This pisses me off

[Mojorabbit]

First sproadic news reports come out of Pakistan that there is human to human bird flu. A vet gets it and dies. His brothers take care of him and another dies. The third brother tests positive. No tests on the first two before they are buried. There are reports of up to ten people testing positive including a doctor. Then one of the brothers gets on a plane for New York. The CDC somehow finds out about this and he has mild resp symptoms. They test him and they say he tested neg. Then they wait a while before they inform the WHO. Why the secrecy? Did they quarantine the rest of the people on the plane with him or just let them go about their business? It does not make sense.

Here is an article on it.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071215/avian_flu_071215/20071215?hub=Health&s_name=

and
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/avianflu/news/dec1407pakistan-jw.html

[Didereaux]

1. ALL Pakastanis are our friends....and

and, and they have the BIMB! Yes we must cower before the protectors of bin Laden or we will all be BIMBED!

Remember its the CDC that was revamped by that eminent Medical genius Tommy Thompson the first two years of the Chimps puppetentcy.

[Mojorabbit]

2. If this guy had tested positive

I wonder how long they would have waited to let anyone know. Why did they let him back in the country without being tested first? This is how a pandemic will arrive here if the virus mutates enough and by the time tptb notify anyone it will be too late to contain it.

[Mojorabbit]

3. Another article on the cluster

Pakistan Has Eight Suspected Human Cases of Bird Flu (Update1)

By Jason Gale

Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Five members of a family in Pakistan are among eight people who may be the country's first human cases of bird flu, the World Health Organization said. At least one brother died.

Pakistan's national laboratory found the lethal H5N1 avian flu strain caused the infections in three brothers and two cousins from the same family, according to information from a WHO statement today and Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman in Geneva. Another brother and his son from the U.S., who attended a funeral for one of the victims, tested negative for the virus at a hospital in Nassau County, New York, Hartl said.

Medical teams have been sent to Pakistan to assist local authorities in investigating the cases, in which two people had only mild symptoms, Hartl said. Avian flu has infected at least one person a month in Asia and Africa during the past three years and doctors are monitoring for signs it may be adapting to humans by killing fewer people, fostering its spread.

"It's too early to make any definitive conclusions'' about the outbreak, Hartl said in a telephone interview today. "We are still in the middle of it.''

The remaining suspected cases include a man and his niece, and a male who worked on a farm about 12 miles (20 kilometers) away.

Doctors from WHO in Geneva and Cairo, and from the U.S. Navy Medical Research Unit No. 3 in Cairo will arrive in Pakistan over the next two days to track and stem the disease's spread, and to analyze specimens for any genetic mutations in the virus.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aYP_YfthdMiA

[Mojorabbit]

4. This makes me feel better

that they did not know he was coming in but then again it shows how easy it would be for it to slip in under the radar.


The WHO said confirmatory testing must still be done. And a spokesperson for the agency said investigations are underway to try to determine how the various people became infected, but noted some human-to-human spread may have occurred.

"We can't rule it out," Gregory Hartl said from Geneva.

"There are other plausible explanations.... We don't know enough at this point. And in some of these cases, one never will know enough."

snip
Meanwhile, U.S. public health authorities have confirmed they conducted H5N1 testing on a man who had recently visited Pakistan and was complaining of mild respiratory symptoms. The man, who officials will only identify as having a link to the cluster, is said to have been concerned he might have been infected.

"The individual went to his private physician after returning from Pakistan, and discussed this with his physician," said Claire Pospisil, a spokesperson for the New York State department of health.

Pospisil said the doctor contacted the local health department in Nassau County, where the man lives, and they collected samples for testing. The tests came back negative.

David Daigle, a spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, said the CDC sent its plane to Albany on Dec. 8 to collect specimens for confirmatory testing. Within hours a CDC lab verified the state lab's findings.

"He was negative. There was no doubt about it," Daigle said from Atlanta on Saturday.
http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5gl49j9v2NcnPwVlOrbtNIG1xrkLw

[Mojorabbit]

5. This is not good

Three more bird flu victims detected in NWFP



NIH confirms two patients suffering from H5N1; Federal Health Ministry taking steps to control virus

By Mushtaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR: The NWFP Health Department on Saturday feared that the bird-flu pandemic could engulf the whole province as three more victims of the virus were admitted to hospitals in Peshawar and Abbottabad.

“The virus can spread to the whole province if precautionary measures are not taken on war-footing by the federal government and the concerned international donors,” remarked NWFP Caretaker Health Minister Syed Kamal Shah.

Also, heirs of two young students and Pakistan’s first-ever bird flu victims held the authorities concerned responsible for their loss.

Official sources told ‘The News’ that three more patients suffering from bird-flu virus were brought to hospitals in the NWFP.

Two patients ñ a 10-year-old girl and a man ñ living in the vicinity of a poultry farm in Abbottabad were admitted to hospitals in Abbottabad district on Saturday.

Health Minister Kamal Shah said one of the patients was admitted to the Ayub Medical Complex (HMC) and another to a private health facility, Shahina Jamil Hospital.

Sources told this scribe that blood samples of both the patients were sent to the National Institute of Health (NIH), which confirmed the two patients were suffering from H5N1 virus, which is considered the most severe bird-flu virus.

Also, blood samples of the third patient who was admitted to Peshawar’s Khyber Teaching Hospital (KTH) were sent to NIH, which is supposed to release report within 24 hours.

Two young brothers ñ Muhammad Idrees and Muhammad Ilyas ñ had lost their lives in the KTH, mainly because of the negligence of the hospital administration as well as lack of coordination between the provincial and federal health departments.

Health Minister Kamal Shah said he did not want to hide the facts from the people and felt the situation could become critical if necessary measures were not taken in time by the federal government as well as by the international donor agencies.

“This is a totally new challenge, which we are completely ill-equipped and ill-planned to tackle,” explained the minister.

He said since it had been confirmed now that the two brothers died in Peshawar were the victims of bird-flu virus, the NIH officials still did not send their report to his ministry. He said if the NIH released its report positive, then they would send it to the Communicable Disease Centre (CDC) in Atlanta, America, for further verification. “For me, the lives of our people are more important than the poultry industry,” he remarked.

Senior officials of provincial health department said people in the poultry industry were powerful enough to manipulate the bosses of the NIH from releasing its report of the deadly disease that took precious lives and posed serious threat to many others.

The two patients admitted in Abbottabad were reportedly living in the vicinity of a poultry farm.

Similarly, the third patient in Peshawar belonging to the nearby Palosai town was serving as attendant of his wife in KTH when the two brothers were admitted there. Doctors in the KTH said the man was sleeping during the night near the isolation room where the two brothers were kept. He was suffering from severe pneumonia when brought to hospital and was shifted to an isolation room.


http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=11764

[Mojorabbit]

6. Update

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071216/ap_on_re_as/pakistan_bird_flu
WHO to investigate Pakistan bird flu

By STEPHEN GRAHAM, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 37 minutes ago



ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - International health experts have been dispatched to Pakistan to help investigate the cause of South Asia's first outbreak of bird flu in people and determine if the virus could have been transmitted through human contact, officials said Sunday.


Four brothers — two of whom died — and two cousins from Abbotabad, a small city about 30 miles north of Islamabad, were suspected of being infected by the H5N1 virus, said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl in Geneva. A man and his niece from the same area who had slaughtered chickens were also suspected of having the virus.

Another person in a separate case who slaughtered poultry in nearby Mansehra, 15 miles away, also tested positive for the disease, he said.

Details surrounding the cases remained confusing, with Pakistan's Health Ministry issuing a statement Saturday saying six people had initially tested positive for the virus last month, while the WHO said eight had been reported. Hartl said the discrepancy was likely linked to a technicality since six patients had tested positive using an internationally recommended method while a less reliable test was used on the others.
snip

Hartl said WHO has not ruled out limited human-to-human transmission.

"We can't answer that yet," he said. "It's possible."

snip
People who came into contact with those infected in Pakistan are being monitored, the WHO said

[Mojorabbit]

7. Two good synopsis

from the right and from the left.
From the right. http://www.scottmcpherson.net/journal/2007/12/14/all-eyes-on-pakistan-as-h5n1-h2h-transmission-grows-more-pro.html
In one of the numerous Pakistani H5N1-related bird culls of the past few months, a veterinarian appears to have been exposed to the H5N1 avian flu virus last October. Remember that date. He then, by all appearances, transmitted the virus to one or more of his brothers. They died ten days apart, strongly suggesting a chain human-to-human transmission, precisely because of the lag times. If the two sons were infected by, say, eating a diseased chicken at the same dinner table, or even as leftovers, the infection incubation period -- and therefore the deaths -- would have occurred much more closely together.

But they didn't, and the timetable gets really scary here. If the vet brother (A) gets infected in October during the cull, and one brother (B) dies on November 19 and the other brother (C) on November 29, there is reason to strongly suspect the infections were passed down like a daisy-chain. Human to human. Chain transmission.

The next wrinkle is really something. There was another brother (D) of the vet, and who is a resident of -- drum roll, please -- the United States! He gets the word that brother B died November 19th, and goes home to Mansera, Pakistan. He then manages to contract bird flu himself and tests positive for the disease. After hospitalization and confirmed recovery, he returns to the Long Island, New York area. Immediately upon his arrival at the airport in Nassau County, New York, local health authorities and the CDC immediately place him (D) in quarantine and test him thoroughly until it is determined he tests negative for H5N1 and is now safe to release. Kudos to the CDC and the authorities in Nassau County, New York. So the CDC can find people now! That is a comforting fact.

much more at blog


and from the left.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/16/91552/542/450/422616
with a great overview

[Mojorabbit]

8. nytimes picks up the story

Tests Negative on L.I. Man Whose Relatives Had Avian Flu


By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: December 18, 2007

Avian flu in Pakistan nearly touched the United States this month when a 38-year-old Nassau County resident returned from visiting family members who were later confirmed to be part of Pakistan’s first cluster of human infections.

But the resident, who landed at Kennedy International Airport on Dec. 5 and visited his family doctor the next day, tested negative for flu, both at a state laboratory and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the New York State Health Department and the C.D.C. said.

The cluster of human cases in Pakistan — which apparently began in November — was described last week in Pakistani press reports, which were picked up by flu-watcher Web sites.

But only on Saturday did the World Health Organization say that Pakistan had detected H5N1 virus in eight people, two of whom had died. The H5N1 virus is the strain of avian flu that has international health officials most worried about the threat of a pandemic.

All the cases occurred in the remote North-West Frontier Province, near the Afghan border, where outbreaks of H5N1 in poultry have been reported for months.

Exactly how the Long Island resident was connected to the cluster was vague.

Pakistani media reports said a man who had attended the funerals of his two brothers in late November had returned to the United States. State and federal officials could not confirm that on Monday.

While some reports said he visited his doctor because he felt ill, a State Health Department spokeswoman said he had not.

Another family member on Long Island had flu symptoms even before his relative returned from Pakistan, but both tested negative, the spokeswoman said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/nyregion/18flu.html?_r=2&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[Mojorabbit]

9. And a weird story

Kuwait: Two quarantined in bird flu scare

KUWAIT (Agencies): An Indian man and his son who is believed to be suffering bird flu have been quarantined in Kuwait, reports Al-Wasat daily. The disease was discovered by chance when the man was on his way to Hyderabad aboard an Indian flight No IC862. When an immigration officer asked the man about his son, the man reportedly told the officer that his son who was leaving on the same flight with him 'may be' suffering from bird flu. The Infectious Diseases Hospital, where the son was reportedly confined, refused to comment on the case or even admit the child was admitted at that place. Immigration officers at the airport referred both passengers for medical examination and a report showed the boy was indeed suffering from bird flu. The concerned authorities are collecting information about the family and the school where the boy was studying as a precautionary measure to ensure the safety of others.

more at link http://www.arabtimesonline.com/client/pagesdetails.asp?nid=9580&ccid=9