China is source of bird flu virus, study shows

[Joanne98]

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China's southern Guangdong Province is the source of the dangerous H5N1 avian flu virus, according to a genetic analysis of the virus published on Monday.

And Guangdong appears to be the source of renewed waves of the H5N1 strain, which has killed or forced the destruction of hundreds of millions of birds, the team at the University of California Irvine reported.

"We show that the Chinese province of Guangdong is the source of multiple H5N1 strains spreading at both regional and international scales," the researchers wrote in their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It is probably still originating there and spreading," Walter Fitch, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

"If you can control the virus at its source, you can control it more efficiently," Fitch added in a statement.

"With a road map of where the strain has migrated, you're more likely to isolate the strain that you should be using to make the vaccine."

Since 2003, H5N1 has spread to more than 50 countries as far away from China as Nigeria and Britain. The real fear is that the virus could mutate into a form that people can easily pass from one to another and spark a pandemic. Continued...

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN0531214820070305

[Kali]

1. I thought it was already fairly well established that China was the source???

[pushycat]

2. Guangdong copied huge US poultry plants

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2006/032006/davis.html

They used the United States' large poultry plants (tyson) as a busines model. Now the world has the bird flu as a health threat.

How much will this cost us?

<quote>" Strangely, in the midst of all these bird deaths, the corporate chicken-processing plants were working overtime. As angry trade unionists at one factory just outside the capital told the Bangkok Post after the scandal broke: "Before November we were processing about 90,000 chickens a day. But from November to 23 January, we had to kill about 130,000 daily. It's our job to cut the birds up. It was obvious they were ill: their organs were swollen. We didn't know what the disease was, but we understood that the management was rushing to process the chickens before getting any veterinary inspection. We stopped eating in October."

The wall of official silence across Asia was breached in December when chickens started dying en masse on a farm near Seoul. Korean agricultural officials were stunned to discover H5N1, but, in contrast to their counterparts in China and Thailand, they promptly notified the World Animal Health Organization (OIE); a week later, South Korea announced a massive cull after new infections were identified in chicken and duck flocks in five provinces. Meanwhile children, not just chickens, had been dying mysteriously in Vietnam; just before the New Year, one of the CDC's influenza experts in Atlanta received a worried email from a virologist in Hanoi which described patients suffering from symptoms of viral pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which had caused the death of many of the 1918 pandemic's victims. "<endquote>

[Mojorabbit]

3. Most countries at first hide it

Iran is still denying they have it. Egypt did too but today seventeen more people were admitted as suspect cases. They had an official deny a case last week at the same time as another confirmed it.
The loss in tourism and livestock income seems to be the number one consideration instead of public health.
edited for spelling