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Philippines suspected bird flu cases in humans

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carbon20 View Drop Down
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    Posted: August 25 2017 at 2:42pm

Philippines watching suspected bird flu cases in humans

Reuters Staff

2 MIN READ

MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines started monitoring suspected bird flu cases in humans on Friday after 34 farm workers in two towns north of the capital Manila developed flu-like symptoms after direct exposure to infected fowl.

Officials from the Departments of Health and Agriculture said laboratory tests in Australia confirmed an outbreak of the deadly H5N6 strain of the bird flu virus. The strain is transmissible to humans, but the mortality rate is low.

Health Minister Paulyn Ubial told a news conference the 34 suspected cases of bird flu infection in humans were detected in provinces of Pampanga and Nueva Ecija, on the main Philippine island of Luzon, north of the capital Manila.

“They developed fever, cough and cold,” she said, adding some of them had diarrhea.

“All of them had direct exposure to fowls and they developed common symptoms of influenza. They were already given medicines but we are now monitoring their conditions.”

The Philippines has culled more than 470,000 chickens, ducks and quails in three towns in Pampanga and Nueva Ecija since Aug. 11, a day after government confirmed the first bird flu outbreak in the country.

Nearly 500 soldiers have been mobilized to speed up the culling of infected fowl in about 40 farms in the town of San Luis in Pampanga and in San Isidro and Jaen in Nueva Ecija.

The Philippines joins countries in Asia, Europe and Africa that have had bird flu outbreaks in recent months. Many strains only infect birds, but the H7N9 strain has led to human cases, including deaths, in China.

Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by Martin Petty and Christian Schmollinger

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

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Albert View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Albert Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 26 2017 at 10:13pm
There have only been a total of 4 h5n6 cases as of 2015, 3 of which were fatal.  There have been very few human cases oh h5n6.   This would be a very large outbreak.  Possible variant.  
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote CRS, DrPH Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 26 2017 at 10:34pm
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, August 24) - The bird flu that has hit parts of the Philippines has been confirmed to be H5N6 - a strain that can be transmitted to humans.

This was confirmed upon receipt of laboratory results from test samples that were sent to Australia.

Agriculture officials were quick to assure, however, that the strain is slow to spread and causes few deaths.

"The rate of transmission is very, very low," Arlene Vytiaco, who heads animal disease control in the Bureau of Animal Industry, said in a press briefing on Thursday.

She explained that countries like Japan and Myamnar have been affected by H5N6 but have reported no humans infected by the avian influenza.

"The mortality rate is also low," Vytiaco said. Since H5N6 started in 2014, there have only been 20 deaths reported worldwide.

The Department of Health has been conducting regular check-ups on farmers and workers in areas hit by the bird flu outbreak. Vytiaco said no new patients have been admitted since two farm workers reported flu-like symptoms last week but eventually tested negative for bird flu.

The government had been waiting to see what the bird flu's specific N strain was - particularly on the lookout for the N1 and N6 strains, which can be passed on to humans.

Local tests had confirmed it was not the far deadlier H5N1 virus. However, it had to send samples to Australia to check whether it was H5N6, since the government did not have its own test kits here.

This was said by Dr. Arlene Vytiaco, who oversees disease control for the Bureau of Animal Industry.

Reports of bird flu being present was first reported earlier this month. The virus was found in birds from seven farms in San Luis, Pampanga

The Department of Agriculture earlier said the virus had been present since April, but was only reported in August after 37,000 birds had died. It added the strain of avian flu present in these birds was not transmissible to humans.

On August 13, Agriculture Secretary Manny Piñol said another round of tests was underway to determine whether H5N6 - the strain of the virus that can be passed on to humans - was present.

The DA imposed a ban on the shipment of poultry and poultry products from Luzon to other parts of the country on August 13 as a precautionary measure, but it was lifted on August 22.

(I agree that we may be seeing mutation/genetic shift with H5N6 in the Philippines, this bears watching!  Be safe, Chuck)

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote arirish Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2017 at 6:44am
Plenty to chew over on bird flu

As President Rodrigo Duterte joined in a "boodle fight" - a feast of chicken dishes - to show that chicken is safe to eat in the bird flu-infected Philippine province of Pampanga, it emerged that the highly pathogenic H5N6 virus blamed for the country's first avian flu outbreak is more fatal than the dreaded H5N1.

Tucking in with Duterte yesterday were former president and current Pampanga congresswoman Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Pinol in San Fernando, just 24 kilometers from San Luis where poultry was sickened and died at farms on August 10. San Fernando meanwhile is 51-57km from San Isidro and Jaen towns, in Nueva Ecija province, which were infected on August 18.

Arlene Vytiaco, avian influenza focal person of the Bureau of Animal Industry, said on Thursday the Australian Animal Health Laboratory confirmed the highly pathogenic H5N6 attacked the poultry in San Luis. But she said that while H5N6 can be transmissible to humans, "there is very low of possibility of animal to human transmission."

But a team of Chinese, Hong Kong and US experts found in epidemiological assessment of H5N6 human cases in China that the fatality rate was 75 percent (12 out of 16 hospitalized cases). This compared with 70 percent for H5N1 (30 out of 43) and 41 percent (319 out of 782) for H7N9 cases.

"H5N6 cases were older than H5N1 cases with a higher prevalence of underlying medical conditions but younger than H7N9 cases," said the team led by Jiang Hui of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Infectious Diseases.

"Epidemiological time-to-event distributions were similar among cases infected with the three viruses," the team concluded in a report published earlier this month in Clinical Infectious Disease journal.

WHO representative in the Philippines, Gundo Weiler, told The Standard that infections with the H5N6 virus seemed to be sporadic with "no evidence of sustained human to human transmission" so far.

No such sustained transmission has occurred anyway for H5N1 and H7N9.

"Whenever avian influenza viruses are circulating in poultry, sporadic infections and small clusters of human cases are possible in people exposed to infected poultry or contaminated environments; therefore sporadic human cases are not unexpected," he said.

All the human cases of H5N6 so far have occurred in China.

The Philippines is the seventh country to see an H5N6 outbreak in poultry.

A total of 476,640 fowl, including chickens, ducks and quails, were culled in San Luis, 114,850 quails killed in Jaen and 70,100 layer chickens culled in San Isidro.

Since 2014, China, Vietnam and Laos have reported H5N6 outbreaks, but last November , major outbreaks of H5N6 were reported in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/section-news.php?id=186801&sid=4
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote jacksdad Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2017 at 9:52am
75%. Isn't that just swell...


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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: August 29 2017 at 2:58pm
Funny how people still dont know ,how viruses work.........

was safe last week.....

could wipe the planet clean of humans this week.......

always  changing, swapping their bits.....
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

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