Here are some snips from the article. Worth a look. The usual doomsayers, Osterholm and Webster, get the big quotes. My take at the end of the piece.

IHT

“I’ve gotten at least 10 media calls in the last few months asking me to deliver the death sentence for avian flu,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But at any conference, if you get a group of virologists at the bar, after the fourth beer, they let their hair down and admit it — they don’t know what is happening. They’ve been incredibly humbled by this virus.”

Robert Webster, a virologist at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, ended a talk with a slide of three animals in a reference to Asia. “We’ve survived the Year of the Chicken and the Year of the Dog,” he said. “Will we survive the Year of the Pig?”

The Year of the Pig begins Sunday, and the Lunar New Year celebrations in China and Vietnam have become associated with flu outbreaks because so much poultry for family feasts is on the move. “My take-home message,” Webster added, “is don’t become complacent. Don’t trust this one.”

But the virus is out of control in poultry in three countries — Indonesia, Nigeria and Egypt — with combined populations of 447 million people. A year ago, it was out of control only in Indonesia, and Thailand and Vietnam had stifled outbreaks, although the virus returned. China remains a mystery — despite official denials, there is evidence that it is circulating there.

Most alarming to the experts, although it got relatively less attention, was the death last month of a 22-year-old Nigerian woman, an accountant who lived in the crowded financial capital, Lagos.

Officially, only one death from H5N1 was confirmed, but Nigerian newspapers said the woman’s mother died with similar symptoms two weeks earlier, and a female relative was sick but recovered. If true, that suggests a cluster of cases with possible human-to-human transmission. Tests on them were negative, but human H5N1 tests are best done on fresh samples from deep in the lungs, which are hard to obtain, and false negatives are common.

In Nigeria, despite the culling of 700,000 birds, the flu has been found in 19 of 36 states, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Oyedele Oyediji, president of a Nigerian veterinarians’ association, told local newspapers that bans on poultry movement and culling orders were simply not being enforced. “If you go to the markets in Lagos now,” he said, “you would notice that poultry products like guinea fowl, ducks, turkey and chicken from the northern part of the country are still available.”

Nigerian farmers have complained that government cullers pay them only $2 for chickens that cost them $5 to $7 to raise. But payments, supported by the World Bank, seem to be made fairly promptly through local police stations.

Indonesia, by contrast, provides farmers with $1 vouchers that may not be cashed for three or four months, said Tri Satya Putri Naipospos, the country’s chief veterinarian. “It’s our weakest implementation,” she admitted. “It should be treated as an emergency, but we still follow routine budget mechanisms.”

Eighty percent of all Indonesian households keep poultry, she said, the flu is in 30 of 33 provinces and still few take the threat seriously enough. “Farmers say dying chickens are normal in life,” she said. “And you must realize that 62 dead people in one and a half years? That’s not very much in Indonesia. Three hundred thousand die from TB, from dengue. People in the villages don’t grab what is a pandemic.”

World Health Organization reports almost always link human cases to proximity to dead poultry, but Naipospos, the Indonesian flu expert, released data at a flu conference in Washington on Feb. 1 calling that into question. In the 82 human cases studied, she said, only 45 percent of victims had direct exposure to sick poultry.

An additional 35 percent had “indirect” exposure, which meant sick birds in the neighborhood, and 20 percent were “inconclusive.” “Unlike in Thailand and Vietnam,” she said, “our risk factors are not clear.” Virologists believe that the situation that must be avoided at all costs is to have humans with seasonal flu catch H5N1, too, because the viruses could mix.

Indonesia’s best prevention against that, Naipospos said, is the “Tamiflu blanket.” “We learned that in Garut,” she said of a cluster of cases last August in West Java. More than 20 people died or suffered serious symptoms.

The government quickly gave the antiviral drug to more than 2,000 people.

Ultimately, only three cases in the cluster were confirmed, but scientists suspected some were missed and the drug suppressed the virus to undetectable levels in others.

Despite what the learned doctors say, it may be that the ordinary Indonesian is correct. 62 versus 300,000. It is not a big deal at this time and may never be.

Let’s be very realistic. If this becomes a pandemic, there’s not a damn thing we can do about the millions who will die in the Third World. Tamiflu is not 100% effective, and it must be given daily for the life of the pandemic. There just aren’t that many doses and there will not be. Even if the medicine exists, religious and social restrictions will come in to play, just as the Moslems limiting the polio vaccinations in Nigeria created an epidemic throughout Africa and Asia.

And, just how do you propose to deliver this medicine? Bad weather, bad roads, not enough medical personnel.

However, if Drs. Osterholm and Webster could just get a few million more dollars for research, we may all be saved.

Keep in mind that it ain’t bird flu until the WHO says that it’s bird flu.

WHO

31 January 2007

The government of Nigeria has announced the death from suspected avian influenza infection in a 22-year-old female from Lagos. She died on 16 January 2007. The mother of the 22-year-old died on 4 January with similar symptoms.

Preliminary tests on the samples from the 22-year-old were positive for influenza A/H5. Samples have now been sent to a WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza for confirmation. Results are expected shortly. No samples were taken from the mother.

Contacts have been followed up and have shown no symptoms at twice the incubation period for avian influenza infection. Samples have been tested from these contacts as well as from three other suspected cases, including one fatal case and have all been negative in preliminary tests. These samples have also been sent to a WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza.

It is important to reiterate that properly cooked poultry meat is safe to consume when cooked at temperatures at or above 70°C in all parts, until none of the meat is red. There is no epidemiological evidence to indicate that people have been infected with H5N1 virus following consumption of properly cooked poultry or eggs. The greatest risk of exposure to the virus is through the slaughter and handling of live or already dead infected poultry. More detailed recommendations can be found here.

WHO is working with the government of Nigeria to monitor the situation.

There is no lab in Nigeria capable of testing for H5N1. The samples were probably sent to London or Cairo, to the Navy lab there. It is FAR more likely that these deaths were due to ordinary influenza.

Michael Fumento comments in the Examiner.

Ersatz experts like Laurie Garrett, a renowned pandemic panic-monger, warn of a horrific mortality rate from the bird flu virus. “Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects,” she told ABC News’s Primetime last year. St. Jude’s alarmist Webster referred to a similar death rate in his New England Journal of Medicine article, and the media routinely parrot it. By comparison, the devastating 1918-1919 Spanish flu is believed to have killed 2.5 percent to 5 percent of those it infected. The death rate in a typical flu season is less than 1 percent. It’s true that, of bird flu cases recorded by the World Health Organization, 59 percent have died. But this is a mere artifact with an obvious explanation: Only people with the most severe cases go to the hospital and become part of the dataset.

As to what the true mortality rate is, over a three-month period in 2004, Swedish and Vietnamese researchers studied 45,478 residents in a rural district in Vietnam that had H5N1 outbreaks to find out how many had contact with sick birds and how many had flu-like illnesses. They published their results in January 2006 in the Archives of Internal Medicine. They found that of 8,149 who had a flu-like illness, 650 to 750 probably caught it from birds. Yet for all of 2004, the World Health Organization data indicated only 29 Vietnamese cases with 20 deaths. Thus what might seem to be a horrific mortality rate of almost two in three, or 69 percent, appears to be actually around one in 140 or 0.71 percent. This, in the rural portion of a Communist country with a state-run medical system. That 0.71 percent is in the same range as seasonal human flu.

More good news from Vietnam, incidentally, is that it has reported zero cases in 2006. Why? As I wrote last year, “Vietnam appears to be making a heroic effort to inoculate all of its poultry.” If you can keep poultry from getting flu, you’ve knocked down the chance of a human pandemic from close to zero to absolute zero.

Michael and I have been in virtual agreement about avian flu from the beginning. Please go and read the entire Examiner article. This exerpt is from page two.

Here is a little analysis of the current bird flu stats, timeframe and geography.

258 cases, 153 deaths.

111 cases in 2006, 43% of the total. 75 fatalities, 49% of the total.

Vietnam has the most cases, 93, but two thirds of them occurred in 2005. The mortality rate is 45%.

Indonesia has had 50% of the cases in 2006, and 74 in total. Their mortality rate has been 76%.

65% of the cases of bird flu were in just two countries, Vietnam and Indonesia. The death rate varied greatly in these two nation.

If we were to try to draw conclusions from such a tiny data set, we would probably be incorrect. However, to date, I can state that this disease in humans has been geographicly isolated. I can also state that the death rate may vary and that it may be dependent upon the medical care provided as much as the virulance of the disease.

As of this moment, there are no signs that the disease is breaking out of the few areas where it has been found. Nor is there any indication that human to human transmission has become the norm. As I have pointed out repeatedly, the people who catch this illness have had close contact with diseased poultry through care, slaughter, food preparation and cleanup.

Time to obtain your annual flu shot and, if you have not already done so, the pneumonia vaccine.

There are three common types of influenza virus, A, B, C. The A type which includes avian flus, is the most common. The B type also occurs in humans.

The usual influenza shot contains antibodies against Type A and Type B virii.

The sub-types are designated based upon the distribution of certain proteins in the viral shell. The are expressed in the form H?N?. H can run 1-16 and N can run 1-9, giving a large mathematical universe of potential sub-types.

About half the H sub-types infect humans, though all of them infect birds. Only three of the N sub-types can infect humans at this time, N1, N2 and N7. The bird flu everyone is afraid of is properly shown as A)H5N1.

Within any sub-type, H5N1, you have strains like the one described in this article in the Scotsman.

A)H1N1 is the designation given the Spanish Flu. It was rediscovered in humans in the mid 1970′s but in a new strain that does not produce a pandemic. A fraction of those who had flu in 2005 in the U.S. had A)H1N1.

The current A)H5N1 is not closely related to the sub-type that produced the Spanish Flu. At any given time, several sub-types and several strains of any given sub-type are in circulation. Flu season is winter in the higher latitudes such as the U.S., but in the tropics it is a year round situation.

Influenza is not normally fatal. In those with a weakened immune system, infants and the elderly it can lead to a bacterial pneumonia which can be fatal. However, in the worst flu pandemic known, the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, the mortality rate was still about 3% and only about 30% of the U.S. population caught the disease.

The two flu pandemics that followed produced fewer deaths. In 1957 the Asian Flu was A)H2N2. In 1968 it was the Hong Kong Flu, A)H3N2.

Pneumonia is treatable with antibiotics, and we have a variety of other medical treatments that we did not have in 1918. We also have the pneumonia vaccine which will prevent a number of bacterial pneumonias, further reducing your chances of death or serious illness.

Past posts about avian flu