[ALERT?] The human flu pandemic has clearly begun according to Dr. Niman.

Thai Binh Haiphong and Quang Ninh H5N1 Clusters

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/04060504/H5N1_Vietnam_Clusters.html

Recombinomics Commentary
April 6, 2005

The clusters of bird flu in northern Vietnam have merged and now cover the northeastern coastine of Vietnam adjacent to Haiphong Harbor.

The three provinces, Thai Binh, Haiphong, and Quang Ninh have the three largest clusters in terms of members admitted on the same day (Haiphong), longest transmission chain including two health care workers (Thai Binh), and first heath care worker fatality (Quang Ninh).

There is clear human-to-human transmission going on in this region, which led to the executive order on April 1 in the United States authorizing bird flu quarantine.

Thai Binh is adjacent to China and the four cases at the Vietnam-Swedish hospital are ringing alarm bells loudly.

The flu pandemic of 2005 has clearly begun.

Hopefully CanadaSue will chime in on this one. Haven't seen anything about it at curevents.com yet.

For them be making the 'call' that it has started is somewhat concerning.

Hmmm. Lovely. Here's a Promedmail article from yesterday ...


AVIAN INFLUENZA, HUMAN - EAST ASIA (65): VIET NAM
*************************************************
A ProMED-mail post
<http://www.promedmail.org>
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
<http://www.isid.org>

Date: Tue 5 Apr 2005
From: A-Lan Banks <A-Lan.Banks@thomson.com>
Sosurce: Reuters News online, Tue 5 Apr 2005 [edited]
<http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=healthNews&storyID=8084714>


Viet Nam: 2 More Suspected Human Cases of Avian Influenza (and one
suspected fatal case of SARS)
---------------------------------------------------
2 more Vietnamese, a 12-year-old girl and a woman, are in hospital with
suspected avian influenza, the official Vietnamese News Agency said on Tue
5 Apr 2005.

The girl, who lives near a poultry slaughterhouse, was in an isolation ward
on Monday in the northern city of Haiphong, the head of the city's Health
Department was quoted as saying. The woman was taken to hospital in Hue the
previous day and both were being tested to see if they had contracted the
H5N1 virus which has killed 49 people in Asia. The Haiphong hospital has
been treating a couple and their 3 daughters who caught avian influenza
last month [March 2005], the largest number of bird flu cases found
together [i.e. as a cluster] in Viet Nam.

The Tien Phong newspaper said researchers at the National Institute for
Hygiene and Epidemiology meanwhile were trying to find what had caused the
acute pneumonia which killed a 34-year-old doctor in the northern province
of Quang Ninh. He fell sick on Fri 1 Apr 2005, his breathing worsened
quickly despite emergency treatment for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
(SARS), and he died on Sunday, the newspaper said. Test results [are]
expected by the end of this week. A SARS outbreak in 2003 killed nearly 800
people worldwide, including 5 in Viet Nam.

On Monday, Vietnamese doctors said a 27-year-old woman had contracted avian
influenza after drinking duck blood, a local specialty, but was expected to
survive. (ack! )

The avian influenza (H5N1) virus has swept across much of Asia in late 2003
and has since killed 35 people in Viet Nam, 14 since the disease broke out
anew in the southern Mekong Delta in December. The virus, which has also
killed 12 Thais and 2 Cambodians, does not pass easily from birds to
humans, and eating infected fowl cooked properly is not dangerous.

--
ProMED-mail
<promed@promedmail.org>

[It is not entirely clear why the 34-year-old doctor in Quang Ninh
province, who fell ill on Fri 1 Apr 2005 and died on Sunday, is being
considered a suspected case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) --
caused by a SARS coronavirus infection -- rather than as a suspected case
of avian influenza virus infection. Further clarification is requested
urgently. - Mod.CP]

http://www.promedmail.org/pls/prome..._BACK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_PUB_MAIL_ID:1000,28589

Thanks NoCarrier

This announcement is coming from a website that has experts who've been following this flu from the gitgo. Where is the media?

Over at Curevents they are saying that none of the things this doctor has said would happen, has not happened so far.

Hopefully, that's true this time too.

BB said:

This announcement is coming from a website that has experts who've been following this flu from the gitgo. Where is the media?

Click to expand...

They are all covering the Papal Funeral and other "easy" stories that don't require any real thought other than reading the press releases.

Am I being to hard on these guys??

Flu Shot season may get real interesting!

Recombinomics Commentary
April 7, 2005

>> I know that many of you have dedicated your careers to this field. In the short time that I have been Secretary of Health and Human Services, I have become acutely aware of the disastrous public health impact that an influenza pandemic could have throughout the world. This is one of the most urgent health challenges we face, and I've made it a top HHS priority. Recently, I increased my briefing frequency on the flu to daily......

In order to increase our readiness against a pandemic strain of influenza, last Friday, on my recommendation, President Bush added pandemic influenza to the list of quarantinable events. This gives HHS the authority to take steps to prevent people with a new or reemerging influenza virus from infecting others by stopping them at our borders. <<

The above remarks by US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, support the comment that an H5N1 infection of a 34 year-old physician at Vietnam-Sweden hospital in Quang Ninh led to the executive order of April 1, allowing the US to quarantine bird flu cases.

The monitoring of the outbreak in the US has been elevated to a daily briefing, which almost certainly includes additional notifications of unusual events. Therefore, when the physician developed Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) on Friday, April 1, in Vietnam (Thursday night in the US), he was probably tested with a quick test for H5N1. When he tested positive, an alert was issued.

This alert then went to HHS in the US, which resulted in the recommendation for the executive order, which was signed on April 1.

It is unclear if the three suspect bird flu cases at the hospital were patients who were recently admitted because of bird flu symptoms, or were patients who were tested because there was a concern about further H5N1 transmission within the hospital.

In either event, ARDS, followed by death on Sunday without a known source, has provided yet another signal that the flu pandemic of 2005 has begun. H5N1 that is efficiently transmitted to humans appears to be generating a range of outcomes. The family of five in Haiphing appears to be on the way to recovery. Results on their neighbors, admitted on or about March 25, have not been released. The family of five was H5N1 positive, clearly showing efficient transmission.

Although there has been minimal or no reporting of H5N1 in poultry in Thai Binh, Haiphong, and Quang Ninh provinces, the three adjacent provinces each have set a record related to efficient transmission (longest transmission chain, largest cluster admitted on the same day, first fatal infection of a health care worker - from an unknown source).

Thus, H5N1 is clearly transmitting efficiently in northeastern Vietnam. However, since many of the cases are mild, most of this transmission is not being detected and/or reported. The time between this efficient transmission in northeast Vietnam, and a pandemic resulting in millions of fatalities may be weeks or months, but the efficient transmission is the missing requirement for the start of the pandemic, and that requirement has been met.

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/04070501/H5N1_Efficient_NE_Vietnam.html

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/04070503/H5N1_Spread_Beyond.html

Has Deadly Bird Flu Spread Beyond Asia?

Recombinomics Commentary
April 7, 2005

>> "The potential for the disease to spread to other continents is real and the international scientific community cannot remain insensitive to the challenge of preventing this happening," OIE Director-General Bernard Vallat told a conference in Paris on Thursday. <<

Although the potential for H5N1 bird flu to spread to other continents is real, the possibility that it has already spread to other continents is high. Reports of bird flu in the three northeastern provinces of Vietnam, Thai Binh, Haiphong, and Quang Ninh, show clear patterns of human-to-human transmissions. Reports of H5N1 infected poultry in these provinces have historically been very low and there has been little evidence to link many, if any, of these cases to poultry. The evidence for human-to-human transmission within the clusters is overwhelming, and the clustering of clusters leaves little doubt that the transmission to humans is becoming increasingly efficient, as transmission chains grow longer and clusters grow larger.

However, many of the cases have been much milder than those reported in the south, where the case fatality remains at 100%. In the north, many of the patients improve within days after hospitalization and are released after 1-2 weeks. This mild course suggests many H5N1 patients simply recover at home, assuming that they have a bad case of human flu.

As the number of the milder cases increases, so does the likelihood that some H5N1 infected people will travel outside of Asia and transmit H5N1 to contacts in other continents. These milder cases will go unnoticed unless the symptoms worsen to a point where testing is ordered. However, milder cases will not be tested, so the flow of H5N1 outside of Asia will remain undetected.

I know there has probobly been a lot of talk about this already, but I was without a computer for a little while. What are the most important preps for if there was a quarintine in your area?
Amanda Blue

Amanda,

See this thread:

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?t=141047

Thanks

Amanda, click here: The Bottomline for preps for Avian Flu: http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?t=141047&highlight=avian

deniability

the problem right along with the reporting of this is that anyone who has eaten chicken in the last month is immediately assumed to have caught the illness from the meat. Same with living near poultry. That's why the woman from a different province who travelled to her daughter's funeral and had provably no contact with poultry was the first case of "human-to-human" contact.

So what we've been seeing (and I'm reading this daily or nearly so for months now) is people living with and nursing other people being labelled "caught from poultry" even if their contact with the poultry is sketchy at best.

Kind of like finding a New York gay who never went to a bar.