Healthy Me - At Home and Away: Bird

Showing posts with label Bird. Show all posts

Monday, January 31, 2011

Flu-less chickens

If this is another attempt to 'play God', hopefully it will be for the better of mankind, not simply some experimentation the effects of which, short-term or long-term, is not known... left to chance.

Flu-less or clue-less?
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WASHINGTON: European scientists have found a way to genetically modify chickens so that they don't transmit bird flu, according to research published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Bird flu, also known as H5N1 avian influenza, usually afflicts poultry but can cross over to humans and cause lethal respiratory problems and other complications.

The first cases detected in humans were in Hong Kong in 1997. A wider global outbreak took hold in 2004 and cases have flared across parts of the world ever since.

Scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh said the modified chickens could get bird flu but could not pass it on to other chickens.

"Chickens are potential bridging hosts that can enable new strains of flu to be transmitted to humans," said Laurence Tiley, of the University of Cambridge's Department of Veterinary Medicine.

"Preventing virus transmission in chickens should reduce the economic impact of the disease and reduce the risk posed to people exposed to the infected birds."

However, Tiley noted that the research still in its early stages, and the birds they developed are not intended to be eaten by people.

"The genetic modification we describe is a significant first step along the path to developing chickens that are completely resistant to avian flu," Tiley said.

"These particular birds are only intended for research purposes, not for consumption."

The birds were altered by a new gene that makes a "decoy" molecule that imitates an element of bird flu virus.

Then the virus is "tricked into recognising the decoy molecule instead of the viral genome and this interferes with the replication cycle of the virus," the study said.

When scientists infected the genetically modified chickens with avian influenza, the birds fell ill but did not spread the flu to other birds, whether those birds were genetically modified or not.

"The results achieved in this study are very encouraging," said researcher Helen Sang of the University of Edinburgh.

"Using genetic modification to introduce genetic changes that cannot be achieved by animal breeding demonstrates the potential of GM to improve animal welfare in the poultry industry," she said.

"This work could also form the basis for improving economic and food security in many regions of the world where bird flu is a significant problem."

- AFP/de

Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:Scientists 'make' chickens that don't spread bird flu

Monday, July 6, 2009

Malaysian authorities seize 'Viagra coffee'

Image via Wikipedia

How does it look like? How would it make you feel? Any aftertaste? What else should I be asking?

Seems like the popularity of this drug is on the rise, and its form is evolving.

Viagra, what would be next in its 'evolution'?

Loads of this drug was mixed with coffee, and sold to unsuspecting consumers, to get perked up more than the usual coffee cup gives.

See the news story here.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Australian PM defends ramp-up of H1N1 flu response

Posted: 23 May 2009 1657 hrs

Australian PM Kevin Rudd

SYDNEY: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said it was inconvenient but necessary to ramp up the country's pandemic threat response as the number of confirmed H1N1 flu cases on Saturday reached 14.

Canberra lifted its alert level to a containment phase on Friday, after recording the country's first case of human-to-human transmission of the A(H1N1) virus in 10-year-old girl who contracted the disease from a classmate.

The girl's classmate had fallen ill upon returning from a family holiday to the United States.

The new phase allows for the closure of schools and other public places and cancellation of major events, with three schools already shut following the confirmation of cases among students.

Further closures are likely, with two boys, aged eight and 15, being diagnosed with the virus in Melbourne, taking the total number of cases to 14.

Authorities said neither boy had travelled recently or come into contact with any known cases.

Rudd acknowledged the closure of schools would inconvenience families, but said it was important to take decisive action.

"Every effort by our public health authorities has been taken to avoid deaths at home," Rudd told reporters.

"We will take whatever actions are necessary to underpin the public health of the nation."

With the exception of a 51-year-old Mexican tourist, all Australia's H1N1 flu cases are younger than 28, and more than half are school-aged children.

More than 11,100 cases and 86 deaths have been recorded since the outbreak of A(H1N1) influenza emerged in Mexico and the United States a month ago, and the world remains at flu alert level five, signalling an "imminent pandemic".
- AFP/yt

From channelNewsAisa.com; see the source article here.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Canadian farm culls 500 swine flu-infected pigs

English: Illustration of antigenic shift (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By CHARMAINE NORONHA,Associated Press Writer AP - Sunday, May 10

TORONTO - Canadian officials said Saturday that almost 500 hogs quarantined on an Alberta farm after they were diagnosed with swine flu have been culled because of overcrowding.

Dr. Gerald Hauer, Alberta's chief provincial veterinarian, said the quarantine left the farm unable to ship hogs to market, resulting in an overpopulation of pigs.

"They were not culled for being sick," Hauer told a news conference. "They were culled because of animal welfare concerns. Living conditions on the farm became unacceptable because of overcrowding. A farm of that size ships 100 out to market weekly so we had to get them out because several weeks of production remained on the farm."

The cull included healthy animals, pigs that had recovered from the virus, as well as hogs with flu symptoms, he said.

Hauer also stressed that the culled pigs and the virus will not enter the food chain since they have been disposed of through rendering, which treats the culled carcass with heat, killing the virus in the process.

Officials identified that the pigs had been infected with swine flu last weekend, apparently by a Canadian farm worker who recently visited Mexico and got sick after returning to Canada.

Dr. Brian Evans, executive vice president with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, stressed that the pigs do not pose a food safety risk, adding that swine flu regularly causes outbreaks in pigs.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studies have shown that swine flu is common throughout pig populations worldwide, with 25 percent of animals showing antibody evidence of infection.

Evans said normally detecting influenza in pigs would not generate a response from food safety officials, but officials alerted the public after the international flu outbreak.

The news that the H1N1 virus had been found in pigs made international headlines on May 2. Though genetic analysis of the new virus shows it is the product of reassortment (gene swapping) between two swine flu viruses, the virus had not been found in pigs to that point.

Officials said the pigs were likely infected in the same manner as humans worldwide, and that the virus is acting no differently in the pigs than other swine flu viruses.

Evans noted that the there was a remote chance that the infected pigs could transfer a virus to a person and that the new virus has shown no signs of mutation when passing from human to pig.

Hauer said Saturday that the flu has not spread beyond the farm and that 1,700 pigs remain under quarantine.

From Yahoo! News; see the source article here.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Swine flu goes person-to-pig; What's next?

English: Main symptoms of swine flu. (See Wikipedia:Swine influenza#Swine flu in Humans). Model: Mikael Häggström. To discuss image, please see Template talk:Häggström diagrams References Centers for Disease Control and Prevention > Key Facts about Swine Influenza (Swine Flu) Retrieved on April 27, 2009 Joint pain added from general influenza: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention > Influenza Symptoms Page last updated November 16, 2007. Retrieved April 28, 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By MARGIE MASON,AP Medical Writer AP - 2 hours 44 minutes ago

MEXICO CITY - Now that the swine flu virus has passed from a farmworker to pigs, could it jump back to people? The question is important, because crossing species again could make it more deadly.

The never-before-seen virus was created when genes from pig, bird and human viruses mixed together inside a pig. Experts fear the virus that has gone from humans back into pigs in at least one case could mutate further before crossing back into humans again. But no one can predict what will happen.

"Could it gain virulence? Yes," Juan Lubroth, an animal health expert at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, said Sunday. "It could also become milder. It could go in both directions."

Canadian officials announced Saturday that the virus had infected about 200 pigs on a farm _ the first evidence that it had jumped to another species. It was linked to a farmworker who recently returned from Mexico, where 19 people have died from the virus. The farmworker has recovered, and the mildly infected pigs have been quarantined.

Agriculture officials believe the worker may have sneezed or coughed near the pigs, possibly in a barn. About 10 percent of the herd experienced loss of appetite and fever, but all are recovering.

Experts say pork _ even from infected pigs _ is safe to eat.

Lubroth stressed that sick people should avoid contact with swine, but said healthy farmworkers don't need to take any extra precautions because the chance of catching flu from a pig is small.

Unlike the H5N1 bird flu virus, which infects the blood, organs and tissue of poultry, most swine flus are confined to the respiratory tract, meaning the risk of a human getting infected by a pig is "probably 10 or a 1,000 times less," Lubroth said.

But pigs are of special concern because they share some basic biological similarities with humans, and they have served as "mixing vessels" in which various flu strains have swapped genetic material. That's what happened to create the current swine flu strain.

Scientists are unsure when the virus leaped from pigs to humans _ possibly months or even a year ago _ but it was identified as a new strain about a week and a half ago. Since then, nearly 800 cases have been confirmed worldwide. The only death outside Mexico occurred when a Mexican toddler died in a Texas hospital.

There have been sporadic cases of pigs infecting humans with influenza in the past. Most cases resulted in mild symptoms, typically among people who were in close contact with sick pigs. A few deaths have been recorded, and limited human-to-human transmission also has been documented, but nothing sustained.

Dr. Tim Uyeki, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who has worked on SARS and bird flu outbreaks, said there may be more pig-to-human cases that have gone unnoticed because surveillance among swine populations tends to be weaker than among poultry stocks.

Given that the past three flu pandemics _ the 1918 Spanish flu, the 1957-58 Asian flu and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 _ were all linked to birds, much of the global pandemic preparedness has focused on avian flus.

"The world has been watching and preparing and trying to prevent a pandemic from an avian influenza reservoir," he said. "The focus has been on birds, and here is a virus that's coming from a swine reservoir. Now it's a human virus."

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From Yahoo! News; source article is here.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Egyptian boy dies of bird flu

H5N1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CAIRO — A six-year-old boy died in Egypt after contracting H5N1 avian influenza, becoming the country's 24th human casualty of the disease since 2006, the state-run Middle East News Agency reported yesterday.

Egypt has the highest number of avian-flu cases outside Asia, according to the most recent data from the World Health Organisation. With the newest reports, the number of infected people there has reached 67.

The boy is the first fatality attributed to the virus in Egypt this year, the news agency quoted a spokesman for the Health Ministry as saying. The boy had shown symptoms of the virus on March 22 after coming in contact with dead birds.

The ministry reported the 67th infection earlier yesterday, saying that a four-year-old boy had contracted the virus. The boy has been given Tamiflu and is in stable condition in hospital.

The Swiss manufacturer of the antiviral medicine, Roche, says it can reduce the severity and duration of flu symptoms if taken within 48 hours of the onset of disease. Early treatment for the H5N1 avian flu may improve survival, some uncontrolled studies have shown.
BLOOMBERG

From TODAY, World – Wednesday, 22-April-2009