and other flu viruses in wild birds in British Columbia and Quebec.

(CIDRAP News) – Preliminary tests indicate H5N1 avian influenza caused the death of a 35-year-old Indonesian man in Jakarta on Nov 19, according to a government official quoted today in the Jakarta Post.

However, Indonesia is awaiting confirmation from a World Health Organization (WHO) reference laboratory of what would be the country's eighth fatality from avian flu. WHO has already confirmed 11 cases, seven of them fatal, in Indonesia.

(CIDRAP News) – A routine government safety review of the antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) revealed 12 deaths in Japanese children who were taking it, but a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel concluded today that the deaths were not related to it.