Mon 28 Nov 2005
As China reports today that bird flu virus in human have mutated, we our raising our red flag and sending out this alert for immediate attention as Bangladesh is alarmingly unprepared to handle this crisis. Millions of people are at risk of dying.
Full alert is here.
The Reuters’ resource page for Bird Flu.
Nov 22, ‘05 The New York Times Editorial by Zahin Hasan:
Avian Flu: Why the chicken virus crossed the border.
Nov 27, ‘05: “Bangladesh takes step to prevent bird flu outbreak.” - is this sufficient?
From the UN FAO newsroom archives: Countries along migratory routes of wild birds should be on alert - emergency preparedness essential.
Are WE ready?
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:50 pm
All the actions proposed sounds great in terms of promoting awareness! Though, there are a few grey areas for me: is there a possibility of it affecting other places other than the 40 hotspots?? How one may contract the flu from the birds, and is it only the birds that are flocking in the carrier?
As BRAC are distributing posters, would it be possible to get a copy of those? If there are no designated stakeholders and anybody can be at risk of the spreading of the flu, is it not possible that individually we may also distribute these flyers out through our emails in our own networks with the link of your bird flu blog site? so word of mouth is a good awareness technique. that is how i got informed about it. does not create a panic effect either.
December 4th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
Saalam everybody
Great to see about your initiative regarding Bird Flu. About Tania H’s quarry - before answering your question directly I would like to explain some thing separately and try to sound simple.
Influenza - Flu:
You must be already knowing about Influenza disease. It differs from the simple catch cold situation in sense of severity and duration. Influenza is cause by Influenza virus and normally remains for about a week. The very young and the old and the people with bad immunity (malnourished or chronic diseased) are vulnerable to this disease. Generally the healthy people come round without any big problem. This influenza is caused by Influenza viruses that have three sub types – A, B and C. The B and C only can attack the humans. The Influenza A virus has different strains which can attack humans and other animals. Till now the animal attacker strains coluld not attack humans and vice versa.
Bird Flu:
The Bird Flu is the Influenza happening in the Birds and caused by the Influenza A virus strains collectedly called - Avian Influenza A Virus. This virus are found in the wild water birds as a normal natural phenomenon. They can spread it by their stool, body secretions or contaminating surfaces they sit. Whenever the virus from the wild birds shift or infect the poultry birds, they are proven fetal to them. As normally the water wile birds are mainly migratory in nature, in their journey of migration they can easily spread this virus to the local wild bird or local poultry birds.
Epidemic and why?:
There has been many epidemic or pandemics around the world during the last century both in humans and birds. The main reasons for the epidemic are some characteristics of the Influenza virus in general. The first one is, Influenza virus is very much infectious in nature. It spreads from person to person very very fast. So containing the disease spread is very very difficult.
Another characteristic is the ability of this virus to change its structure. Flu virus undergoes continuous changes regularly. That makes it more dangerous. Just giving one example – There is a common saying about the Chicken Pox disease that if some one has chicken pox once that that person will not have chicken pox again. This is generally true. This happens because if someone gets chicken pox once than our body creates antibody against chicken pox virus which helps protect from future infection. On the other hand Influenza virus is undergoing changes continuously – if someone gets the virus and body makes antibody – but the virus after some days will have a slightly changed structure and the antibodies at that time will not work. So re-infection happens. For this reason every year they do new research and update the vaccine available regarding influenza.
Bird Flu and Humans : Why to get worried?:
Normally the bird flu virus did not infect the humans. But in 1997 in Hong Kong for the first time it was confirmed that bird flu virus has infected humans. At the same time the bird flu epidemic among the poultry of Hong Kong was going on. After that there were several reports all around the world for the human infections with Avian Flu virus. If you try to get the bigger picture – the bird flu epidemics has been around during the last couple of decades. But suddenly it has jumped to the humans. It proves that the virus is changing and so it characteristics are also changing. The only for bird virus can now attack the humans. Now the main fear is – if these continuous changes go on – it can any time get the characteristics of spreading from human to human. And this can trigger an epidemic. There are couples of cases the scientists suspect that the incident of human to human transmission has happened but could not be proven scientifically. The bird to human cases was among people who were related to poultry in some way.
The bed of roses for the Epidemic:
In the current situation the circumstances are a bed of roses for the epidemic. The danger of the flu epidemic is that it spreads like a fire. The densely populated residential structure of the 3 rd world or the aged population majority of the 1st world are both at very much health risk. Bad sanitation, malnutrition also will have added effect. Some more experts say – sudden load on the health system may cause a break down in it causing a chaos. Unprepared ness for crisis management will make things worse. If the virus can infect the humans and birds simultaneously than disease spreading speed will become super fast. Some more the effectiveness of available anti viral drugs or vaccination is also important. Because in general there is not such straight forward treatment against viral infection and same goes for Flu virus.
I hope that, I could make it easy to understand the main threat of the bird flu virus. I have explained thing in General. If any comments or quarry regarding more deeper issues please do let know – will be happy to share the things I know and learn more from you all.
Ms Tania – I hope managed to satisfy your quarry.
Regards
Turin
December 5th, 2005 at 10:07 pm
Just writing to say something about prevention. Reading Ms Tania’s mail – “so the struggles right now are trying to educate the people of BD but also have some sort of backup should something come up, and to decrease the chances of anything spreading?” The answer is yes but I would like to slightly differ from it. In the given circumstances it should be other way around — “the struggles right now are to have strong backup preparation should something come up, but also trying to educate the people of BD and to decrease the chances of anything spreading” My personal opinion is we need the “disease disaster management preparation” approach more right now rather than “conventional disease prevention” approach.
I have already told that containing the Flu epidemic will be difficult if it starts. And the virus and the spread of it are difficult – and we will need obviously an international platform initiative for that and the WHO is on it. But for our country we have to get prepared by ourselves. I believe that for Bangladesh, the prevention plan or approach should have two components. The primary component — the system (in this case the Government) has to prepare actively with a concrete plan to face the epidemic situation with a disease disaster management preparation activity. The second component should be the disease prevention activity. The Government is the best institution to take these initiatives. The private sector can be of secondary help. But bad luck for us that our Government is busy with more important (?!?) issues like coming election. So I hope and pray that the NGOs like BRAC and Grameen and others can and will understand the importance and use their full utility to create a parallel infrastructure for the facing the disaster. (I do not know how much that is possible because the Govt will not like it and how much NGOs will devote to this). This will consist of stock piling of medical supply, emergency service preparation, plan a strategy for systematic response and be cruel (realistic) in identifying priority population, etc. And obviously some emergency drill is needed to check the preparation.
Some more the 2nd component of the disease prevention should not be the conventional one like only creating awareness and educating people. The priority should be creating a surveillance system for the disease outbreak information. This will have two benefits – that is – we will get the news of out breaks in a certain locality in the minimum time and so will have the maximum time to act against it. The added benefit will be to execute the “creating awareness and educating people” programme by this same surveillance system working chain.
If I am given to choose between the two components saying that I can work with only one in the field - than I will choose the first component – “prepare for disease disaster”. During my working in the fields of Bangladesh I have seen that these types of works have an indirect messaging benefit. We Bangali people are very curious in nature. (You may dislike it very much but now it will help us) As disaster management activities or drill will go on , the people around it will get the message and it will spread. The problem will be the message will have lots of added particles with it as it will spread. (lol)
Anyway I hope I did not become too much technical. And (please) a reminder that what ever I have said this time is simply my personal opinion as a public health worker.
Regards
Turin
March 15th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Cumulative Number of Confirmed Human Cases of Avian Influenza A/(H5N1) Reported to WHO
upto 13 March 2006 - 177 cases / 98 deaths
Details..
(http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/country/cases_table_2006_03_13/en/index.html)
March 15th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
Gloomy situation for BD
1) India fights bird flu — Bangladesh at high Risk
2)Bird flu spreads to Myanmar, likely in Afghanistan ,Sunday, March 12,
3)Myanmar has reported what is believed to be the secretive country’s first case of bird flu, March 13
March 15th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
Golbal situation…….
1)Denmark has found its first case of a highly pathogenic bird flu virus in a wild buzzard, March 15
2)Azerbaijan, which lies on a crossroads between Asia and Europe, reported its first bird flu deaths, March 14
3) USA getting prepared to fight Bird Flu: Survaillance in the airports are in place. (TV report March 15)