LATEST NEWS...

A page in which we attempt to keep you up to speed with latest developments...
(See page "Timeline" to see how we have got here in the first place....)

Don't forget that if you have any queries, we will happily answer your questions.
See FAQ first, but if you still have something that needs clarifying go to ContactUs

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Today's Best Buy: vaccination against pneumococcus.  The flu virus kills fewer than the opportunistic infections like pneumonia that follow once the lungs have been damaged.  I qualified for a free jab as an ageing Type 2 diabetic.  If you qualify for a free one, get it! If you have to pay, it could be the best £50 you ever spend...
And as immunity lasts a lifetime, it's the Best Buy for today and every other day too!

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Health teams in flu pandemic test - reported on www.bbc.co.uk, Tuesday 20th February 2007

It is feared that a flu pandemic could kill 400,000 people in the UK
Hundreds of health officials from across Britain are due to take part in an exercise later to see how a flu pandemic would be dealt with.
Officials will stay in a bunker at the Department of Health, in London, as part of the logistical exercise!
The strategic trial is thought to be the biggest emergency planning event since the end of the Cold War.
Officials estimate that a flu pandemic would affect one in four people and cause 400,000 deaths in the UK.
In the trial scenario, the first infected person is a businessman from Surrey who recently returned from South East Asia.
The operation is an attempt to estimate the way in which certain aspects of the country's infrastructure, such as health, transport, education and food distribution would keep working during an outbreak.
Health officials fear that a new strain of flu will spread globally at some point in the future...

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14th February 2007 - Wow! We're getting somewhere at last....

A friend of mine, who is a school governor, sent me a link to a website which has links to all the various advisory documents available to schools from the UK Department for Education & Science:
http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/emergencies/planning/flupandemic/
The document "Planning For A Human Influenza Pandemic - Short Version of Guidance For Schools" actually starts with the following introduction:

Is there a serious risk of a flu pandemic, and what impact could it have?
Experts advise that a further flu pandemic is inevitable, but cannot say when it will happen. When it happens, we expect it to spread rapidly to all areas of the UK and have a significant impact. Depending on the severity of the pandemic, 25-50% of the population may become ill at some stage during one or more waves, each lasting 3-4 months, and 50,000 – 700,000 more people than usual may die.

So at last the authorities are beginning to use the higher estimates! One success...
What a pity their advice is still so unrealistic... Schools are advised to stay open whenever possible - whilst acknowledging that children at school are the best "spreaders" of disease that there are. Practical advice is limited to advising that hand-washing and disposal of tissues are areas of concern. And having advised that symptoms include "difficulty breathing" head teachers are advised to send staff or pupils home if they inconvenience anyone with their symptoms...
Still, there isn't much else they can give as advice - considering that Hospitals are likely to be overwhelmed, and every other group from GP clinics to Funeral Directors is going to be functioning with no advance planning. (see other news stories below...)

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Friday 9th February 2007, and by popular demand, I feel obliged to comment on The Great Norfolk Turkey Shoot....
- but honesty obliges me to say it is statistically irrelevant.  You ain't seen nothing yet - there's hundreds of millions of birdies who've been on holiday abroad who are all heading home, and many will carry H5N1 with them.  There could be lots more outbreaks. 
But none of is in any danger unless we are chicken-pluckers... If you don't understand why, then for goodness sake go off and read the rest of this website! Birds give it to birds - and just occasionally give it to chicken-pluckers. And people who have caught it from birds very seldom pass it on to other people, which is why we have so far had so few human casualties.
The danger increases as the virus mutates and becomes more able to live in mammals... The virus is quietly practising in other mammals than us at this very moment.  Mostly pussy cats this time according to research in Indonesia. (In 1918 it was probably pigs that were the intermediary.) Once it has got the hang of feeling at home in one mammal it will look for other species to live in - that's when we will be in big trouble...
This outbreak will be bad news for the turkeyburger industry, but otherwise poses little threat to the rest of the population. It's worst side-effect will be that it will distract everyone from the real dangers and the woeful lack of government preparation. No doubt Paxman on Newsnight will savage everyone involved with the turkey industry, then it will all die down and everyone will feel smug and safe again - while the virus continues to mutate, the danger of a pandemic gets closer, and the authorities still do damn all to prepare us for it! Cynical? Moi?

Today's best buy: vaccination against pneumococcus.  The flu virus kills fewer than the opportunistic infections like pneumonia that follow once the lungs have been damaged.  I qualified for a free jab as an ageing Type 2 diabetic.  If you qualify for a free one, get it! If you have to pay, it could be the best £50 you ever spend...

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Monday 15th January 2007, both the FINANCIAL TIMES and FORBES published the predictions of the Global Risks prediction market that NewsFutures built for Thomson Financial and the World Economic Forum. Here are the links to the stories:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2007/01/15/1821/avian-flu-and-the-perception-of-risk/
http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/01/14/afx3328028.html

Here’s an excerpt from the Forbes story:
"The predictive market contracts … are currently forecasting the outbreak of bird flu in 22 countries in 2007, which Thomson Financial calculates will result in a fall of in the Dow Jones Industrial Index of 0.4% during the year. However should the spread of bird flu reach 60 countries it is anticipated that this would cause a fall in the Dow of over 10%."
Commenting on the data, Thomas Aubrey, Investment Management Director, Thomson Financial said: "This is the first quantitative data that looks at the potential impact of bird flu and provides the global financial services community with invaluable information on this critical non-financial risk. When fed into our sector based risk indicator it will help business leaders develop a greater understanding of the risks facing their businesses and allow them to make more informed decisions to mitigate against this risk."

Comment: as outlined below, these use some conservative estimates for fatalities. Even if they are correct, if it is better (or even much better) than that, it is possible that the social dislocation of having 20% of the workforce out of action over a 2 year period could be devastating. People could really lose interest in buying consumer goods, planning holidays abroad, or investing in the stock market!

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Finance firms gauge the fallout from flu pandemic - London Evening Standard, 4th January 2007
Banks could be forced to shut branches and cash machines could run out of money if there is a flu pandemic. This was the finding of an exercise run by the Treasury, Bank of England and Financial Services Authority in which 70 financial services firms reacted to a 22-week pandemic. At its height, up to 60% of staff were supposedly off work sick or looking after children, and City firms would cut back on trading...

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Fri 22nd Dec 2006 - reports of an article in The Lancet (medical journal)
Pandemic bird flu could kill up 62 million people, with developing countries bearing the brunt of the deaths, according to a new forecast.

Researchers based the prediction on data from the 1918-20 influenza pandemic, which caused more deaths than the first world war.
(So far there have been 258 confirmed cases of people catching the H5N1 strain of avian flu, and 154 deaths, mostly in China and south-east Asia. These have generally occurred as a result of direct contact between humans and birds carrying the virus. But experts believe it is only a matter of time before the virus evolves a way to spread from human to human. If that happened, a worldwide pandemic would be almost inevitable.)

Estimates of the potential death toll from such a disaster have varied from two million to 360 million, even reaching apocalyptic levels of one billion.
The new assessment reported in The Lancet medical journal was carried out by researchers led by Dr Christopher Murray, from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. They used death registration data to calculate excess mortality during the 1918-20 'Spanish flu' pandemic in 27 countries.
Extrapolating the results to the worldwide population of 2004, they found that 62 million people could have died had a similar pandemic occurred that year.
As in 1918, people on high incomes were less likely to die than the poor, with 96% of deaths occurring in developing countries.
In one year, a flu pandemic striking the human population could increase global mortality by 114%, with most of the deaths would be among younger people under the age of 44.

Comment: This report actually uses some rather conservative arithmetic. The ratio of population then (1918) to population now suggests that casualties in 2007 would be 150 million worldwide. But no-one can know. The present virus is no threat until it mutates into a version that will transmit person-to-person; and when it does its other properties will be unpredictable. More or less fatal than the last time? Only time will tell...

Bird flu outruns the vaccines

A NEW strain of H5N1 bird flu has emerged in China and is poised to start yet another global wave of infection. The human pandemic vaccines now being developed will not protect against it. Worse still, nearly three times as many Chinese poultry are infected with H5N1 now as last year, meaning there is a greater chance of human infections - despite China's insistence that all poultry be vaccinated against it. In fact, vaccination may be to blame for the new strain.

Yi Guan and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong have been testing poultry in markets across southern China for bird flu for years. In 2004, 0.9 per cent of market poultry tested positive for H5N1, including 2 per cent of ducks, a major carrier of the virus. But between the middle of 2005 and June this year the virus turned up in 2.4 per cent of market poultry - a nearly threefold increase - and 3.3 per cent of ducks. The virus is also showing up in chickens for 11 months of the year, up from only four months previously.

The reason, says Guan, is a new "Fujian-like" strain of the virus, descended from one first seen in a duck in Fujian, China, in 2005. It caused 3 per cent of poultry infections in September 2005 but was responsible for 95 per cent of infections by June 2006. "The predominance of Fujian-like virus appears to be responsible for the increased prevalence of H5N1 in poultry," write Guan and colleagues in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0608157103).

A higher number of infected but apparently healthy birds in Chinese markets for more of the year means a greater risk for humans, says Guan. All but one of China's 21 officially reported human cases of H5N1 have occurred since November 2005 - after the Fujian strain started its rise. Some of these people lived far away from any known outbreak in poultry, but close to urban poultry markets, suggesting the new strain is spreading silently in some of the world's most crowded cities.

Based on what previous H5N1 viruses have done in China, Fujian now seems poised to start a third epidemic wave, potentially worldwide, following the first in 2004 and H5N1's spread across Eurasia in 2005. So far the Fujian virus has reached Thailand, Malaysia and Laos.

Its sudden emergence suggests that a selection pressure is acting on the virus. In November 2005 China ordered compulsory vaccination of all poultry. The law has been imperfectly applied, however: Guan and colleagues found vaccine-induced antibodies in only 16 per cent of birds tested. What's more, they found these antibodies do not recognise the Fujian virus, even though they attack the previous strains of H5N1. "This novel variant may have become dominant because it was not as easily affected as other strains by the current avian vaccine," Guan says.

In 2004, an investigation by New Scientist concluded that vaccinating poultry against bird flu can lead to the emergence of novel strains that can circulate undetected in vaccinated birds unless there are scrupulous controls ( New Scientist , 27 March 2004, p 6). The risk is that whatever strain emerges might have unexpected features, such as an ability to kill humans.

While Guan's team has no evidence to suggest that the Fujian strain is more virulent or likely to transmit between humans than previous strains, so far it has killed one person in Thailand and caused five of the Chinese cases for which the team has virus samples. "As far as I know all (20) human cases since November 2005 were caused by this virus," Guan told New Scientist .

The discovery is a warning bell to researchers working on human vaccines for H5N1. The pandemic vaccine now being developed by pharmaceutical companies is based on strains of H5N1 isolated from Vietnam in 2004 and Indonesia last year - but antibodies to these strains do not recognise the Fujian strain. This means the vaccine would not work against any pandemic virus carrying surface proteins from the Fujian strain.

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 8-9

Behind enemy lines

THE sudden emergence of a "super-strain" of H5N1 that sweeps away all other strains may seem unsettling, but it is something we could have predicted. Human flu does this all the time. The reason people get flu year after year is because the virus evolves slightly different surface proteins that our immune systems don't recognise from the last time we had flu.

Researchers had thought this was a continual process, with individual mutations being selected for if they give the virus an advantage over the others. Now David Lipman and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, have shown that the process is far more sporadic.

Using a large collection of recent flu strains, they showed that H3N2, the most common human strain, generally floats in evolutionary limbo accumulating random mutations, none of which gives any virus an advantage over the rest. As more and more people become immune, flu seasons become milder.

Then every few years, one virus happens to collect a winning combination of these individually useless changes that enables it to avoid recognition by human flu antibodies. It out-competes other H3N2 viruses and rapidly becomes the dominant strain that sweeps the world ( Biology Direct , DOI: 10.1186/1745-6150-1-34).

In 1998, for instance, one strain from Australia acquired a novel surface change, but it wasn't until 2003, after a few more key mutations, that it suddenly emerged as the most murderous H3N2 of recent years.

Lipman's team suggests that by monitoring these random mutations, we might learn to predict what dominant strain is about to emerge, giving vaccine makers more warning.

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• 22:00 30 October 2006