tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
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The bird flu virus first emerged as a public health risk in 1997 when it caused 16 human infections and six fatalities in Hong Kong, prompting Margaret Chan, Hong Kong's then director of public health and now director-general of the World Health Organisation, to close the territory's wet markets and initiate a mass poultry cull.
However, it was the resurgence of human infections in Thailand and Vietnam in 2003, followed by outbreaks on chicken farms across Asia, the Middle East and eastern Europe in 2005 that made H5N1 a household name, while the H1N1 swine-flu outbreak of 2009 prompted the World Health Organisation to declare a pandemic. "We were extremely lucky in 2009," he says.
"Nature didn't put in the killer genes, that's all."
At the same time, Webster insists, the threat from H5N1 has not gone away. On the contrary, if the latest the scientific data are to be believed, a new "mutant" strain of the virus, codenamed 2.3.2., has already moved from China and Vietnam to central Asia and eastern Europe, spread by migratory waterfowl.
Meanwhile, in H5N1 "hotspots" such as Egypt, where another variant is endemic in the poultry industry, the virus continues to kill people in significant numbers.
As Webster told an international gathering of flu experts at St Hilda's College, Oxford, earlier this month: "Highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza appears to be spreading into Eurasia again, most likely carried by wild bird migrations. It's only a matter of time before it comes to the Americas."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/17/bird-flu-swine-flu-warning
The bird flu virus first emerged as a public health risk in 1997 when it caused 16 human infections and six fatalities in Hong Kong, prompting Margaret Chan, Hong Kong's then director of public health and now director-general of the World Health Organisation, to close the territory's wet markets and initiate a mass poultry cull.
However, it was the resurgence of human infections in Thailand and Vietnam in 2003, followed by outbreaks on chicken farms across Asia, the Middle East and eastern Europe in 2005 that made H5N1 a household name, while the H1N1 swine-flu outbreak of 2009 prompted the World Health Organisation to declare a pandemic. "We were extremely lucky in 2009," he says.
"Nature didn't put in the killer genes, that's all."
At the same time, Webster insists, the threat from H5N1 has not gone away. On the contrary, if the latest the scientific data are to be believed, a new "mutant" strain of the virus, codenamed 2.3.2., has already moved from China and Vietnam to central Asia and eastern Europe, spread by migratory waterfowl.
Meanwhile, in H5N1 "hotspots" such as Egypt, where another variant is endemic in the poultry industry, the virus continues to kill people in significant numbers.
As Webster told an international gathering of flu experts at St Hilda's College, Oxford, earlier this month: "Highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza appears to be spreading into Eurasia again, most likely carried by wild bird migrations. It's only a matter of time before it comes to the Americas."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/17/bird-flu-swine-flu-warning