H5 found in wild birds in Canada; testing needed to see if is Asian H5N1

[Mojorabbit]

http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=9705d992-07c4-457a-a38f-8f40c33fd1fc
H5 found in wild birds in Canada; testing needed to see if is Asian H5N1

Helen Branswell
Canadian Press

Monday, October 31, 2005

(CP) - Several wild birds in Quebec and Manitoba have tested positive for H5 flu viruses.

Officials said Monday they don't know yet if the birds - 28 in Quebec and five in Manitoba - have the dangerous H5N1 subtype of the avian flu. Even if they do, it's not necessarily the exact strain responsible for lingering poultry outbreaks in southeast Asia.

"It's important to clarify that the avian influenza virus is not new to wild birds," Jim Clark of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency told a news conference.

snip

Even if the Canadian birds have the H5N1 virus, it doesn't mean they are necessarily closely related to the viruses behind the Asian outbreaks. The World Health Organization says those outbreaks have infected 121 people and caused 62 deaths in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Cambodia.

[LSparkle]

1. Yikes ... this is too close for comfort

[whatever4]

2. and I was just talking about moving to Canada nm

[ZigSteenine]

3. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh

Run for your lives!!!!!

We're all going to die from the bird flu!!!!!!!!


Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

:sarcasm:


Bird Flu, Schmird Flu

Something to fill time on the 24 hr news cycle!

[KurtNYC]

6. You probably said the same thing about the Y2K bug

the one that shut down the whole world and made us all starve to death in the dark... or at least it was supposed to. ;-)

[whatever4]

13. *titter*

I'm sorry, I guess this was shameless bait. I had actually just written a post about moving to Canada. This thread coming right after that made me hoot. Which is good, it's better than crying, but mostly it's funny how desperation and fear was read into my post.

Y2K, that is funny. Yes, I was a little worried about it, mostly because I'd been a programmer for over ten years and was involved with the fixing of it.

Amusing to hear people talk about how Y2K turned out to be nothing, when so many of us worked so hard. To hear it laughed about, when I and many like me were expected to either be on-call or to attend New Years Eve parties AT work, that New Years Eve, in case there were any problems. When some people complained about being forced to be there, instead of with their families, in case something happened, the party was made family-friendly. Bring the wife and kids, stay all night, that sort of thing. Because it wasn't anything to worry about? Sure, if you think businesses around the nation and the world did stuff like that for NO reason, I'd say, you must not be a very good businessman yourself. Those types of resources are NOT expended for no good reason. No, make no mistake, you might have thought there was "nothing to it" with Y2k, but I can verify how much work and worry went into that anti-climax, and the fact that it was the biggest software test EVER. Bar none. I can promise you it WAS a problem, but, we fixed it.

I just wish we had cube farms of rows and rows of programmers working to fix our current problems, don't you?

IN any case, this comment about Canada meant nothing more than it said. Sorta a sneaky shot at those that DO jump up and down at the drop of a hat. ;)

[unhappycamper]

4. Mojorabbit:

Please be aware that DU copyright rules require that excerpts of copyrighted material be limited to four paragraphs and must include a link to the original source.

Thanks,

unhappycamper
DU Moderator

[Mojorabbit]

5. Whoops

I know that. I am having a blonde day. My apologies and fixed.

[unhappycamper]

7. Thank you.

I frequently have days like that myself......

[mike_c]

8. H5 avian flu is COMMON and widespread-- this is not news folks...

...unless it turns out to be the SAME H5N1 strain that is the highly virulent asian variety. That is not impossible at this point, but is quite unlikely. I think this is another case of a reporter not understanding what the H5 designation means.

[TygrBright]

9. Exactly... just be glad you're not a PHO!

A friend of mine retired recently from the position of Director of Public Health for a very large suburban county. Although the county has serious, ongoing problems with AIDS and other STDs, teen pregnancy, mental illness and chemical dependency, and intermittent but urgent problems with food-borne illness, TB, measles outbreaks, etc., guess what this highly-paid, extremely-skilled public servant spent LARGE amounts of her time doing the last couple of years she was in office?

Picking up dead bird corpses because people were so mortally terrified of West Nile. Number of confirmed West Nile cases in the county during those couple of years: zero. Number of hours spent hopping in a van with containment bags, etc., and schlepping dead bird corpses to the lab: hundreds.

Something tells me that PHOs are in for another run of dead bird collecting, yesindeed. Glad my friend is retired!

wearily,
Bright

[mike_c]

11. I have a PHO friend who tells similar stories...

...and one of my students has spent the last several months-- since early summer-- helping him with mosquito surveys because he doesn't have the budget or the expertise to do it himself. We have actually had quite a few dead birds positive for West Nile virus in this county, although no human cases yet. Frankly, if he were to ever do viral swabs or lung samples of dead birds, or of waterfowl killed by hunters, or of the thousands of chickens and other birds raised in yards in this county, the results would likely horrify the marginally informed. There would undoubtedly be lots of H5 avian flu, as well as H1 viruses, and probably even some H5N1 strains. They're pretty ubiquitous among bird populations.

[XemaSab]

12. There ain't much you can get from a bird

My a**hole boss freaked out when I picked up a sick bird, but he didn't say anything when my collegues picked up a sick rabbit. (In Tulare county, no less.)

[NashVegas]

10. Interesting email Newsletter

This is from financial adviser John Mauldin (I think he's a conservative? Not positive, but pretty sure):

There is not anything fundamentally new in this year's bird flu scare.

A more likely vector, therefore, would be for H5N1 to leap into a species of animal that bears similarities to human immunology yet lives in quarters close enough to encourage viral spread -- and lacks the capacity to complete detailed questionnaires about family health history.

The most likely candidate is the pig. On many farms, birds and pigs regularly intermingle, allowing for cross-infection, and similar pig-human biology means that pigs serving in the role as mutation incubator are statistically more likely than the odd Vietnamese raw-chicken eater to generate a pandemic virus.

And once the virus mutates into a form that is pig-pig transferable, a human pandemic is only one short mutation away. Put another way, a bird flu pandemic among birds is manageable. A bird flu pandemic among pigs is not, and is nearly guaranteed to become a human pandemic.

...

In 1918 the influenza outbreak spread in two waves. The first hit in March, and was only marginally more dangerous than the flu outbreaks of the previous six years. But in the trenches of war-torn France, the virus mutated into a new, more virulent strain that swept back across the world ... Soldiers not only faced degrading health from their "quarters" in wartime, but even when they were not fighting at the front they were living in barracks. Such conditions ensured that they were: a) not in the best of health, and b) constantly exposed to whatever airborne diseases afflicted the rest of their unit.

...

And it should be no surprise that in 1918, circulation of military personnel was the leading vector for infecting civilian populations the world over.

In other words, people need to calm down.