Bird Deaths in Russia Are Being Blamed on ‘Low Pathogenic Flu’

The H5N1 avian flu didn’t cause deaths of wild birds in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region last week, the government’s food safety agency said.

Lab tests proved a “low-pathogenic flu,” not H5N1, killed hundreds of wild ducks in coastal lakes in the Anapa and Temryuk districts in the Krasnodar region last week, said Alexei Alekseenko, spokesman for Rosselkhoznadzor.

No poultry for human consumption was infected, Krasnodar’s administration said on its website Nov. 30. Governor Alexander Tkachev ordered a quarantine of areas and banned hunting there to keep the virus from spreading, the press service said.

Most bird viruses don’t infect humans, according to the World Health Organization. The disease can be spread by wild water fowl, the WHO says.

Rosselkhoznadzor will eliminate dead birds from the area and will not cull other ducks, Alekseenko said. There were about 12,000 wild ducks in the Krasnodar areas last week, according to Rosselkhoznadzor data.

To contact the reporter on this story: Marina Sysoyeva in Moscow at msysoyeva@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Carpenter at ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-12-04/bird-deaths-in-russia-are-being-blamed-on-low-pathogenic-flu

Bird Flu Vaccine: Prototype For H5N1 Vaccine Backed By FDA Advisory Panel

Nov 14 (Reuters) - An advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday voted unanimously that a GlaxoSmithKline Plc prototype vaccine against bird flu appears to be safe and produces the desired immune-system response against the highly fatal virus.

The London-based drugmaker said the advisory panel of outside medical experts voted 14 to 0 to support its vaccine against the H5N1 bird flu virus.

The virus is spread among birds but sometimes infects people, with highly fatal consequences.

"Glaxo looks forward to the approval by the FDA of our vaccine, hopefully later this year," said Leonard Friedland, a senior U.S. vaccine executive for the London-based drugmaker.

Friedland told Reuters there have been 608 cases of bird flu around the world since 2003, with 359 deaths.

If approved by the agency, Glaxo would be licensed to make millions of doses of the vaccine, which would likely be placed in a government stockpile for use in the event of a global epidemic.

The company would also be prepared to make as many other doses as required, perhaps including a slightly different strain of the virus than the Indonesia strain in its current prototype, Friedland said.

Continued:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/15/bird-flu-vaccine-h5n1-prototype-fda-advisory-panel_n_2132806.html

Feds Seek Comments On Bird Flu Safety Fears

Here's your chance to weigh in on mutant forms of bird flu that have been in the news — the U.S. government wants to know just how scary you think these new viruses are.

The Department of Health and Human Services posted a call for public comments today requesting information on whether the lab-created bird flu viruses "have the potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety." The government is also asking whether any special precautions need to be considered when scientists work with these viruses.

The move comes after some have criticized officials for not having enough public discussion about these controversial viruses, which were created in the lab as part of an effort to understand how highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu viruses out in the wild might mutate and start a pandemic in people.

Because the genetically-altered viruses are contagious between ferrets, the lab stand-in for people, some critics fear that these viruses could cause a deadly pandemic in humans if they ever escaped the lab. All work has been halted since January, when researchers adopted a voluntary moratorium that was only supposed to last 60 days.

Since then, experts in the scientific community have come to no consensus on whether research should go forward and, if so, under what conditions.

Some microbiologists have argued that the lab-modified viruses should only be studied at labs with the very highest level of containment and security, so-called "biosafety level 4" labs (BSL-4).

But others point out that limiting work to those labs would slow down valuable research, because the world has so few BSL-4 labs. They say experiments can be safely done at a slightly lower level of bio-containment, and that these studies are urgently needed to prepare for the threat of a naturally-occurring flu pandemic.

Before the end of the year, the government plans to hold an international workshop that will consider the risks and benefits of experiments that make highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu more contagious. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has urged that the scientists' voluntary moratorium continue while discussions move forward.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/10/16/163012771/feds-seek-comments-on-bird-flu-safety-fears

Bird flu hits S China city

BEIJING, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- The H5N1 avian flu virus has been detected in the city of Zhanjiang in south China's Guangdong province, experts confirmed on Tuesday.

The virus has infected 14,050 ducks and killed 6,300 of them since Sept. 11, when symptoms were first reported, a Ministry of Agriculture official said.

After the epidemic was confirmed, local authorities cordoned off an infected area in the city and killed all poultry in the area before starting to decontaminate it, the official said.

China is particularly prone to bird flu epidemics, as it has the world's largest poultry population and many rural farmers live in close proximity to their poultry.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-09/18/c_131858481.htm