Friday night Pandemic Watch - Swine Flu coming to you?

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

[chiggerbit]

You know how the media keeps repeating how pork is safe to eat?

http://www.abc15.com/content/living/you ... sMybw.cspx

"....It has an unfortunate name doesn't it?" asked Dr. Bob England with the Marciopa County Department of Public Health. "It has nothing to do with eating meat from a pig. You can't catch swine flu eating anything....."

Well, that's not exactly how the CDC says it :

There is no risk of infection from this virus from consumption of well-cooked pork and pork products.

Maybe I'm reading too much into that statement, but what it ways to me is that the pork you're eating may have the virus in it, but the virus
is killed when cooked at high enough temperatures for long enough.

ABC goes into more detail here:

http://a.abcnews.com/US/wireStory?id=7440199

Fear of swine flu is a good reason to wash your hands, but not to take pork off the menu.



Federal health officials say the virus that has triggered fears of a flu pandemic is not transmitted by food, and that all food-borne germs are killed when pork is cooked to the recommended internal temperature of 160 F.

There also is no evidence so far that American pigs are infected with the virus, or that people can become infected by touching uncooked pork, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Monday.

Swine flu can be spread the same way seasonal viruses are, mainly through sneezing, coughing and touching surfaces contaminated with the virus, as well as through contact with infected pigs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

When cooking pork, internal temperature is a better indicator than color to determine whether the meat is safely cooked. Cooked pork sometimes will still be pink at the center depending on cooking method and other ingredients.


Thomas Griffiths, an associate dean at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., says smaller cuts of pork, such as chops or medallions, should be cooked until they hit 160 F.

But large cuts, such as a loin, can be removed from the heat at about 152 F or 153 F, then allowed to rest. Larger cuts of all meats continue cooking off the heat and will reach 160 F.

There IS a big difference between saying pork is safe to eat and saying pork is safe to eat if it's been heated to a high enough temperature. And the question about touching raw pork hasn't been really addressed.

[chiggerbit]

OK, this is weird how there have been no results from the tests received on the original 6 ill residents of Marshall County who have been considered "probable" for H1N1. The governor indicated on Saturday that test results would be in shortly. Now, maybe that's due to the backlog, but I have my doubts. And now there are a total of 27 "probable's" in Marshall County alone, and no test results. Are they trying to damp down concerns by delaying the release of the test results?

The media never says so, but I'm wondering if some of these cases are the Mexican workers at the meat packing plants in Marshall County, such as Swift and Co, which would indicate a high liklihood of the disease having a direct connection to Mexico's influenza. The reason that I mention this is that the event of this flu having passed from human to hogs at the herd in Alberta, Canada could be could be the forerunner of a real problem at meat packing plants plants all over. In other words, this flu has likely passed from hogs to humans and back to hogs again in a matter of weeks, indicating some pretty fast crossovers, and there's at least circumstantial evidence that both ways have occurred at meat packing plants.

More on central Iowa here:
http://www.mediastudies.org/templates/d ... ntID=17494

[chiggerbit]

I was wrong:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/articl ... /905060352

Tina Coleman, Marshall County’s public health director, told reporters it is unclear why the outbreak has hit Marshalltown so hard. She said the first area case was a young man who traveled to an area of the United States that had the virus. She noted that the man was white.

After the news conference, Coleman said she wanted to make the man’s race clear because some people have speculated that Marshalltown’s large Hispanic population is somehow at fault for the outbreak.

This is interesting:

"....Public and parochial schools here will reopen Thursday because federal experts no longer think children need to be kept out of classes if their classmates - or people who work in the building - come down with the H1N1 flu...."

"...Marshall County has been the site of about 90 percent of Iowa's cases of the disease, commonly called swine flu. School district officials followed federal recommendations in canceling classes. But experts from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed their recommendations Tuesday. They said that the virus apparently is not as contagious as initially feared, and that the practice of closing schools has not proved effective at stopping local outbreaks...."

\

"...Marshalltown schools Superintendent Marvin Wade said he was surprised by the federal experts' changing advice.

"The message we had gotten loud and clear was, 'Close down the schools, stop the transmission,' " he said. He said he had no regrets about the earlier decision to close schools....".

[chiggerbit]

I'm beginning to think that this might be a good time to catch this flu, before it comes arround again and bites us in the butt later this year..


http://www.usnews.com/articles/science/ ... eadly.html
Experts: Mild Swine Flu Could Quickly Turn Deadly
Posted May 6, 2009


SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON—A flu virus is a powerhouse of evolution, mutating at the maximum speed nature allows. A mild virus can morph into a killer and vice versa.

One change already made this year's swine flu more of a problem, helping it spread more easily among people. The big question is: What mutations are next? That's why scientists are watching it so closely.


"There are no rules to flu viruses; they are just so mutable," said Dr. Paul Glezen, a flu epidemiologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "The fact that it changes all the time really confounds our efforts to control it."

Think of flu's evolution like a family tree: In the current flu's distant ancestry are last century's three pandemics. But its more immediate relatives are swine flu strains that were no big deal to humans.

The good news right now is that this flu has lost some of the most dangerous genetic traits of past pandemics. The bad news is that it's gained something its parents didn't have: the ability to spread from human to human.

Flu reproduces about every eight hours, said Dr. Raul Rabadan, professor of computational biology at Columbia University. That means this morning's flu is a parent by the afternoon, a grandparent by the evening, and a great-grandparent by the next day.

Instead of complex double-helix DNA — nature's basic biological instruction book — flu has a simpler, single strand of genetic code. Normal DNA has a spellcheck-like system that reduces mistakes in replicating the code; the flu virus does not. So mutations come more often. If the mutations are good for the virus, they multiply, and voila, you have a new and sometimes nastier flu.

Scientists are trying to piece together swine flu's ever-changing genome, its genetic ancestors and the random mutations that in this instance turned a simple pig disease into something that scares billions.

They also don't know how the virus is going to mutate next.

In the world's most devastating global flu epidemic in 1918, the first wave of cases in the spring were mild. Then, the virus evolved and came back in the fall as a strain that proved truly deadly, flu experts say. So scientists today are watching to see if that could happen again.

Also troubling is the possibility that this virus could develop resistance to anti-flu drugs, and flu trackers are watching for such changes, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flu chief Dr. Nancy Cox said.

It's impossible to know where this swine flu strain began exactly, Cox said. But flu trackers do have clues to its closest ancestral genes.

"Its two parents were swine viruses that we know and love," said virologist Dr. Richard Webby, a researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

The mother of the swine flu was a surprising genetic event that went unnoticed except by a few scientists a little over a decade ago. Three influenza strains — some pig, some bird, some human — combined in pigs to form two new strains of swine flu. This new flu was unusual. Virus hunters called it a "triple reassortment."

That 1998-99 flu in pigs first hit a farm in North Carolina, then spread to Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma and eventually to at least 23 states. No more than 4 percent of the swine died. But the disease was in more than one-quarter of tested pigs. A handful of people who were in close contact with the hogs got slightly sick when they caught this flu from pigs, but they didn't die and didn't spread it to others.

In 2005, a 17-year-old Wisconsin boy caught that triple reassortment flu virus from "respiratory secretions" of a pig he had been helping his brother-in-law butcher, according to the CDC. He recovered and didn't pass it on to others.

There have been about 10,000 generations of that virus since. Six of the eight genetic segments of the current swine flu can be traced to that triple combination, Rabadan said.

The rest of the swine flu parentage is more of a mystery. The other two of the eight genetic segments can be traced to pig viruses in Europe and Asia that were seen from time to time in the 1990s, Rabadan said. Scientists don't quite know if those other two segments combined with the triple reassortment at the same time or separately.

How the triple reassortment genes and the European and Asian genes met and mixed is not known, Webby said.

The three global flu epidemics of the past, including the 1918 event, all passed on traits to ancestors of this flu, Rabadan said. But there have been many changes in the thousands of generations since.

A specific gene for virulence that was seen in the 1918, 1957 and 1968 pandemics was notably absent in this swine flu, said Dr. Peter Palese, a prominent flu researcher for Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. He said when he removed that gene from other viruses of the past, they weren't as dangerous.

Rabadan suggests the way to think of this flu is like a homemade car with parts from different vehicles. The parts have all been in several different vehicles before. Sometimes the combination of parts is a dud and the car doesn't move. And sometimes you get a race car. A pandemic is a race car.

All eight of the new flu's genetic segments have been in different viruses before. But this is the first time this specific combination has been seen. The big question is: Why is this particular swine virus spreading so fast among people when past swine viruses haven't?

One possibility is that it's just this particular combination of the eight parts that makes it spread among people, Webby said. But a more logical explanation is that a small mutation within the individual genetic segments changed things.

These tiny changes are possible because there are about 13,000 individual letters, or bases, in the flu genetic code, Rabadan said. That's tiny compared to more than 3 billion in humans.

One prime suspect is the surface protein hemagglutinin, the "H'' in the virus' H1N1 name. It is "probably the most important gene determining virulence and immunological characteristics," according to Palese.

In flu viruses, scientists have so far identified 16 hemagglutinins. Only three — H1, H2 and H3 — commonly infect humans. The other surface protein, neuraminidase, has nine variations. Palese said scientists are seeing more different types of flu strains because of better surveillance and increases in bird, pig and human populations.

"These genetic processes of mutation and genetic reassortment occur all the time," he said, "and every once in a time, it's a lottery winner."

[American Dream]

Excerpted from: http://www.fpif.org/fpifzines/wb/6101

Capitalist Pigs

Think about the term "money laundering" for a moment. It suggests that the more often dirty money changes hands, the cleaner it gets.

Globalization operates according to the same imagined principle. If we tear down the barriers to the free flow of capital, our economies will cleanse themselves of protectionist impurities. The faster that money circulates in the global spin-cycle, the more efficiently the global economy will operate.

In fact, globalization just moves the dirt around. The recent outbreak of swine flu —actually a hybrid of swine, avian, and human flu — painfully demonstrates this truth. Did the epidemic begin at a hog farm run by Smithfield Foods in Veracruz, Mexico? A disease much like swine flu broke out in the community of La Gloria in February, affecting 60% of the town's population of 3,000 people. The link between this outbreak and the subsequent epidemic hasn't been determined. But the residents of La Gloria have been complaining for some time about the filthy conditions, namely the manure lagoons and the flies that love them.

As Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Manuel Pérez-Rocha points out in the latest video interview in our Empire strategic focus, Smithfield was polluting the Chesapeake Bay before it branched out into polluting Mexico. In 1997, Smithfield was hit with the largest water pollution fine ever — $12.7 million — for dumping you-know-what into a river that feeds into the Chesapeake. Thanks to the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Smithfield could easily shift operations to a place where health and safety regulations are considerably less strict. Rather than raising standards — wages, environmental regulations, health care — free trade agreements have pushed down the quality of life for workers and those living in communities around operations like Smithfield's in Veracruz.

The brouhaha over the name of the flu — it is now officially called "H1N1," which makes it sound like the latest music video channel — has largely obscured the appalling conditions at these hog operations and their pathogenic propensities. "Pigs actually serve as a wonderful mixing vessel for influenza viruses to reassort," the CDC's Nancy Cox told The Washington Post. Epidemiologist Ellen Silbergeld was even more to the point: "It's my opinion that these kinds of events go on all the time because we have so little regulation of industrial agriculture. It's appropriate to refer to these animal operations as viral mixing bowls" (By the way, if you want to get a sense of what it's like inside these porcine hells on earth, read the novel That Old Ace in the Hole by E. Annie Proulx, which in the most entertaining way rubs your face in it).

Globalization isn't just about capital, of course. Germs and viruses are thrilled at the new opportunities to spread. Epidemics have been linked to colonialism (Europeans brought smallpox to the New World and brought home syphilis in return) and to war (the great flu epidemic of 1918 spread in part because of troop movements). These days, pathogens are benefiting from the greater circulation of people, goods, and capital. Both AIDS and SARS were given a big boost by airline travel. But the creation of a global assembly line for food production — swine flu breeding grounds, avian flu Petri dishes, mad cow disease production facilities — has exponentially increased our chances of breeding a virus that can tear through our compromised global immune system. If viruses could speak, they would sound a lot like Ronald Reagan: "Mr. Human Being, tear down this wall!"

One end run around this problem is to skip livestock altogether and grow meat in the laboratory, which the Dutch have been researching (giving new meaning to the phrase "Dutch treat"). But that sends us off into Oryx and Crake territory, novelist Margaret Atwood's terrifying vision of genetic engineering and pandemics. Without giving away the novel's ending, let's just say it's apocalyptic.

A more appropriate response would be to ramp up global cooperation to deal with these global challenges. One positive sign is China's recent decision to stop preventing Taiwan from participating as an observer at the World Health Organization. We can't deal with these problems until everyone is at the table. A shift in resources away from military spending and toward global health care is another no-brainer. And our globalization should be about raising standards rather than lowering them to the level of a pigsty.

We don't need an alien invasion à la The Day the Earth Stood Still to force nations to set aside their petty squabbling and join forces. The aliens are already here. They're just too small to see. They've sent their forces into battle several times already and been defeated, sometimes after a long and expensive fight. They're now gathering their strength and developing new weapons of mass destruction. Are we going to come up with an effective non-proliferation strategy? Or will we take the A. Q. Khan route and essentially supply these pathogens with the means to take us out?"...

Links
"Swine Flu in Mexico: Timeline of Events," Biosurveilliance, April 24, 2009; http://biosurveillance.typepad.com/bios ... vents.html

"Interview with Manuel Pérez-Rocha," Foreign Policy In Focus/YouTube; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub1upFN4 ... r_embedded

Tom Philpott, "Symptom: Swine Flu. Diagnosis: Industrial Agriculture," Grist, April 28, 2009; http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-28 ... eld-swine/

Associated Press, "Smithfield Gets Record Fine for Polluting Virginia River," September 1997; http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=2082

Joel Achenbach, "Health Officials are Wary but Hopeful," The Washington Post, May 4, 2009; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00791.html

Mark Rose, "Origins of Syphilis," Archaeology News Briefs, January/February 1997; http://www.archaeology.org/9701/newsbri ... hilis.html

Reed Stevenson, "Dutch Try to Grow Enviro-Friendly Meat in Labs," Reuters, June 1, 2007; http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL3051670020070601

Keith Bradsher, "Taiwan Takes Step Forward at UN Health Agency," The New York Times, April 29, 2009; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/world ... lobal-home

[chiggerbit]

Four of the original 6 probablesfrom last Saturday in Marshall County, Iowa were confirmed, and they've added nine new probables in that county to their list. They opened the schools back up today, so it will be interesting to see if the numbers skyrocket.

.http://www.whotv.com/news/who-story-h1n ... 5017.story

Four Marshall County Cases Confirmed As H1N1
WHO
Staff Writer


May 6, 2009
Four of Marshall County's suspected 36 cases of H1N1 flu have been confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control. That brings the total confirmed cases of the virus in Iowa to five.

Wednesday, the Iowa Department of Public Health added nine more probable cases in Marshall County and one in Hardin County. That brings the number of suspected cases of H1N1 flu in Marshall County to 32, with four confirmed cases.

Because of fears the illness would spread rapidly, Marshalltown schools were closed this week, but will begin classes again Thursday.

Story County officials say an Iowa State student from Marshalltown is showing symptoms of the virus.

Polk County reported its first possible case earlier this week, in a 27-year-old Johnston man.

There is also one other confirmed case of H1N1 flu in Iowa, that was in Des Moines County.

[chiggerbit]

Remember the CDC saying

"viruses are not spread by food, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced in a statement posted to its web site. You cannot get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products. Eating properly handled and cooked pork products is safe.' The CDC and other health organizatio...

Now WHO says don't eat pork that has swine flu. Right, and we're supposed to trust companies like Smithfield to not send out infected meat from their plants?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... tory/Front

HONG KONG — Meat from pigs infected with influenza A H1N1 should not be eaten by humans, a WHO official said Wednesday, while stressing that existing checks were sufficient to safeguard the food supply from the new virus strain.

Jorgen Schlundt, director of the World Health Organization's Department of Food Safety, Zoonoses and Foodborne Diseases, said care must be taken to ensure that pigs and their meat were checked for all diseases, including the H1N1 virus that may be present in the blood of infected animals.

“Meat from sick pigs or pigs found dead should not be processed or used for human consumption under any circumstances,” he told Reuters.

It is possible for flu viruses such as the new H1N1 strain to survive the freezing process and be present in thawed meat, as well as in blood, the expert said. But he stressed that there was no risk of infection from eating or handling pork so long as normal precautions were adhered to.

“While it is possible for influenza viruses to survive the freezing process and be present on thawed meat, there are no data available on the survival of influenza A H1N1 on meat nor any data on the infectious dose for people,” he wrote in an e-mail reply to questions from Reuters about risks from the respiratory secretions and blood of infected pigs.

Mr. Schlundt said it was still unclear whether and how long the virus, which is commonly known as swine flu but also contains human and avian flu pieces, would be present in the blood and meat-juices of animals which contracted it.

“The likelihood of influenza viruses to be in the blood of an infected animal depends on the specific virus. Blood (and meat-juice) from influenza H1N1-infected pigs may potentially contain virus, but at present, this has not been established,” he said.

The WHO has urged veterinarians, farm hands and slaughterhouse workers to exercise caution in their contact with pigs to avoid contamination until more is known about how it manifests in the animals.

“In general, we recommend that persons involved in activities where they could come in contact with large amounts of blood and secretions, such as those slaughtering/eviscerating pigs, wear appropriate protective equipment,” Mr. Schlundt said.

The Food and Agriculture Organization and World Organization for Animal Health have said import bans on pigs and pork are not required to safeguard public health because the disease is not food-borne and does not pose a threat in dead animal tissue.

While acknowledging technical questions remain about the conditions in which the virus may be present, Mr. Schlundt stressed that the WHO had not changed its basic guidance that pork is safe to eat.

International trade and food safety guidelines — drawn up well before the latest flu scare — provide ample protection and ensure meat is not sourced from sick animals, he said.

“Sick animals should not enter the food chain. If you are following existing guidelines it (the virus) will not get into the human food chain,” he said.

The Paris-based OIE has also said the new flu strain does not require supplemental care or checks besides those in place for other diseases, and stressed live pigs can continue to be traded using normal health inspection standards.

The new H1N1 swine flu virus is being transmitted from person to person, not from pigs to people.

Its global spread has prompted many countries to limit pork imports, however. As many as 20 governments have imposed import bans on live pigs and meat from affected countries to prevent exposure to the virus.

Such fears increased after Canadian authorities said on Saturday a herd of swine was infected by a farmer who had returned from Mexico.

The WHO said its laboratories have confirmed more than 1,500 cases of the flu virus in 22 countries.

While the strain is mainly spread from person to person through coughing and sneezing, experts do not know for sure how this virus came to be, which animal passed it to the first human patient and when that occurred.

But the case of the farmer infecting the pigs in Canada fuelled fears of the virus yet again jumping the species barrier — this time from pig to human — and possibly becoming more virulent in the process.

[chiggerbit]

The number of confirmed cases has jumped from 5 on Wednesday to 36 today, but we're being told that htat's not evidence that the bug is spreading:

http://www.ksfy.com/news/local/44590732.html

[Fixx]

Warm weather may not halt swine flu

New data from Mexico and case numbers so far suggest that if the spread of H1N1 "swine flu" continues elsewhere as it has in the Americas, the virus could infect more than a billion people by July.

The data also suggests that the virus may not be slowed by summer temperatures in temperate countries. However, it spreads slowly enough to respond to the "social distancing" measures used in Mexico.

2009 H1N1 has been circulating, geneticists estimate, since last autumn, but it was first recognised in Mexico in April. New data released by the Mexican health ministry (pdf) reveals disturbing similarities with the last H1N1 pandemic, in 1918.

Health officials have expressed hopes that summer weather in the northern hemisphere will stop H1N1, as it does ordinary flu. But "pandemic flu doesn't seem to be as sensitive to warm weather," says Lone Simonsen of George Washington University in Washington, DC. A relatively mild first wave of the 1918 pandemic spread through the northern hemisphere in the spring and summer.
1918 similarities

The Mexican data show cases of pneumonia – a proxy measure for severe flu – soared in April, mainly in Mexico City. April temperatures there range between 11° and 26 °C, climbing higher than the summer average in London, UK.

Moreover, flu normally kills the very young and very old. The data shows that a disproportionate number of people between 15 and 54 were hospitalised for severe pneumonia in April this year compared to April for the past three years in Mexico. The same age group was disproportionately affected in 1918 and other pandemics.

Yet physical limits on testing mean we cannot say exactly how fast the virus is spreading. The number of confirmed cases reflects the availability of testing as much as the spread of the virus, says Richard Besser, head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

With 896 cases yesterday – bringing the World Health Organization total to 2384 from 24 countries – the US has the largest number outside Mexico, and the fastest growth in cases. But Besser says numbers will change as state labs get new test kits, and work through backlogs, while states with large numbers of suspected cases will not test them all.
Too many to count

"We will be moving to much more of a system like we use with seasonal flu," which tracks levels of "flu activity", says Besser – the number of regions in a state confirming outbreaks of flu, rather than case numbers. States such as Georgia and New Yorkalready test only serious cases.

Health experts tell New Scientist that based on the apparently exponential rate of rise soon after the WHO started counting cases, H1N1 could infect more than a billion people by July. Mexico's numbers show just such a rise in cases of flu this spring. The Mexican health ministry thinks that would have continued without the closure of schools, businesses and mass gatherings imposed by the government.

They may be right. Based on observation of individual cases, they calculate that the R0 of the virus in Mexico – the number of people infected by each case, a measure of how readily it spreads – is 1.4. A genetic analysis had put this at 1.16, but an underestimate was expected for technical reasons.

Mathematical modelling shows flu with low R numbers, such as 1.4, is easier to stop with "social distancing" measures.

New Scientist

[chiggerbit]

The second person in Texas who had died of this flu was a 33-year-old woman, and her "underlying health issues' which contributed to the severity of her illness were pregnacy, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis.

Marshall County, Iowa, which had 6 "probable" cases of swine flu on Saturday had 37 confirmed cases as of yesterday. Their schools re-opened on Thursday.

[monster]

asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis.

All inflammatory diseases, which makes sense if the virus kills by turning the immune system against itself. People with autoimmune disorders would be more susceptible - I wonder if the data supports this or not.

[chiggerbit]

asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis.

Are all three of those over-reactive immune disorders of some sort, even the psoriasis, monster? Can you imagine dying of flu due to your psoriasis? What about the meds people take for these three afflictions? Would those meds interfere with a person's ability to resist flu? I had a type A flu in the eight month of my last pregnacy, and it was NOT fun. I wonder what the effect would be on a fetus if those anti-virals are used by the mother.

Meanwhile, since the reporting of Iowa's third "probable" case-- the first for Marshall County, Iowa-- on May 1, Iowa has announced it's 43rd confirmed case as of last Friday. I've read that the incubation period is longer for this strain than for the usual ones, so I expect that Iowa will see a storm of flu cases by the end of this week, now that the Marshall County kids have returned to school.

Update: Iowa now has 54 confirmed cases as of today, Monday the 11th. I suppose pretty soon they'll stop testing every probable case.

[stickdog99]

What is there to this story other than hype? The flu spreads. A select few people die of the flu. What is the news story here?

[lightningBugout]

What is there to this story other than hype? The flu spreads. A select few people die of the flu. What is the news story here?

1. Swine and avian flus are different than the seasonal flu for any given year.
2. This flu is very, very, very contagious.
3. It will mutate over time. If it mutates to become more deadly, many many people could die.