Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 14

A14 ARIZONA Daily STAH Sunday, February 8, 2004 ANimAL-TO-UAN VIRUSES Delaware chickens Idled in flu scare Did China cover up spread of avian flu? II 'hi- i V-V'mV" j'J V' REUTERS PHILADELPHIABANGKOK A flock of chickens in Delaware was destroyed Saturday after bird flu was detected in the United States, even as Thailand came close to containing its outbreak of a broad Asian epidemic that has killed 18 people and decimated poultry stocks. Twelve thousand chickens were slaughtered Saturday morning at a Delaware farm after two birds tested positive Friday for a strain of the H7 virus that state officials said does not transfer to humans. Delaware Secretary of Agriculture Michael Scuse said the H7 strain in the U.S. chickens differs from the strain in Asia. "The virus that is in Asia is a mutation of H5," Scuse said.

The H7 strain found in Delaware is fatal to poultry and does not transmit to humans, he said. South Korea, which is battling its own bird flu outbreak, reacted swiftly to reports of the discovery in Delaware, immediately halting imports of U.S. poultry. News of the U.S. outbreak came on the same day the prime minister of Thailand one of the 10 Asian countries hardest hit by the epidemic said he expected the last outbreak of the virus to be contained within days.

Delaware's Scuse said he was "fairly confident" the virus had not spread. As a safeguard, however, other flocks within a 2-mile radius of the infected farm would be tested, and the outcome of that process would probably be known by Tuesday, he said. If the virus is found in any of the other flocks, the testing area would be extended to 5 miles, he said. The farm where the diseased birds were found has been quarantined, he said. Poultry is a multibillion-dol-lar industry in Delmarva Peninsula, where the infected farm is located.

The Delmarva region consists of parts of Delaware, Maryland and A'. 1 i By Geoffrey York TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL BEIJING With its bird-flu outbreak spreading swiftly to new regions, China faces mounting suspicions that its obsessively secretive bureaucracy has again been caught in a cover-up of a deadly disease. The disease has now spread to 13 of China's 31 regions. There are growing questions about whether China and other Asian countries deliberately failed to report the first cases of avian flu. The latest criticism came from Bernard Val-lat, director-general of the World Organization for Animal Health, at a special meeting of health experts in Rome.

"I can say that all countries were much too slow on reporting," Vallat said. "All countries could have notified more quickly." There is evidence that avian flu has been spreading in Thailand and Indonesia for the past several months, and that officials were aware of it, yet their governments concealed the outbreaks and suppressed the news that birds were dying. The question now is whether China is doing the same thing. It happened last year in China with the SARS epidemic, and earlier with AIDS. In both cases, the first reaction of Chinese officials was to hide the truth, pretending that the outbreaks were relatively mild and insignificant.

In both cases, the cover-up continued until Beijing finally bowed to intense international pressure and began disclosing the frightening depth of its crises. Now some observers worry that Beijing might be concealing the extent of the avian-flu outbreak to avoid the embarrassment and economic costs of the true situation. Thursday, at their first news conference since the bird-flu outbreak erupted last month, Chinese health and agriculture officials were peppered with questions about a suspected coverup of the bird-flu outbreak. Reporters asked how Beijing could continue to claim that no humans were infected with bird flu, with more than 56,000 birds infected in chicken farms in almost half of the provinces. They asked whether anyone would be fired for concealing the disease, and whether an inquiry would be held.

And they asked why Beijing continues to ban foreign journalists from any of the infected regions. The officials insisted there was no cover-up. "It is not true that we had this disease but did not report it," said Liu Jian, deputy agriculture minister. The officials said they had examined more than 1,400 people in the infected regions and had studied 22,000 specimens of various strains of flu, without finding any human cases of bird flu. "I can say in a responsible way that there is no human patient in China," said Wang Longde, deputy health minister.

China has strengthened its surveillance systems and tightened its rules for mandatory reporting of suspected infections, especially in the wake of last year's SARS crisis, the officials said. There is a long history of covering up diseases in China, not just human diseases such as SARS and AIDS but also animal diseases. The Associated Press More than 30,000 chickens were slaughtered after an outbreak of bird flu in Lanzhou, in northwest China 's Gansu province. China fertile ground for disease I Bird flu outbreaks Past flus, SARS underscore fear of new outbreak Deaths caused by bird flu (avian flu) have only been reported in Vietnam and Thailand, but the fatal H5N1 virus has been documented among birds in a number of Asian countries. SOUTH 5 X0BEA i 507, i 1 Provinces iv affected CHINA PAKISTAN Jtf fi Two labs onwayto a vaccine for bird flu Pacific Ocean UOS Indian Ocean '2004 KM CAMBODIA' Source: News reports, ifood and Agriculture Organization of the 1 f.f United Nations (FA0) INDONESIA Graphic: Jakob Jensby, Morten tyhne The current outbreak of Asian bird flu, identified in 10 countries, has been found in China on the coast and deep inland in the western Xinjiang region.

On Wednesday it was identified in Yunnan, near Myanmar. The great worry of scientists over this outbreak of H5N1 avian flu is its unusual virulence. "For some reason we don't really understand, these viruses are not only causing problems in poultry but gaining the capacity to go into humans," said Daniel Perez, an avian flu expert at the University of Maryland. If this bird flu outbreak is not stamped out before it infects too many people, the risk grows that the virus will meet up with a common human flu bug and recombine into a deadly new form capable of being easily transmitted from person to person. But the World Health Organization says there is no evidence that the current H5N1 strain has mutated into the most contagious form.

"I think it's very important at this stage that we remain calm about worst-case scenarios," Mike Ryan, the WHO'S chief of global epidemic response, said Tuesday. "We have a strain of influenza with the potential to pick up human genes, and we're nowhere close to declaring a By Michael A. Lev CHICAGO TRIBUNE CHENGDU, China Bright splotches of blood stained the ground. Cocks and pigeons huddled in their cages. Six workers squatted nearby, plucking dead quail and tossing their scrawny bodies into' a large bucket of water.

The live poultry markets were still open, but sales were down considerably in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan province. In other cities, only dressed chickens are available as China again finds itself fending off a deadly virus. Last year SARS bubbled up from southern China. This year bird flu is spreading rapidly across Asia, ravaging poultry stocks and killing at least 15 people in Vietnam and Thailand. Experts at an emergency meeting in Rome on Wednesday said they would recommend vaccinating healthy poultry as part of a broader strategy to control the disease.

Health officials have said that destroying infected birds is the best way to contain the disease. About 50 million birds, mostly chickens, have been killed in Asia. In the past week avian flu has begun rolling across China. There are confirmed or suspected outbreaks in chickens but not people in 12 provinces. Defeating the scourge and avoiding the threat of a human flu pandemic will require overcoming the cultural and virological hurdles that make China a particularly susceptible breeding ground for bird flu and human influenza.

Scientists say the Asian flu of 1957-58 and Hong Kong flu of 1967-68 started in China. Scientists have been warning for years to expect another disastrous influenza The China-flu connection is easy for scientists to understand. Influenza originates in aquatic birds that can pass the disease to domestic fowl. China is a sprawling, densely populated region where people live close to poultry and pigs, which can act as intermediaries in transmitting the disease. There are huge chicken and pig farms and backyard pens in suburban regions and big outdoor markets that stock fowl that are killed to order.

Southern China is also on the migratory flight path of wild birds, he said, making it easier for diseases to be picked up by local birds and then spread more widely. By M.A.J. McKenna COX NEWS SERVICE ATLANTA Two Southern laboratories working urgently to create a vaccine to protect humans against the flu virus ravaging bird flocks in Southeast Asia say they have passed the first major milestone in the difficult and tedious effort. Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and St.

Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis said their achievement breaking the virus apart to remove its most virulent elements and reassembling it is but one step of many on the road to a bird flu vaccine. If every remaining step goes as well as possible, they said, it will still take four to six months of lab work, testing and manufacturing before a safe, approved vaccine can be made and sold. Before those months are up, the Southern Hemisphere's flu season will begin, increasing the chances that avian influenza which already has killed a reported 18 people, most of them children, and triggered the slaughter of 50 million chickens and other birds will morph into a more dangerous form. The researchers know that they are pressed for time. "If the virus takes off tomorrow, then the vaccine won't be ready," said Richard J.

Webby, a virologist leading the research at St Jude's. The scientists working on it face profound technical challenges, and the vaccine will encounter regulatory hurdles unless governments clear the way. But on the ground in Asia, researchers battling bird flu are beginning to believe that only a vaccine can stop the continuing rapid spread of the disease. Study: 'Spanish flu' jumped from birds to humans 1918-19 epidemic similar to outbreak in Asia, but different ous when a virus moves directly from birds into humans, or re-assorts its genes and infects another species, such as pigs, and then jumps into humans. Such outbreaks are so dangerous because the human immune system hasn't been exposed to them, and thus has a tougher job in mounting a defense.

Wilson's team, and an international team led by John Skehel of Britain's Medical Research Council, found that the three-dimensional structure of spike-like molecules called hemagglutinins, which sit on the surface of the virus, kept bird flu properties while apparently also picking up properties of a virus strain already common in people. The researchers compared the 1918 virus structure with hemagglutinins from other human, avian and pig "It looks more like an avian virus, with some human characteristics," Wil-. son said. But the hemagglutinins of the 1918 virus is from a different family than the bird flu now circulating across Asia, or than the strain that hit the United States and most of the Northern Hemisphere hard last fall. That suggests that while there have been human infections from sick birds in Asia at least 18 people have died from it the virus seems less likely to evolve into a disease that can spread easily from person to person.

On the other hand, the study shows there doesn't have to be all that much change for bird flu to jump to humans if the virus morphs in the right places, Wilson noted. New York and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington that analyzed virus fragments recovered from victims of the 1918 flu. The 1918-19 "Spanish flu" outbreak was the most lethal flu epidemic in history, killing 675,000 Americans and up to 40 million people worldwide. Mortality rates reached 70 percent in some isolated communities, and it was particularly deadly in teens and young adults, an age group that normally weathers the flu fairly well. Flu viruses circulate around the globe every year, with flu seasons typically peaking in the winter.

Most of the time, the outbreaks tend to claim those with weakened immune systems, namely the very young and very old. But flu becomes much more danger SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE New analyses of the virus responsible for a deadly 1918 flu outbreak shows it jumped from birds to humans. The structure of proteins from the virus helps explain why it was such a devastating outbreak, said Ian Wilson, lead investigator for one of two teams that published results from the journal Science online last week. Wilson led a team from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, the Mount Sinai Institute of Medicine in.