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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

OCTOBER 2005

 

PANIC DRIVES FLU RESPONSE—dogs blamed, but never had disease

 

BUCHAREST, ISTANBUL–– Fears that the H5N1 avian flu virus had spread to Romania “may be wrong,” the London Daily Mail reported on October 10.


A suspected outbreak in Turkey was likewise unconfirmed.


Amid rising public panic, the veterinary authorities of both Turkey and Romania nonetheless ordered the immediate slaughter of tens of thousands of domestic fowl to keep the presumed outbreak from spreading.


“In western Turkey, military police set up roadblocks at the entrance to a village near Balikesir,” reported C. Onur Ant of Associated Press. “A two-mile radius was quarantined as veterinarians and other officials began destroying poultry at two turkey farms. Other fowl––including pigeons––and stray dogs in the village would also be killed as a precaution, said Nihat Pakdil, undersecretary of Turkey’s Agriculture Ministry.”


Pakdil did not explain why dogs would be targeted, since there is no record of dogs ever contracting or carrying H5N1, but a new national humane law making neuter/return rather than killing dogs the official prescribed method of animal control has been widely defied on the pretext of disease control. The most recent of many dog massacres reported since the new law took effect in mid-2005 was discovered in Aliaga, Izmir, on October 6, where 24 dead dogs were found in a wooded public park.


If the Romanian and Turkish massacres were just a panic response, the Romanian and Turkish officials were hardly alone in having it. U.S. President George Bush on October 4 asked Congress to give him the authority to use the military in a domestic policing role in the event of an H5N1 epidemic. The Bush request was immediately denounced as excessive, unnecessary, and unconstitutional by prominent commentators across the political spectrum.


H5N1 was suspected of striking in Romania, entering Europe for the first time, after three barnyard ducks appeared to have died of some form of avian flu on a farm in Ceamurlia-de-Jos, Tulcea County, in the eastern Danube River delta.


Tissue samples were promptly sent to the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, for more sophisticated testing than was possible within Romania. The preliminary indications were negative.


British chief veterinarian Debby Reynolds told the Daily Mail that a European Union team would fly to Romania to try to confirm the findings.


Romanian agriculture minister Gheorghe Flutur imposed a three-kilometer quarantine on the area surrounding the farm where the suspected outbreak occurred, and suspended waterfowl hunting throughout the Danube delta region.


If the disease that killed the three ducks was H4N1, and if it arrived with migrating wild ducks, the whole of Romania might potentially have been at risk. Flooding underway since April 2005 has expanded waterfowl habitat in all parts of the country, which each fall attracts migrating red-breasted geese from Siberia plus white-fronted geese from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany.


The Turkish disease outbreak was confirmed as an H5 virus, but not necessarily H5N1, or even a closely related variety. The closest confirmed H5N1 outbreak to Europe so far occurred in July 2005 in the Chelyabinsk region of the Ural mountains in Russia.


“From the map,” commented International Society for Infectious Diseases ProMed forum moderator Jack Woodall, “it seems clear to me that at least up until now the virus has not been spread by migrating birds, since the direction of spread has been east-west, cutting across several north/south flyways and following the frontier between Russia and Kazakhstan westwards from the Mongolian border. Could there be a flourishing trade in poultry along the border?”


Agreed fellow ProMed moderator Craig R. Pringle, “Our species has lived more or less in harmony with waterfowl for millennia. The changed dynamic is the vast increase in recent years of the production and global trading of poultry as a source of food. It is more likely that a novel pandemic virus would spread along trade and communications routes rather than via the migratory pathways of free-living birds. Outbreaks of disease have occurred along migratory routes,” Pringle conceded, “but the majority of migrating birds have proven to be free of H5N1, and the minority of birds exhibiting disease may be victims rather than carriers.”

 

Sarawak deputy chief minister George Chan Hong Nam told Stephen Then of the Malaysia Star on October 3 that the major possible avenue for an outbreak he sees is the clandestine traffic in gamecocks–– already repeatedly identified as the major vector for spreading H5N1 in Thailand, and implicated almost everywhere else that outbreaks have occurred. Chan also cited the illicit trade in exotic pet birds.


“These birds, if infected by the bird flu virus, would be very potent carriers and would spread the virus very swiftly,” Chan said. “We need to control the free flow of these fighting cocks and other birds from Indonesia,” Chan emphasized, saying he had “directed for more stringent controls at the border entry points along the Sarawak/Kaliman-tan border.”


H5N1 has so far killed 65 humans in Southeast Asia since 1997, 43 of them in Vietnam since 2003. Almost all human victims have been cockfighters, poultry workers, or members of their immediate family. Only a handful of cases are believed to have been transmitted from person to person.


Epidemiologists most fear the possibility that H5N1 might mutate into a form that passes readily from person to person, and/or to other mammals, potentially touching off a global pandemic.


In June 2005 H5N1 was found in captive-raised civets at Cuc Phuong National Park in Vietnam. H5N1 has also killed a few domestic cats and zoo tigers in Thailand. The civets and the cats, both small and large, were apparently fed the carcasses of infected poultry.


Dogs so far appear to be practically invulnerable to H5N1. Carrion-feeding street dogs are abundant in Thailand and several other nations where H5N1 has occurred, but as yet no cases in dogs have even been epidemiologically suspected, let alone confirmed. In addition, thousands of dogs are raised outdoors for meat in the same parts of southern China and northern Vietnam where the most H5N1 cases have occurred, and are commonly fed poultry offal, with no suspected crossover cases resulting.


But health officials and politicians worldwide are on edge.


Only days before the Romanian and Turkish outbreaks, Indonesia prepared for a possible H5N1 epidemic, after six human deaths in as many weeks, with more than 50 suspected cases under observation and treatment. Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari requested 900,000 capsules of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu from Australia and the World Health Organization.


The Indonesian episode was initially believed to be much bigger, but many suspected cases turned out to be misdiagnosed.


Many others may have occurred, Agence France-Presse reported on October 10, because of vaccines that were only 12% to 28% effective, according to spot testing. “Government auditors suspect local companies assigned to make the vaccine produced doses of inferior quality to inflate profits, with the collusion of some ministry officials,” AFP summarized.


A simultaneous suspected H5N1 outbreak that killed 50 chickens on a farm near Calumpit, Bulacan, in the Philippines, was actually caused by a bad batch of homebrewed antibiotics mixed into poultry feed, investigators said.


Reports from Hong Kong that Tamiflu might be losing potency against H5N1 were attributed by Hong Kong University pharmacology professor William Chui to a journalistic misunderstanding.


Efforts to prevent a global influenza epidemic, whether of H5N1 or another deadly strain, are still critically underfunded, the United Nations Food and Agricul-ture Organization warned on Sept-ember 24.


The FAO and the World Organization for Animal Health have been trying since May 2005 to raise more than $250 million over the next three years for flu-fighting efforts. Donor nations led by the U.S. and Japan have so far pledged $16.5 million, and the U.S. has also allocated $25 million to other flu-fighting projects in Asia, Agence France-Presse reported.