Avian Flu

Richard Moyer no longer visits his fellow poultry farmers. Robert Weaver turns out of his way to avoid even driving past his neighbor's farm, where the poultryman's plague already has visited. And at a meeting of young farmers the other night, not a single poultry farmer was in attendance; for the time being, they communicate only through letters and phone calls. Fifteen months after everyone thought it was safe to let down their guard, avian influenza has returned to a handful - so far - of chicken and turkey farms in central and southern Pennsylvania.

I offer you a story whose impact is so monumental that I haven't heard a peep from Congress or the White about it. This is not a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. This is a problem of bureaucrats so busy greasing their own agendas that they are doing squat to protect us. We are talking here about avian flu. Flu is always a fascinating issue in America. This past year, we depended on a British plant to provide enough vaccine to supply our population against that year's strain of Asian flu, but the plant screwed it up, and we found out so late that some people at high risk were left unprotected.

Face masks are in hot demand - but not because of Halloween. The scary prospect that avian flu could morph into a deadly human pandemic has triggered a surge in orders for respirators that could protect against a deadly influenza virus. One independent distributor in New York City said his daily online sales had soared from an estimated 25 masks to 5,000 in the last week. "It's an uncontrollable ascent in sales," said Howard Ryan, owner of 3MMasks.com, which is not affiliated with the 3M company.

The bird flu sweeping through Asia has raised the same international fear that SARS did last year: the specter of a global flu "pandemic" that could kill millions of people. Pandemic is a word that gets tossed around a lot these days, in news about AIDS, SARS, and potential bioweapons such as smallpox. It has come to mean a worldwide epidemic with high death rates, not to mention economic and political upheaval. The avian flu viruses known to have attacked humans could not cause a pandemic because, while they are frighteningly lethal, they do not spread easily from chicken to human, and apparently not at all from person to person.

The federal government said yesterday that it had awarded Sanofi Pasteur Inc. a $100 million contract to produce an avian flu vaccine. It also awarded GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. a $2.8 million contract to supply its antiviral drug Relenza, which can be used to treat influenza. The Department of Health and Human Services said the contracts were part of the government's plan to buy enough vaccine for 20 million people and antivirals to treat 20 million more in the event of an avian flu pandemic.

While researchers furiously pursue defenses against the expected outbreak of a deadly international flu, the U.S. policymakers remain amazingly passive about pandemic preparations. Scientists announced last weekend that they had successfully tested a vaccine that they believe could protect people against a virulent strain of avian influenza that is killing tens of millions of birds in Asia and Russia. So far, 57 of the 112 people it has infected have died. If it mutates and begins spreading human-to-human, avian flu could become a pandemic like the Spanish flu of 1918-19, which killed at least 50 million people.

Sounding an alarm against a possible global flu pandemic, President Bush yesterday asked Congress for $7.1 billion in emergency funds to help prepare the country for avian flu. The flu virus H5N1 is highly lethal, and humans have virtually no immunity. If the virus mutates into a form that can be passed easily among humans, it could kill millions of people around the world. The virus is continually evolving, and the number of countries where birds are infected and come into contact with humans continues to increase.

Terrifying. That's the best word to describe what some experts are saying about the economic and social upheaval that a global outbreak of avian flu could cause. So far, the H5N1 virus - the scientific designation for avian flu - has killed millions of birds in Asia and Europe, and half of the more than 130 people in Southeast Asia who contracted it from infected birds. There is no evidence the disease has spread from one human to another. But agreement is widespread on the need for businesses - and especially the travel industry - to prepare for the possibility that avian flu mutates into a strain that people could transmit to one another, something some health experts warn is inevitable.

Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture epidemiologists expect to announce today whether an episode of avian flu at a poultry farm near Mount Joy, Lancaster County, was caused by a live or inactive virus. Spokeswoman Kristina Watson said yesterday that though state offices were closed for Presidents' Day, some scientists were working on the problem. "We're anticipating sometime [today] to get confirmation" of the nature of the virus. The agency, which has not named the farm or given its precise location, is expecting to conclude that the virus was not active because there have been few sick or dying birds at the farm.

Using new genetic information from the deadly 1918 Spanish influenza, scientists say the lethal avian flu plaguing Southeast Asia could evolve in a similar way to become a global human menace. Up to now, many people thought the bird virus would need to mix with a human virus before it could become a pandemic strain. But now, scientists believe it also could undergo its own genetic changes and morph into a version that would spread easily among people, according to an article in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Hallelujah, the disaster has been averted! The World Health Organization last week declared the H1N1 swine flu pandemic over. Except for one little thing: It never happened. That is, the WHO had no business labeling it a "pandemic. " It did so purely for its own interests, wreaking worldwide havoc. In April 2009, WHO flu czar Keiji Fukuda declared that we could be facing a contagion on the order of the Spanish flu of 1918-19, and the United Nations soon concurred. Spanish flu killed about 50 million worldwide and 675,000 in the United States.

Avoid flu epidemics by shunning meat Along with the avian flu of a decade ago, the Hong Kong flu of 1968, and the Asian flu of 1957, swine flu has been traced to animal waste in a factory farm. Today's factory farms constantly expose sick, crowded, and highly stressed animals to contaminated feces, urine, and other secretions. They provide ideal breeding grounds for the replication and mutation of viruses and bacteria into more lethal forms. Every one of us can help prevent the development and spread of these killer diseases by replacing animal products in our diet with healthful vegetables, fresh fruits, and whole grains.

For years now, before it became fashionable, I have had what I would call a healthy anxiety about germs and a tendency toward, shall we say, fastidiousness. My husband might have on occasion even referred to me as a paranoid neat-freak. I take this as a compliment. Like all married couples, we have learned to live with each other's idiosyncrasies. I do have to point out, however, that my husband has never has gotten TB or any other infectious disease since we have been married!

IN HIS FIRST mea culpa interview, Mel Gibson has called his anti-Semitic rant following his arrest for drunk driving in July "the stupid ramblings of a drunkard. " In the Diane Sawyer chat set to air on "Good Morning America" today and tomorrow, Gibson says that though staying sober is a struggle, he has not had a drink in 65 days - since the 13th of Av, 5766, on the Hebrew calendar. "All you can do is take another step, keep breathing," he says in a partial transcript of the interview released to the Associated Press by ABC. Clean shaven and casually dressed, Gibson tells Sawyer he began drinking two months before sheriff's deputies arrested him in Malibu on July 28. "Years go by, you're fine," he says.

Investor concern about the spread of avian flu, after reports that six members of a family in Indonesia died of the virus, buoyed biotechnology stocks yesterday, including those of Novavax Inc. in Malvern. "There's a news-flow mentality, whether it's stem cells or bird flu," said Ren Benjamin, analyst for Rodman & Renshaw. "Once a particular medical condition or epidemic is featured in the headlines, investors start looking for those companies developing treatments, to try to invest in them.

The City of Philadelphia yesterday publicly released a draft of its pandemic flu preparedness plan for the first time. The 118-page document details the steps public health officials would take if the H5N1 bird flu or an equally dangerous strain of the virus triggered a worldwide epidemic. The plan estimates that 35 percent of the nation's population could get sick, meaning about 560,000 people in the city could be stricken during the worst six months of a pandemic. The outbreak would crowd city hospitals with 2,000 additional admissions a month.

WHEN WE learned recently that avian flu was decimating flocks of chickens that are the principal source of income for thousands of Afghan war widows, our hearts skipped a beat. We felt again the special bond that links Americans and Afghans touched by the tragedy of Sept. 11 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. We were heartbroken that these women, who have suffered so much, again face the loss of their livelihood. Like so many disasters, the current outbreaks of avian flu are hitting the world's poorest people hardest.

As U.S. health officials warn it may be only a matter of time before the avian flu hits the United States, GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. said yesterday that it had started clinical trials to test two bird-flu vaccines in humans. The London-based drugmaker, with a U.S. headquarters in Philadelphia, said it was conducting two European trials - in 400 healthy adult volunteers in Belgium and 400 in Germany - to test the vaccines' safety and ability to boost protective immune response against the H5N1 strain of avian flu, which has killed more than 100 people worldwide.

Yossi Leshem knows birds, and what he knows about their migratory patterns leaves little doubt: "They know no boundaries. " So the deadly avian flu now spreading through Europe, Africa and Asia "will come to Israel sooner or later," the Israeli ornithologist said recently. Yesterday appeared to have been that day, after officials reported that more than 1,000 turkeys died suddenly at two poultry farms in the Negev Desert near the populous Gaza Strip. Agriculture officials said coops at the two farms had been put under quarantine.

Bird flu has taken wing, and now three continents are rightly worried. In February alone, avian flu has been detected in 13 new countries: Iraq, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Iran, Austria, Germany, Egypt, India and France. The lethal H5N1 virus also has reappeared in Malaysia, after more than a year without new cases in birds. Some scientists fear that the H5N1 virus, which has killed millions of birds and 92 people in Asia, eventually could mutate into a version that passes easily from human to human.