Thursday, June 15, 2006

June 15 Flu Update

China says it tested 98 contacts of the newest flu victim, and they were all negative.

The 7 year old girl who died in Indonesia June 1 is a confirmed positive H5N1 death. Here's a comment in the WHO update:


"The newly confirmed case is one of several where exposure occurred despite a clear signal of a high-risk situation arising from poultry deaths. Pending better control of the disease in animals, WHO and officials in the Ministry of Health see an urgent need to improve public awareness of this disease, the risk factors for infection, and the behaviours that should be avoided."


Skeptical of actually getting compensation, people in Indonesia are not cooperating with the government's flu containment program.

The esteemed Helen Branswell has this on Canadian flu preparations.

Conference Board vice-president Prem Benimadhu suggested the findings were "a bit surprising," especially given only 28 per cent of the businesses asked to respond to the survey even bothered to answer.

"The surprise is the gap between concern and execution," he said.

Macao is on bird flu alert.

A Doc and health board member in Lincoln (MA) had this to write about the bird flu for local readers.

Canada says it will limit its Tamiflu stockpiles to a relatively low population ratio, saying a vaccine is key.

Revere writes on the difficulty of local news reports (oh, so available with the Internet) to get reliable info, as he has human translations of two different stories on a sick reporter who might have been H5N1. Of course, a sick reporter would be H5N1 fear, but is that what it is?


Here's Recombinomics on the same reporter (heavy user of machine translations).

We've written here about Secretary Leavitt and the Magical Mystery Flu Tour. Apparently, WaPo is criticizing him for too much use of the plane. Revere comes to his defense.

Finally, Effect Measure notes the case in China, saying that it appears to be another sporadic infection--and its a mystery on who gets sick and who doesn't.

Recombinomimcs notes neurological involvement in a case from the Sumatra cluster, which leads to some genetic inferences.

China is trying to evaluate whether past bird immunization efforts have been effective.

Polk County (IA) is holding its final bird flu forum.

Cuba says it is ready to detect and fight bird flu anywhere in the country.

New Zealand apparently has some live H5N1 for case detection purposes, and its being kept under heavy, heavy biosecurity.


We reported a couple days ago on the story about protecting pets from bird flu. Here's an interesting an acerbic mod comment on ProMed.


It is clear that the UC Davis faculty found a ready listener in Ms Tansey and it is now summertime. If this risk were real, we would have had reports (plural) from Europe of infected domestic cats.

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