USEFUL INFORMATION on the SWINE FLU.
Research
www.Apodimos.com
Henceforth the swine flu has been confirmed in 10 different states, included New York, while exist enough human victims. Until now the flu of pigs did not strike the door of Greece and the measures that have been taken in the Gates of entry of visitors and in the Public Hospitals were instantaneous. For that reason we will inform all our Greek and Emigrant brothers, giving various valid information on the spread of flu of pigs, while we thank also the senator Dean Skelos of which immediately 30 April 2009 gave useful information in our Greek Emigrant in US in NY for the confrontation of flu of pigs with a view to does not become pandemic. One and from 2004 Webby declared that the pigs in the USA are “a more and more important reservoir of viruses with the human pandemic possibility”
The Briefing of senator Dean Skelos
Dean G. Skelos
New York State Senator
9th Senate District
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Dear friend,
With recent news that swine flu has been confirmed in 10 different states, including New York, and that it may be spreading, the public is right to be concerned.
As with any illness, information is key. Therefore, I wanted to remind you that there are a number of useful web links you can visit to access the latest information on swine flu, including the New York State Health Department and the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) sites. These links provide the public with up-to-date information from health professionals about swine flu, what to do if you are experiencing symptoms and what can be done to prevent the spread of this illness. I have included the links below.
It's also important for parents and their children to know that among other things, the CDC recommends washing hands; avoiding touching of the eyes, nose or mouth and staying home from work or school if you have become infected or believe you may be infected.
§ http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/
§ http://www.health.state.ny.us/diseases/communicable/influenza/
seasonal/swine_flu/
The New York State Health Department hotline is 1-800-808-1987.
As always, please contact a physician if you have any questions or concerns.
Very truly yours,
Dean Skelos
Senator- 9th District
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Swine flu: The predictable pandemic?
29 April 2009 by Debora MacKenzie
THE swine flu virus has been a serious pandemic threat for years, New Scientist can reveal - but research into its potential has been neglected compared with other kinds of flu. As New Scientist went to press, cases were being reported far from the original outbreak in Mexico.
The clusters of milder infections in the US suggest the virus is spreading readily among people. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says this strain is so different from existing human flu viruses that most people have no immunity to it. There are no existing vaccines.
All this means the virus could go pandemic. Or it might not: if the virus spreads less readily than is feared, it might not be able to maintain itself in the human population and could fizzle out (see "What makes flu go global?").
We could have seen this coming, though. This type of virus emerged in the US in 1998 and has since become endemic on hog farms across North America. Equipped with a suite of pig, bird and human genes, it was also evolving rapidly.
Flu infects many animals, including waterfowl, pigs and humans. Birds and people rarely catch flu viruses adapted to another host, but they can pass flu to pigs, which also have their own strains. If a pig catches two kinds of flu at once it can act as a mixing vessel, and hybrids can emerge with genes from both viruses.
This is what happened in the US in 1998. Until then, American pigs had regular winter flu, much like people, caused by a mutated virus from the great human pandemic of 1918, which killed pigs as well as at least 50 million people worldwide. This virus was a member of the H1N1 family - with H and N being the virus's surface proteins haemagglutinin and neuraminidase.
Over decades, H1N1 evolved in pigs into a mild, purely swine flu, and became genetically fairly stable. In 1976, there was an outbreak of swine H1N1 in people at a military camp in New Jersey, with one death. The virus did not spread efficiently, though, and soon fizzled out.
But in 1998, says Richard Webby of St Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, swine H1N1 hybridised with human and bird viruses, resulting in "triple reassortants" that surfaced in Minnesota, Iowa and Texas. The viruses initially had human surface proteins and swine internal proteins, with the exception of three genes that make RNA polymerase, the crucial enzyme the virus uses to replicate in its host. Two were from bird flu and one from human flu. Researchers believe that the bird polymerase allows the virus to replicate faster than those with the human or swine versions, making it more virulent.
By 1999, these viruses comprised the dominant flu strain in North American pigs and, unlike the swine virus they replaced, they were actively evolving. There are many versions with different pig or human surface proteins, including one, like the Mexican flu spreading now, with H1 and N1 from the original swine virus.
All these viruses still contained the same "cassette" of internal genes, including the
avian and human polymerase genes, reports Amy Vincent of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Ames, Iowa (Advances in Virus Research, vol 72, p 127). "They are why the swine versions of this virus easily outcompete those that don't have them," says Webby.
But the viruses have been actively switching surface proteins to evade the pigs' immunity. There are now so many kinds of pig flu that it is no longer seasonal. One in five US pig producers actually makes their own vaccines, says Vincent, as the vaccine industry cannot keep up with the changes.
This rapid evolution posed the "potential for pandemic influenza emergence in North America", Vincent said last year. Webby, too, warned in 2004 that pigs in the US are "an increasingly important reservoir of viruses with human pandemic potential". One in five US pig workers has been found to have antibodies to swine flu, showing they have been infected, but most people have no immunity to these viruses.
The virus's rapid evolution created the potential for a pandemic to emerge in North America.
Our immune response to flu, which makes the difference between mild and potentially lethal disease, is mainly due to the H surface protein. The Mexican virus carries the swine version, so the antibodies we carry to human H1N1 viruses will not recognise it.
That's why the CDC warned last year that swine H1N1 would "represent a pandemic threat" if it started circulating in humans.
The avian polymerase genes are especially worrying, as similar genes are what make H5N1 bird flu lethal in mammals and what made the 1918 human pandemic virus so lethal in people. "We can't yet tell what impact they will have on pathogenicity in humans," says Webby.
It appears the threat has now resulted in the Mexican flu. "The triple reassortant in pigs seems to be the precursor," Robert Webster, also at St Jude's, told New Scientist.
While researchers focused on livestock problems could see the threat developing, it is not one that medical researchers focused on human flu viruses seemed to have been aware of. "It was confusing when we looked up the gene sequences in the database," says Wendy Barclay of Imperial College London, who has been studying swine flu from the recent US cases. "The polymerase gene sequences are bird and human, yet they were reported in viruses from pigs." So where did the Mexican virus originate? The Veratect Corporation based in Kirkland, Washington, monitors world press and government reports to provide early disease warnings for clients, including the CDC. Their first inkling of the disease was a 2 April report of a surge in respiratory disease in a town called La Gloria, east of Mexico City, which resulted in the deaths of three young children. Only on 16 April - after Easter week, when millions of Mexicans travel to visit relatives - did reports surface elsewhere in the country.
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the-predictable-pandemic.html
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Swine Flu and Factory Farms: Fast Track to Disaster
www.hsus.org
by Michael Greger, M.D.
April 25, 2009
The H1N1 swine flu virus in North America currently concerning global public health officials is not the first triple hybrid human/bird/pig flu virus to be discovered.
Factory farms confine thousands of animals in one building—a breeding ground for disease. ©Farm Sanctuary
First Found on a Factory Farm
The first was discovered in a North Carolina factory farm in 1998. Since the 1918 pandemic, an H1N1 flu virus has circulated in pig populations, becoming one of the most common causes of respiratory disease on North American pig farms.[1]
In August 1998, however, a barking cough resounded throughout a North Carolina pig farm in which all the thousands of breeding sows fell ill. An aggressive H3N2 virus was discovered, the type of influenza that had been circulating in humans since 1968.
Not only was this highly unusual—only a single strain of human virus had ever previously been isolated from an American pig population—but upon sequencing of the viral genome, researchers found that it was not just a double reassortment (a hybrid of human and pig virus, for example), but a never-before-described triple reassortment, a hybrid of three viruses—a human virus, a pig virus and a bird virus.[2]
Intensive Farming is the Problem
Dr. Robert Webster, one of the world’s leading experts of flu virus evolution, blames the emergence of the 1998 virus on the "recently evolving intensive farming practice in the USA, of raising pigs and poultry in adjacent sheds with the same staff," a practice he calls "unsound."[3] "Within the swine population, we now have a mammalian-adapted virus that is extremely promiscuous," explained another molecular virologist at the time, referring to the virus's proclivity to continue to snatch up genes from human flu viruses. "We could end up with a dangerous virus."[4] This may indeed be what we are now facing.
Within months of the 1998 emergence, the virus showed up in Texas, Minnesota, and Iowa.[5] Within a year, it had spread across the United States.[6] This rapid dissemination across the country has been blamed on long-distance live animal transport.[7]
Long Way to Go
In the United States, pigs travel coast to coast. They can be bred in North Carolina, fattened in the corn belt of Iowa, and slaughtered in California.[8] While this may reduce short-term costs for the pork industry, the highly contagious nature of diseases like influenza (perhaps made further infectious by the stresses of transport) needs to be considered when calculating the true cost of long-distance live animal transport.
The rapid dissemination of the virus has been blamed on long-distance live animal transport.© Compassion Over Killing
What led to the emergence of the North Carolina strain in the first place? What changed in the years leading up to 1998 that facilitated the surfacing of such a unique strain? It is likely no coincidence that the virus emerged in North Carolina, the home of the nation’s largest pig farm. North Carolina has the densest pig population in North America and reportedly boasts more than twice as many corporate swine mega-factories as any other state.[9]
Agricultural Intensification
The year of emergence, 1998, was the year North Carolina's pig population hit ten million, up from two million just six years before.[10] At the same time, the number of hog farms was decreasing, from 15,000 in 1986 to 3,600 in 2000.[11] How do five times more animals fit on almost five times fewer farms? By crowding about 25 times more pigs into each operation.
In the 1980s, more than 85 percent of all North Carolina pig farms had fewer than 100 animals. By the end of the 1990s, operations confining more than 1,000 animals controlled about 99 percent of the state's inventory.[12] Given that the primary route of swine flu transmission is thought to be the same as human flu—via droplets or aerosols of infected nasal secretions[13]—it's no wonder experts blame overcrowding for the emergence of new flu virus mutants.
Starting in the early 1990s, the U.S. pig industry restructured itself after Tyson’s profitable poultry model of massive industrial-sized units. As a headline in the trade journal National Hog Farmer announced, "Overcrowding Pigs Pays—If It’s Managed Properly."[14]
Crowding Breeds Disease
"Influenza [in pigs] is closely correlated with pig density." ©Farm Sanctuary
The majority of U.S. pig farms now confine more than 5,000 animals each. A veterinary pathologist from the University of Minnesota stated the obvious in Science: “With a group of 5,000 animals, if a novel virus shows up it will have more opportunity to replicate and potentially spread than in a group of 100 pigs on a small farm.”[15]
Recent Outbreak
The swine flu virus discovered this week in California and Mexico appears to be a quadruple reassortment virus incorporating genes from human and avian flu viruses as well as North American and European strains of swine flu. In Europe in 1993, a bird flu virus had adapted to pigs, acquiring a few human flu virus genes, and infected two young Dutch children, even displaying evidence of limited human-to-human transmission.[16]
Recipe for Disaster
"Influenza [in pigs] is closely correlated with pig density," said a European Commission-funded researcher studying the situation in Europe.[17] As such, Europe’s rapidly intensifying pig industry has been described in Science as “a recipe for disaster.”[18] Some researchers have speculated that the next pandemic could arise out of "Europe's crowded pig barns."[19]
The European Commission’s agricultural directorate warns that the “concentration of production is giving rise to an increasing risk of disease epidemics."[20] Concern over epidemic disease is so great that Danish laws have capped the number of pigs per farm and put a ceiling on the total number of pigs allowed to be raised in the country.[21] No such limit exists in the United States.
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'Worst Case' Scenario for Flu Estimated
Fri May 1,
Robin Lloyd
LiveScience Senior Editor
There will be about 1,700 U.S. cases of the new H1N1 flu, aka "swine flu," in the next four weeks under a worst-case scenario, according to a research team's new simulations. And a second team working independently, about 200 miles away, on exactly the same question came up with a similar forecast.
AP– Police officers wearing masks seal off Metro Park Hotel in Hong Kong Friday, May 1, 2009
As of Thursday, there were 109 lab-confirmed U.S. cases of the new influenza, according to the World Health Organization, which earlier this week raised the risk level of the influenza to one stage below pandemic because the virus is being transmitted within at least two countries in one region of the world. A full pandemic - the virus is also being transmitted within a third country in a different region - is considered imminent.
It is not clear, however, how virulent or deadly this flu strain will become. Flu viruses are unpredictable, and while some in history have proven incredibly deadly, many would-be-pandemics turned out to be quite mild. Also, medicine and public health are more sophisticated today, in terms of treatments and educational campaigns, than they were during the nation's last pandemic flu in 1968, let alone during the Spanish flu of 1918.
Still, researchers are eager to predict what might happen and Dirk Brockmann has identified the hotspots.
California, Texas and Florida will have most of the cases by late May if Brockmann's large-scale computer simulations are right. His group at Northwestern University came up with the figure of 1,700 cases by late May, and also projected more than 100 cases for the Chicago area.
"Remember - that's exponential growth, which means slow at the beginning and then very fast," Brockmann said. "If you run the worst-case scenario for four months, we're at a very different number."
Brockmann's computer clusters can be used to simulate an infectious disease that spreads among 300 million people. The approach was based on human mobility patterns - daily commuting, intermediate trips and long-distance ones - which helps determine how a disease could potentially spread, and he modeled those on data from a dollar-bill tracking project called WheresGeorge.com. You can track people's movements, to a certain extent, if you know where they spend cash.
"These networks play an important role in the spread of infectious disease," he said. "So we're looking at how people travel in the United States and Europe and trying to find a theory behind human traffic. Then we can unravel the structures within these networks and explain them."
Brockmann says his forecast is off by a little bit, and that's a good thing. His worst-case scenario assumes that no measures have been taken by officials and public health agencies to combat the spread of disease. Most likely, the case count will be lower than his estimate as a result of such things as stronger public health campaigns for hand washing and social distancing (stand far away from people who are coughing and sneezing), school closures where children are found to be symptomatic and the federal travel advisory against non-essential trips to Mexico.
Brockmann and his team's swine flu results match up well with those of a research group at Indiana University in Bloomington led by computer scientist Alex Vespignani. The teams were aware of each other's work but intentionally worked independently and remained ignorant of each other's methodology to see if they arrived at the same results. When scientists independently arrive at the same result, it suggests they have a finding that is "robust," that is it will stand the test of time.
"When we look at the numbers, they are in stunning agreement," Vespignani told LiveScience. "That is very comforting in the sense that it's a sign of robustness. Also it suggests that the results we are getting are probably correct."
The two teams know each other from conferences, but have never specifically collaborated on a published research report, he said.
Of course, the H1N1 flu outbreak is still evolving, he said.
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worstcasescenarioforfluestimated
