SANTIAGO, Chile – Chile said Friday that tests show swine flu has jumped to birds, opening a new chapter in the global epidemic.

Top flu and animal-health experts with the United Nations in Rome and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were monitoring the situation, but said the infected turkeys have suffered only mild effects, easing concern about a potentially dangerous development.

Chile’s turkey meat remains safe to eat, the experts said, and so far there have been no signs of a deadly mutation. None of the birds have died from this flu, according to the farms’ owner, Sopraval SA.

Chile’s Health Ministry said it ordered a quarantine Friday at two turkey farms outside the port city of Valparaiso after genetic tests confirmed sick birds were afflicted with the same virus that has caused a pandemic among humans. The infected birds are contained within closed buildings, preventing any spread to wild birds, the farms’ owner said.

So far, the virus — a mixture of human, pig and bird genes — has proved to be very contagious but no more deadly than common seasonal flu. However, virus experts fear a more dangerous and easily transmitted strain could emerge if it combines again with avian flu, which is far more deadly but tougher to pass along.

Sopraval alerted the agriculture ministry after egg production dropped at the farms this month. After initial tests on four samples, further genetic testing confirmed a match with the subtype A/H1N1 2009, the agriculture and health ministries announced.

“What the turkeys have is the human virus — there is no mutation at all,” Deputy Health Minister Jeannette Vega told Chile’s Radio Cooperativa on Friday.

The Health Ministry said it has alerted the U.N.’s World Health Organization. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, meanwhile was working closely with Chilean government scientists, said Dr. Juan Lubroth, the head of infectious diseases for FAO in Rome.

Chile is sending some samples outside the country for more genetic sequencing to confirm that it matches the pandemic strain, Lubroth said. “As a scientist, I want to touch, smell, feel, taste it” before agreeing that it’s a match, he said.

There are some encouraging signs that this particular outbreak remains mild. Egg production and water consumption among the birds dropped — prompting the company to take action — but the birds aren’t terribly sick, let alone dying in large numbers, Lubroth said.

“My understanding is that with the ones that were sick, it was a very mild disease,” Lubroth said. “It’s significant in that we don’t need to recommend any drastic measures, as far as culling the population of turkeys. Let them go through their illness and recover — seven to 10 days — and if they are sound and healthy, they could enter the food chain.”

Sopraval veterinarian Andrea Kamp said that won’t happen because the outbreak has been limited to birds raised to lay eggs, not those being fattened for meat.

“In all of the birds raised to be fattened to produce meat, we have not found any illness. This is an illness entirely limited within a reproductive group,” Kamp said.

Lubroth praised the company and the Chilean ministries for the actions they’ve taken.

“If it were highly virulent then we would recommend stronger measures,” Lubroth added.

Chile, meanwhile, is acting to contain the outbreak by limiting the turkeys’ contact with people and wildlife, Lubroth said. But given the mildness of this particular outbreak, he said, “I don’t see that there is going to be a large risk from what we know today of this type of transmission occurring.”

U.S. health officials said they remain wary of the possibility that swine flu will mutate by mixing with bird flu or other forms of influenza. But they haven’t received any reports of a dangerous mutation yet, and the fact that the virus can spread to turkeys was not all that surprising, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaking at a Friday news conference in Atlanta.

The Chilean report “did not raise any great concerns among us,” Fauci said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a longstanding avian influenza surveillance program that it says would detect any H1N1 virus outbreak in U.S. poultry. The USDA recently infected ducks, chickens, turkeys and quail in lab experiments, and none became clinically ill. Low levels of the virus infected the quail, but the disease did not spread, the agency said this week.

In Chile, the virus has infected at least 12,000 people and killed 128. Throughout the Americas, as of Aug. 14, 105,882 confirmed cases were reported from all 35 countries, including 1,579 deaths in 22 countries.

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Associated Press Writers Michael Warren in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Mike Stobbe in Atlanta; and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS the spelling of the last name Kamp, instead of Campos.))

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H1N1 flu virus hasn’t mutated, CDC officials report


출처 : USA Today - Aug 21 1:46 PM
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-08-21-swine-flu-vaccine_N.htm?csp=34

One of the biggest fears has been that the virus, which first appeared in April in the U.S. and Mexico and which people don’t have any built-up immunity to, might mutate into an even more dangerous form. Health officials have been keeping a close watch on the Southern Hemisphere, which is in its winter season now, to see what form of the virus is likely to travel north as fall comes to the U.S. and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.

Flu viruses are unpredictable, so the fact that this one hasn’t mutated is “somewhat reassuring” said Jay Butler, director of CDC’s H1N1 Vaccine Task Force.

Case numbers in the Southern Hemisphere appear to be dropping, he said.

The U.S. is currently experiencing low levels of influenza, which is rare at this time of the year. Almost all cases are H1N1, Butler says. So far the CDC has laboratory confirmed reports of 7,963 hospitalizations and 522 deaths. Those numbers are very likely a radical underestimate of actual cases, as most people aren’t tested, Butler said.

The H1N1 flu, commonly known as swine flu, continues to disproportionately affect young people, which is very different than most influenza strains. Thus far about 75% of hospitalizations and 60% of deaths are in people under 49 years, he reported.

Two states, Alaska and Maine, are currently reporting widespread influenza activity, very unusual for this time of year. Why those are being hit right now isn’t known.

“It’s one of the mysteries of influenza,” Butler says. He did note that Alaska was one of the last states to have laboratory confirmed cases of the H1N1 strain, so it’s possible the outbreak there just got a later start.

Flu vaccine production and testing is currently underway. Jesse Goodman, chief scientist and deputy commissioner with the Food and Drug Administration said that they expect to have 45 to 52 million doses of vaccine available by mid-October. They’ll then be making more vaccine available weekly, up to about 195 million doses by the end of the year. Five manufacturers are working on producing the vaccine.

Vaccine will be made available to each state according to its population, Goodman said.

Testing of the vaccine to find out how much needs to be given and whether one or two doses is required is well underway in adults, with the first results expected by mid September, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Researchers waited to make sure the vaccine was safe in adults before beginning testing in children, which got started in the past few weeks. Those results should begin coming in by mid-October.

All together over 4,600 people will be enrolled in the trials, Fauci said.

Today in Beijing, World Health Organization Western Pacific director Shin Young-soo said that cases in the Northern Hemisphere will soon begin to increase and most countries may see swine flu cases double every three to four days for several months until peak transmission is reached.

“At a certain point, there will seem to be an explosion in case numbers,” Shin told a symposium of health officials and experts.”It is certain there will be more cases and more deaths.”

Fauci cautioned that while the CDC and FDA are preparing for worse case scenarios, “explosion” might be overstating the problem.

“Sometimes words that are used in an innocent way can cause alarm. I think in a realistic setting we should expect that there clearly is going to be an upsurge of cases when you get into the fall.”

Whether or not they get vaccinated, people need to remember the three rules of staying healthy, Butler says.

“We can’t stop the tide of flu any more than we can turn a hurricane in its course or stop the earth from shaking in an earthquake,” he said. But we can cut down on illness. “Wash your hands, cover your cough and stay home is you’re sick.”

Contributing: The Associated Press