News Reports for June 26, 2012

China: Dead bird tested H5N1-positive in Hong Kong

http://news.xinhuanet.com/engl...

HONG KONG, June 25 (Xinhua) -- A dead scaly-breasted munia found in northern Hong Kong has tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus, the city government said in a statement on Monday.

The bird was found on June 18. The scaly-breasted munia is a common resident bird in Hong Kong. (continued)

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by: AlohaOR @ Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 04:05:21 AM UTC

H1N1 Swine Flu May Have Killed 15 Times More Than First Said

The swine flu virus, H1N1, may have killed 15 times the number of people counted by the World Health Organization, according to a new study. And unlike the seasonal flu, the H1N1 pandemic struck down mostly young people, many living in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Beginning in 2009, the virus swept the globe, and the WHO counted 18,500 swine flu deaths that had been confirmed by laboratory tests. But according to new estimates from researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the virus probably killed between 105,700 and 400,000 people around the world in its first year alone, and an additional 46,000 to 179,000 people likely died of cardiovascular complications from the virus.

MORE

http://news.yahoo.com/h1n1-swi...

Always have a plan B.

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by: maryinhawaii @ Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 04:47:46 AM UTC

Similar report from Reuters via Toronto Star

Swine flu outbreak in 2009 was 15 times deadlier than reported, says study

NEW YORK- The swine flu pandemic of 2009 killed an estimated 284,500 people, some 15 times the number confirmed by laboratory tests at the time, according to a new study by an international group of scientists.

The study, published on Tuesday in the London-based journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, said the toll might have been even higher-as many as 579,000 people.

The original count, compiled by the World Health Organization, put the number at 18,500.

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by: pogge @ Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 12:19:19 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

and HealthDay

http://www.philly.com/philly/h...

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by: DemFromCT @ Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 13:31:27 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

The Evolution of Bird Flu, and the Race to Keep Up

On May 20, a 10-year-old girl in rural Cambodia got a fever. Five days later, she was admitted to a hospital, and after two days of intensive care she was dead. The girl was the most recent documented victim of the influenza virus H5N1, a strain that has caused 606 known human cases and 357 deaths since it re-emerged in 2003 after a six-year absence.

H5N1 can race through bird populations, and the World Health Organization suspects the girl was infected while preparing chicken for a meal. While humans are not ideal hosts for H5N1, bird flu viruses do sometimes manage to adapt for easy transmission from human to human, and the results can be devastating. In 1918, one such transformation led to the Spanish flu pandemic, a global outbreak that claimed an estimated 50 million people.

To better understand the possibility of H5N1 making a similar transformation, two teams of scientists recently manipulated the virus until it could spread through the air from one ferret to another. If a flu virus can infect a ferret, then it could theoretically infect other mammals, including humans.

(Snip)

The experiments offer two examples of how H5N1 could theoretically become a human flu. "It's important work," said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard. "The most important thing it did was put to rest the claims that H5N1 just couldn't be transmitted between mammals. We know this is a serious possibility."

But just because such a virus can exist doesn't necessarily mean that it will evolve in the wild. How flu viruses cross the species barrier remains deeply mysterious. "We know that it happens, but we also know it must not be easy," said Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, a virologist at the National Institutes of Health who has studied the 1918 flu. Dr. Taubenberger and other researchers warn that we don't know enough about the flu to say how likely it is that H5N1 will take the two paths presented in the new papers - or a different path. "We are still woefully ignorant about how all of this works," he said.

The new paper describes the more straightforward of the two experiments. Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands and colleagues started off with H5N1 isolated from an Indonesian patient and introduced mutations to the virus's genes. They then transferred the virus from one ferret to another, allowing more mutations to accumulate. After five mutations, viral strains emerged that were able to spread from one ferret to the next through the air.

Acquiring a series of mutations is also probably how a bird flu gave rise to the 1918 pandemic. In another paper in Science, Derek Smith, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge, and his colleagues investigated how easy it would be for natural H5N1 to acquire the five mutations identified by Dr. Fouchier. They found that two of the mutations have arisen numerous times in the wild. In one group of closely related H5N1 viruses, both mutations are present in their genes, so they would need to acquire only three more mutations to spread between mammals.

To judge the likelihood of that, they developed a mathematical model based on what is known about flu viruses. A flu infection can produce 100 trillion new viruses in a matter of days. And because these viruses have a high mutation rate, just about every new virus will be slightly different from its ancestor. Dr. Smith and his colleagues found that under plausible conditions, there was a small chance that the flu viruses could gain the final three mutations in a single person during a single infection. Continued: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06...

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. --Unknown

     

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by: Carol@SC @ Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 07:03:32 AM UTC

Study Reveals Flu-fighting Role for Well-known Immune Component

University of Georgia scientists have discovered a new flu-fighting role for a well-known component of the immune system. Kimberly Klonowski, assistant professor of cellular biology in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and her colleagues found that administering a cell-signaling protein known as IL-15 to mice infected with influenza reduces their peak viral load by nearly three times.

"We gave the IL-15 intranasally and found that it enhanced the movement of the immune system's natural killer cells and CD8 T cells into the lung airways," said Klonowski, whose findings were recently published in the journal PLoS ONE. "As a result, the animals that received it cleared the virus faster than the control group."

Klonowski cautioned that the protein is only effective against influenza for a defined period of time immediately following infection, which would make its use as a flu treatment difficult to implement. She added that IL-15 has been tested as a vaccine-booster, or adjuvant, in other viral diseases such as HIV, monkey pox and hepatitis B; understanding its mechanism of action is essential to maximizing its effectiveness in these contexts.

IL-15 was discovered nearly 20 years ago and is part of a group of immune system proteins known as interleukins. Klonowski noted until recently, however, its primary role was thought to be the maintenance of immune memory cells. Yet Klonowski and her colleagues found that concentrations of the protein surge in the respiratory tract in response to influenza infections, which led them to hypothesize that it also might play a role in controlling the virus.

The scientists devised a series of experiments in mice to discern the role of IL-15 in the immune response. It turns out that IL-15 is one of the body's critical first responders during influenza infection. Continued: http://www.biosciencetechnolog...

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. --Unknown

     

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by: Carol@SC @ Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 15:50:53 PM UTC

Toronto: Flu shot should be mandatory [for health care workers]: health board

At healthzone.ca (which is a web property of the Toronto Star newspaper):

Toronto's board of health is pushing ahead with the idea of mandatory flu shots for health-care workers because too few staffers are voluntarily getting vaccinated. Among the worst performers last flu season were the Rouge Valley Centenary Hospital in Scarborough, where only 26 per cent of staff got the shot, and the Ukrainian Canadian Care Centre, a North York long-term-care home, where only 7 per cent got immunized.

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by: pogge @ Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 19:42:34 PM UTC

Please post new news stories to...

News Reports for June 27, 2012

Thank you!

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by: AlohaOR @ Wed Jun 27, 2012 at 05:00:42 AM UTC