WHO report on human cases of avian influenza A(H7N9) infection
The World Health Organization has been publishing weekly reports on the avian influenza A(H7N9) outbreak which include the geographical location of each case, the cumulative number of cases, and the epidemiological curve. Go to this page at the WHO website for an archive of the weekly reports (there you will also find other useful information on the H7N9 outbreak). Images for report #3 of 24 April 2013 are reproduced below. Click each image for a larger view. (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - April 25, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Information avian influenza H7N9 China pandemic Shanghai viral virus WHO world health organization Source Type: blogs
First imported human infection with avian influenza H7N9
From the Centers for Disease Control in Taiwan:
In the late afternoon of April 24, 2013, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) confirmed the first imported case of H7N9 avian influenza in a 53-year-old male Taiwanese citizen who worked in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China prior to illness onset. He developed his illness three days after returning to Taiwan. Infection with avian influenza A (H7N9) was confirmed on April 24, 2013. The patient is currently in a severe condition and being treated in a negative-pressure isolation room.
It’s not clear how the patient acquired the infection in China; he had no contact wi...
Source: virology blog - April 24, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Events Information avian influenza H7N9 China imported infection Jiangsu Province pandemic Suzhou Taiwan viral virology virus Source Type: blogs
WHO Says H7N9 is One of the Most Lethal Flu Strains
There continues to be new cases of the H7N9 bird flu strain in China. An image of the H7N9 virus from the CDC is pictured above. So far there have been 108 lab-confirmed cases and 22 deaths. Taiwan has also confirmed a case, but the person did not catch it in Taiwan. He was hospitalized after returning from Shanghai. He is in critical condition.
Reuters reports that a World Health Organization (WHO) expert called H7N9 a very dangerous virus at a briefing. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's assistant director-general for health security, said, "When we look at influenza viruses, this is an unusually dangerous virus for humans. This i...
Source: HealthNewsBlog.com - April 24, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Tags: flu h7n9 avian-influenza Source Type: blogs
TWiV 229: Partly cloudy with a high of H7N9
On episode #229 of the science show This Week in Virology, Vincent, Rich, Dickson, and Alan review the current status of human infections with avian influenza H7N9 virus.
You can find TWiV #229 at www.twiv.tv. (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - April 21, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: This Week in Virology avian H7N9 brambling China duck H2N9 influenza pandemic reassortant Shanghai vaccine viral virus WHO wild bird Source Type: blogs
Avian influenza H7N7 virus outbreak: Lessons for H7N9
An outbreak of high-pathogenicity avian influenza H7N7 virus that took place on 255 poultry farms in the Netherlands during 2003 has been used to provide clues about the current avian influenza H7N9 viruses in China. During the Dutch outbreak 453 humans showed symptoms of illness and 89 were confirmed to have infection with the virus. Some interesting observations from that outbreak:
Conjunctivitis (inflammation of the membranes surrounding the eyelids) was observed in many of the human cases, as well as in later human infections with H7 influenza viruses. Apparently these viruses replicate well in the eye, which bea...
Source: virology blog - April 19, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Information avian influenza China H7N7 pandemic Shanghai viral virology H7N9 virus Source Type: blogs
Half of Tamiflu prescriptions went unused during 2009 swine flu pandemic
Around 50% of the Tamiflu prescriptions issued during the influenza pandemic in 2009–10 went unused in England, a study by the UK’s Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) has found.
The unused medication represents approximately 600,000 courses of Tamiflu at a cost of around £7.8m to the UK taxpayer.
The finding, published online in the open access scientific journal Plos One, comes from the first study of its kind to use sewage water to estimate drug compliance rates. The study estimated usage of pharmaceuticals from large populations by sampling sewage and recovering the active component of Tamiflu, thus measuring d...
Source: PharmaGossip - April 17, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: insider Source Type: blogs
Avian influenza H7N9 viruses isolated from humans: What do the gene sequences mean?
There have been over 60 human infections with avian influenza virus H7N9 in China, and cases have been detected outside of Shanghai, including Beijing, Zhejiang, Henan, and Anhui Provinces. Information on the first three cases has now been published, allowing a more detailed consideration of the properties of the viral isolates.
The first genome sequences reported were from the initial three H7N9 isolates: A/Shanghai/1/2013, A/Shanghai/2/2013, and A/Anhui/1/2013. These were followed by genome sequences from A/Hongzhou/1/2013 (from a male patient), A/pigeon/Shanghai/S1069/2013), A/chicken/Shanghai/S1053/2013), and A/en...
Source: virology blog - April 17, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Information China H5N1 h7n9 H9N2 influenza pandemic poultry viral virus zoonosis zoonotic Source Type: blogs
China: 44 H7N9 Flu Cases, One In Beijing
A 7 year old girl in Beijing has H7N9 influenza. Her parents sell poultry. So probably still transmission from birds. 11 dead so far. The scary part: Genetic sequence data indicate that the H7N9 virus may bind more easily to human receptors than avian receptors and that the virus may also be transmitted by air. Scarier still: H7N9 causes brain damage and damages other organs. See this NEJM about the potential for a global pandemic written by Timothy M. Uyeki, M.D., M.P.H., M.P.P., and Nancy J. Cox, Ph.D. We might still dodge this one. Hasn't shown up yet outside China. H7N9 might not mutate into a form easily transmitted b...
Source: FuturePundit - April 13, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
TWiV 227: Lacks security and bad poultry
On episode #227 of the science show This Week in Virology, the complete TWiV team reviews the controversial publication of the HeLa cell genome, a missing vial of Guanarito virus in a BSL-4 facility, and human infections with avian influenza H7N9 virus.
You can find TWiV #227 at www.twiv.tv. (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - April 7, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: This Week in Virology avian influenza BSL-4 eradication genome sequence guanarito h7n9 HeLa cell henrietta lacks pandemic pigeon poliovirus poultry viral WHO Source Type: blogs
First human infections with avian influenza H7N9 virus
Fourteen people in China have been infected with avian influenza H7N9 virus, leading to five deaths. This avian influenza virus has never been isolated from humans.
Influenza A viruses with the H7 hemagglutinin protein circulate among birds, and some, such as H7N2, H7N3, and H7N7, have been previously found to infect humans. It is not known how the individuals in China acquired the H7N9 virus. Some of the infections have occurred in Shanghai, where a similar virus was found in pigeon samples collected at a marketplace in that city. It is not clear what types of pigeon samples tested positive for the virus, nor is it known...
Source: virology blog - April 5, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Information avian influenza China h7n9 H9N2 HA hemagglutinin pandemic reassortant Shanghai viral virus Source Type: blogs
Roche offers researchers access to all Tamiflu trials
BMJ 2013; 346 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f2157 (Published 4 April 2013)
Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:f2157
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Deborah Cohen
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More than three years after the Cochrane Collaboration first asked Roche for the full clinical study reports for its influenza drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu), the Swiss company has offered the collaboration access to “all 74 Roche sponsored trials.”
Don MacLean, life cycle leader for Tamiflu at Roche, emailed the Cochrane researchers on 2 April to propose providing d...
Source: PharmaGossip - April 4, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: insider Source Type: blogs
Harvard University: Great virology, bad science writing
Harvard University is home to some of the world’s finest virologists. But apparently they do not communicate with the writers at Harvard Magazine, where a botched story on the avian H5N1 influenza virus has just been published.
The problems begin with the first paragraph:
But when Dutch researchers recently created an even more deadly strain of the virus in a laboratory for research purposes, they stirred grave concerns about what would happen if it escaped into the outside world.
Readers of virology blog will know by now that the Dutch researchers did not make an ‘even more deadly strain of the virus’ &#...
Source: virology blog - February 18, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Commentary Information aerosol transmission avian influenza H5N1 ferret fouchier kawaoka pandemic viral virus Source Type: blogs
Comment on H5N1 lethality in humans
In a brief letter to Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, Alan Zelicoff notes a problem with serosurveys for influenza H5N1 infection:
…peak titers after H5N1 infection occur at about 4 to 6 weeks postinfection and may drop by as much as 32-fold over the course of a year, probably decreasing the sensitivity of serologic testing for past asymptomatic infections. Micro-neutralization testing may be more sensitive.
He cites a serological survey carried out on poultry workers in South Korea, in which 9 of 2,500 subjects were found to have antibodies to H5N1 virus, in the absence of illness. These seropositive individuals carrie...
Source: virology blog - February 18, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Information avian influenza H5N1 bioterrorism microneutralization serological survey serosurvey viral virus Source Type: blogs
Human infections with influenza H5N1 virus: How many?
The lethality of avian influenza H5N1 infections in humans has been a matter of extensive debate. The >50% case fatality rate established by WHO is high, but the lethality of the virus might be lower if there are many infections accompanied by mild or no disease. One way to answer this question is to determine how many individuals carry antibodies to the virus in populations that are at risk for infection. A number of such studies have been done, and some have concluded that the results imply a low but substantial level of infection (even less than one percent of millions of people is a lot of infections). The conclusio...
Source: virology blog - February 7, 2013 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Commentary Information antibodies avian influenza H5N1 bioterrorism case fatality ratio fatality rate infection pandemic serological survey serosurvey viral virus Source Type: blogs
8 Damn Good Reasons Not to Get the Flu Shot
Are you thinking about getting the flu vaccine?
Every year the mainstream media war drum beats for you to get vaccinated against the flu. They rarely discuss anything but the benefits of the vaccine.
Why?
Maybe it is because many people are already skeptical about the flu vaccine.
I’m going to be very up front with you here. You rarely hear about the adverse reactions or about the toxic chemicals being injected into you. My goal is to get you to investigate vaccines more closely. Here are eight reasons to question the flu shot.
Let’s begin…
REASON #1: NEUROTOXIC INGREDIENTS
A common urban myth is that the mercury ha...
Source: vactruth.com - February 1, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Jeffry John Aufderheide Tags: Jeffry John Aufderheide Top Stories American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Dr. Gary Goldman Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thimerosal vaccine ingredients Vaccine Safety Viral Shedding Source Type: blogs
