MaxedOutMama
Monday, May 23, 2005
Bird Flu Found In Wild Geese (China)
This is not good news, as the Time Online article notes. Geese migrate:
The latest outbreak of avian flu was discovered after tests on 178 wild geese found dead on May 4 in the western Qinghai province. The bodies of the birds were on the shore of a vast lake in the province that borders Tibet and is a favourite migration pitstop.It looks like this particular cat is out of the bag. Recombinomics points out that these geese were migrating from India. Recombinomics has also argued strongly that human-to-human transmission is already occurring in certain areas:
The area, which is also popular among birdwatchers and as a tourist attraction, has been sealed off for ten days, officials said.
Other emergency measures include stopping people entering the habitats of migratory birds, ordering farms near migration routes to immunise their fowl and telling the public to stay away from poultry. It was unclear how officials would minimise contact between birds and people in a country where almost every rural family keeps hens and ducks and more than half of China’s 1.3 billion population lives in the countryside.
Common exposures generally produce symptoms at the same time, while human-to-human transmission produce a bimodal distribution of disease onset dates. The familial clusters at the beginning of 2004 were bimodal, strongly suggesting human-to-human transmission in all or most clusters. Last summer larger clusters in Vietnam and Thailand left little doubt that the familial clusters were generated by localized human to human transmission, which placed the pandemic at phase 4.
In 2005 the size of the bird flu clusters grew larger and the clusters began to cluster, moving the 2005 pandemic to phase 5, which is defined by larger localized clusters. The real question at this time is whether level has moved to 6, due to widespread community transmission that is not recognized because of lack of testing or reporting.
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It's not fun to think about, especially since I have ducks. And kids. Anything that can move from one to the other is a little scary.
We have tons of wild birds at our place. Migratory ones. West Nile hit here about six months before the rest of our area. There were carcasses of dead birds EVERYWHERE.
I think this one has the potential to be very serious. Frankly, I'd keep the kids away from the ducks starting this fall.
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I think this one has the potential to be very serious. Frankly, I'd keep the kids away from the ducks starting this fall.
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