Scott McPherson's Web Presence

Like most flu watchers, I was struck by the seemingly contradictory behavior of the government in Myanmar last week.  Unless you live in your own universe where you are the deity, you are painfully aware of the situation regarding the military dictatorship's antipathy towards anything even remotely resembling freedom, democracy and transparency.  There are even hushed rumors that in the last round of anti-government demonstrations in that country (previously known as Burma) this past September and October, hundreds -- if not thousands -- of Buddhist monks were killed and (even more horrifying), there are allegations that several injured monks were cremated alive.  http://209.85.207.104/search?q=cache:YDx3ElhwIqsJ:www.globalvoicesonline.org/2007/10/02/myanmar-list-of-detainees-and-letter-from-a-88-generation-worker/+myanmar+government+priests+killed+2007&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us

So what can scare one of the most repressive regimes in the world into calling the World Health Organization?

Bird flu.

One can only imagine the telephone call that took place.  Only Bob Newhart could do that call justice. 

"W.H.O. bird flu clearinghouse Geneva.  You want to report a suspected case?  Where are you calling from?

"You're kidding, right? This call is from Myanmar?  C'mon, who is this really?"

Anyway, a young girl came down with H5N1 bird flu last week, and before you could say "Gesundheit!" (by dictatorship standards), the Myanmar authorities had the WHO on the line . From the Miami Herald, via AP:

Myanmar reports 1st human bird flu case

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/world/AP/story/345709.html

Kudos to Myanmar for their swift reporting of the case and the equally swift transport of virus samples for analysis.  One step toward transparency, no matter how small, is cause for celebration.

It is sometimes worth remembering, however, that dictatorships have an easier time of controlling bird flu than democracies.  House-to-house searches are nothing new to an enslaved people. 

But it is worth noting that Myanmar did what Indonesia steadfastly refuses to do -- promptly notify the WHO and then equally promptly send virus samples to Geneva.

What a bitter irony it would be if the Indonesians continued their ridiculous withholding of virus samples until they had solid assurances that they would be first among equals for vaccine, and then the virus mutates in, say, Myanmar or Pakistan, and Indonesia has no leverage left because their samples were then worthless?  They would have mortgaged their peoples' lives for nothing -- not to mention the rest of the worlds'.  And they would be in the same spot they were in previously -- standing in line, waiting for whatever tablescraps were left.

No, I take that back.  they would be in a decidedly worse spot, because of the ill will they have generated with the industrialized world. 

The confused jumble of media and medical reports coming out of Mansera, Pakistan is beginning to stabilize.  With that stabilization, we are beginning to get a picture of activity that is much more serious than originally assumed.

First, massive tips of the cap: The Flusites are absolutely nuclear with activity on this topic right now, with Flu Wiki and Flutrackers leading the way (you can click a link to them via this Website).  Dr. Henry Niman at recombinomics.com is doing his usual excellent job of sorting through the maze and reading between the lines.  Plus, all the A-list flubloggers -- Mike Coston, Crawford Kilian, SophiaZoe and others (just a click away via this site) -- are maintaining excellent lines of communication.

Distilled from all these sites and opinions and translations, here is what apparently has happened:

In one of the numerous Pakistani H5N1-related bird culls of the past few months, a veterinarian appears to have been exposed to the H5N1 avian flu virus last October.  Remember that date. He then, by all appearances, transmitted the virus to one or more of his brothers.  They died ten days apart, strongly suggesting a chain human-to-human transmission, precisely because of the lag times.  If the two sons were infected by, say, eating a diseased chicken at the same dinner table, or even as leftovers, the infection incubation period -- and therefore the deaths -- would have occurred much more closely together. 

But they didn't, and the timetable gets really scary here.  If the vet brother (A) gets infected in October during the cull, and one brother (B) dies on November 19 and the other brother (C) on November 29, there is reason to strongly suspect the infections were passed down like a daisy-chain.  Human to human.  Chain transmission. 

The next wrinkle is really something.  There was another brother (D) of the vet, and who is a resident of -- drum roll, please --  the United States!  He gets the word that brother B died November 19th, and goes home to Mansera, Pakistan.  He then manages to contract bird flu himself and tests positive for the disease.  After hospitalization and confirmed recovery, he returns to the Long Island, New York area.  Immediately upon his arrival at the airport in Nassau County, New York, local health authorities and the CDC immediately place him (D) in quarantine and test him thoroughly until it is determined he tests negative for H5N1 and is now safe to release.  Kudos to the CDC and the authorities in Nassau County, New York.  So the CDC can find people now!  That is a comforting fact.

So to recap: Four brothers (ABCD) are in the first cluster family, one a vet.  And that vet was, by newer media accounts, the sole person to expose himself to poultry during the cull.  Two brothers are now dead, and the remaining two have tested positive for H5N1.

At the same mass bird cull that the veterinarian attended, a day laborer also contracted H5N1.  He is in hospital.  the culler's daughter is either in the hospital with bird flu-like symptoms or simply under observation, depending on the accounts.  Family contacts of all infected are under observation and, one would hope, also under isolation.  .So a second potential cluster develops from the same cull.

All this sounds eerily similar to the outbreak of highly pathogenic H7N7 in the Netherlands in 2003.  As you recall, a veterinarian died in that outbreak, and human-to-human transmission was thoroughly documented by medical researchers (http://www.eurosurveillance.org/em/v10n12/1012-222.asp).  That study's abstract concluded:

Further seroprevalence studies among contacts of asymptomatic H7 cases should be conducted.

So we have as close to a confirmed familial cluster of H5N1 that we have witnessed since May, 2006 in Indonesia.  And we have another potential familial cluster with the culler/laborer.  There may be a third cluster, but I believe we are seeing the "fog of war" syndrome as the Pakistani press tries to sort out some erroneous and conflicting dates and test results.

Anyway, if we have two clusters or three, that is two to three too many for the Pakistani government to tolerate.  So today, the entire nation of Pakistan went on medical alert.  In a scene that reminds me of the end of Howard Hawks' classic The Thing from Another World, when the call "Watch the skies!  keep looking, keep watching the skies!" goes out via the wireless all over the world, local health departments in Pakistan are especially tasked with reporting ANY "untoward" situation.  They are clearly worried that, on this farm in Pakistan last October, Qinghai H5N1 (Clade 2.2) may have developed the capacity for efficient human-to-human transmission.

This should not surprise anyone in the least.   Who knows how many times since 2003, culling has prevented (or postponed) the Next Pandemic?  Go back to December, 1997, when then-Hong Kong health officer Dr. Margaret Chan may have saved the planet from a pandemic when she ordered the death of every bird in the city? At the risk of a bullet in the back of the head from her brand-new Communist Chinese handlers (Hong Kong passed from British to Chinese control in June, 1997), she made the decision to defy the totalitarian leaders and tell the truth.  As we know today, she runs the WHO.

I personally believe that the mutations necessary to change H5N1 to a lethal and efficient killer of humans can take place in multiple environments in multiple areas of the world at the same time.  These simultaneous "tipping points" are why we need to look at the Big Picture, rather than become focused merely on one flashpoint.  If chain H2H is happening in Pakistan, then right now, anywhere else on the planet H5N1 causes an outbreak in poultry, we now need to be extremely vigilant in our search for the presence of human clusters.  Everywhere.

The politics of going to Phase Four.

For the first time since H5N1 avian influenza has been tracked by the WHO, there is compelling evidence of simultaneous clusters of possible human-to-human transmission occurring in multiple nations with little physical proximity between them. 

Specifically, the locations are China, Indonesia and Pakistan.  In all three cases, people have died who were family members.  And what is equally distressing is that the third location -- Pakistan -- has previously never reported a confirmed case of human H5N1 infection.

We also know that on at least two different occasions within Indonesia, in the past 13 months, the WHO had vast quantities of Tamiflu distributed to thousands of villagers.  This was done in an attempt (so far successful) to prevent a cluster from growing into an outbreak.  Those two times were August, 2006 and September, 2007.  We all know of the August 2006 "blanket" of Tamiflu over four remote villages within a few clicks of each other; but we never heard about the results of the Palua Tabuan blanket.  Palua Tabuan is an island off the coast of Sumatra.  Every single villager on the island was given Tamiflu prophylactic ally last September as "fowl plague" and another undisclosed illness swept the island. 

Coupled with the simultaneous emergence of divergent familial clusters of H5N1-infected humans is the ongoing round of hostilities between the WHO and the Indonesian government.  Someone please tell me the difference between the Indonesian government's intransigence on the issue of sharing H5N1 virus samples and the Iranian government's refusal to cooperate on the topic of nuclear reactors.  Both situations are ticking time bombs that can spell doom for millions of innocent people if handled incorrectly.

Of course, we are more than willing to help out the Indonesian government when they come calling, as we did when it appeared Bali was fomenting H2H-capable bird flu last August and September.  By golly, the Indonesian government was more than willing to beg for help save the Global Warming Summit's location, hat in hand.  But once the virus had appeared not to mutate, the Indonesians assumed their previous defiant stance, with all the gratitude and credibility of Bobby Petrino.  I have dealt personally with Bobby Petrino, by the way, and I can tell you he is never to be believed and everything negative you ever heard about the man is probably true.  Now the entire nation knows his word is about as good as --well, as good as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari.

But I digress.  The point is, politics eventually comes into play, one way or another.  And the decision to raise the threat level from 3 to 4 will be a political one.

So I ask, in light of the above factors:  Is it time to raise the threat level for pandemic influenza from Phase 3 to Phase 4? 

Is the Indonesian government's refusal to help the global preparedness effort not as big a threat as the virus itself?  Have we not seen that this virus is a mutating fool and is steadily acquiring the genetic characteristics of human influenzas?  Have we not seen at least empirical evidence of H2H (and H2H2H in Indonesia in May, 2006) over and over again?

Let's threaten Indonesia with raising the threat level, if for no other reason than to get Indonesia (and the rest of the world) off its rear end.  Here's what raising the threat level would do:

• First, it would act as a catalyst for the governments of states, counties and cities to get moving with awareness and preparedness efforts.
• Second, it would prompt the private sector to finish its preparation efforts.
• Third, it would be a huge black eye to the economies of any nation that had an endemic bird flu problem and, for whatever reason, refused to take appropriate steps to contain or eradicate it.  Are you listening, Indonesia?  No more global conferences.
• It would help activists like us to get our message out more clearly and to more people.
• It would focus media attention on the issue.
• And it would remind families that they need to prepare themselves for a pending viral disaster.

We need to adjust our thinking and discuss the theory that the virus will mutate spontaneously and simultaneously in different locations due to some external influence or recombination event.  And our ability to identify and isolate this emerging virus will be totally reliant upon the levels of communication and cooperation between sovereign nations and between those nations and the WHO.  This means I do not hold out much hope that the WHO threat level phases will be able to maintain any semblance of real-world, real-time correlation with actual, evolving events.

Look at the mobilization of the Chinese military in Nanjing, the province affected by the latest suspected H2H event.  The Chinese military is wasting no time as it considers the threat of avian influenza in the province to be as great as the threat from SARS in 2003-04 (http://www.newfluwiki2.com/showComment.do?commentId=76347) .  Additionally, guards have been set up around the building where the latest H5N1 victim is said to be recovering.  They are clearly not taking any chances.

In Tangerang, Indonesia, the situation is much more dire.  I have blogged no less than four times in the recent past regarding the presence of H5N1 in Tangerang.  Family clusters are not uncommon there.  Just this past week, a 28-year old woman and a 47-year old man have both died in Tangerang. Causes are listed as anything from handling manure (the woman was a plant seller) to raising ducks (the man).

How about the more obvious thing:  Something big is happening in Tangerang province, and it is calling out for the world to investigate?  I am quoting directly from Dr. Henry Niman's commentary on the latest developments on his Website, recombinomics.com:

The two confirmed cases above extend the cluster of H5N1 cases in Tangerang.  Four of the five most recent confirmed cases in Indonesia have been from Tangerang and all but one died.  This clustering increases pandemic concerns.  Sequences from most of the human cases this year have been withheld, so tracking of H5N1 evolution in humans in Indonesia is not currently possible.  Bird sequences from Indonesia match earlier cases, but the most recent public human sequences from January had additional divergence not well represented in the public bird sequences.

H5N1 in poultry and wild birds in Indonesia has been widespread, but the recent confirmed human cases have been concentrated in Tangerang, adjacent to Jakarta, or Riau province in central Sumatra.  These two geographic clusters suggest that H5N1 in these regions is more efficiently transmitted to humans and raise concerns about unreported cases.  The vast majority of cases in Indonesia are confirmed when the patient is in critical condition and the case fatality rate in Indonesia is above 80%.  This high rate raises concerns that milder cases are not being reported, raising additional concerns.

WHO Pandemic Phase 4 is defined as "Evidence of increased human-to-human transmission."  So what constitutes evidence?  Is it a dramatic upswing of localized human H5N1 cases in a nation where no one can get their hands on virus samples?  If we limit this decision solely to scientific analysis and examination, at the end of the day it will still be up to a consensus of scientists to give their subjective opinion.  I said opinion.  That means a bunch of people in a room (or via videoconference) trying to come to a group decision on what to call things.

Meanwhile, in several remote (and maybe not so remote) corners of the planet, the virus mutates and causes more clusters.  The possibility for this to happen is upon us.

Look at what is going on around the world, as we speak.  There are multiple outbreaks of H5N1 in poultry in Poland.  Egypt just went on alert against H5N1, and no one would ever fault the Egyptian government to be digging in against this foe.  China goes on alert. Vietnam continues to wrestle with outbreaks.  Pakistan culls poultry and then two humans die.  Indonesia has no earthly idea how entrenched the virus is there.  Russia culls hundreds of thousands of birds. Saudi Arabia is reporting new cases in poultry, as is Bangladesh.  South Korea and China are battling localized outbreaks in poultry. And we haven't even gotten halfway through December!

The single biggest thing the WHO can do to raise awareness of H5N1's pandemic potential is to raise the threat level -- now -- from Phase 3 to Phase 4.  I am certain they can find sufficient justification, if said justification does not exist already.

Newsweek magazine has weighed in on the escalating/deteriorating situation in Uganda.  And if you read the article carefully, and match Newsweek's suspected case total with the official records, you get a wildly divergent -- and extremely unsettling -- new number of potentially infected persons.  Not to mention the possibility of a deliberate cover-up of the virus by government officials.

The article itself is a good digest of what has already happened. And as we know and is proven by the presence of a reporter in the village -- Newsweek's Andrew Ehrenkranz (photo) -- there is no substitute for Journalist Boots on the Ground.  As admirable a job as as the Myhres' have done to update their blog, they are not journalists, aimed at extracting the truth. 

The paragraph in question is this one:

Some Ugandans, however, are questioning whether Museveni's government deliberately covered up news of the outbreak ahead of the recent meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in the capital city, Kampala. The government did not announce the outbreak until just after the conclusion of the high-profile meeting, even though government reports acknowledge that blood samples from infected patients were sent to South Africa for Ebola testing on Sept. 29. These samples were reportedly found negative for Ebola but were subsequently shown to carry a new strain of the virus at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta on Nov. 24—the second day of the Commonwealth meeting. The initial false negative may have been due to the difficulties of identifying the new strain—even the CDC tests took a day longer than usual—but that hasn't stopped public outrage over whether the government could have acted faster to stop the spread of the virus. "It looks quite strange, from a public health perspective, that blood samples were not taken [to the CDC] earlier," said Dr. George Pariyo, dean of the public health school at Kampala's well-respected Makerere University in a front-page Uganda Monitor feature investigating the suggestions of a government cover-up.

Other news regarding the actual number of infected, plus the prospect of large numbers of "super-spreaders" of the disease, are also mentioned by Newsweek:

Bundibugyo is at the epicenter of the outbreak, which began in August. Doctors in the town are monitoring more than 360 sick people believed to be incubating the virus and have recorded 18 local fatalities, including four medical staffers at Bundibugyo Hospital. Townspeople are terrified by the outbreak. Bundibugyo's usually bustling central market is quiet, and residents of nearby villages are anxiously reading newly distributed Ebola information posters. Hawkers sell the antibiotic Cipro at inflated prices on the street, falsely promising that it can prevent infection; local healers and herbalists are offering their own versions of a cure. (bold mine)

The piece continues:

But while the new strain seems to be less virulent, it also raises the possibility that the infected are now more likely to survive long enough to spread it elsewhere. Already there have been Ebola cases in eight districts across Uganda, with confirmed cases as far away as Mbale, a village some 600 miles from the outbreak zone. On Uganda's borders, neighboring Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Sudan are screening all Ugandans for symptoms and travel patterns in an attempt to halt the disease from spreading into their countries.

Let's hope the global media keeps its focus on this growing problem in Eastern Africa.  The entire story can be found at:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/76935

You gotta love the story coming out of Suffolk, England.  As we all know, Suffolk was the epicenter of Britain's worst bird flu outbreak of the last few years.  High-path H5N1 was found in free-range poultry, and this threatened to put a huge dent in Britain's holiday fowl season.

Anyway, the tab was just presented to the government.  And what a tab it is!  Some 160 persons stayed at luxury hotels, running up a hotel and meal/entertainment tab of £121,000!  That is about a quarter of a million dollars, or about $1,600 a person for a month.

This, understandably, has MPs (Members of Parliament) and local officials fuming.  Local economies were already reeling from the state of Britain's economy (not good) and then, to have a massive bird flu die-off and cull on top of that -- well, the ripple effect can be well-imagined.  So did Her Majesty's government choose to slip some of that quid back into the pockets of local Bed and Breakfast owners and restaurateurs (pictured), to help them recover economically?  No, of course not!  they stayed at the luxury hotels and the locals failed to benefit economically.

Notice to FEMA workers, emergency managers and well-meaning bureaucrats everywhere:  Government produces no revenue.  It TAKES revenue from others.  It produces no widgets. The least government can do (and except for pandemic preparedness and homeland security, as a general rule the less government can do the better), please inject those taxpayer dollars back into the local economies. 

Here is the story, from the Suffolk Evening Star,  http://www.eveningstar.co.uk/content/eveningstar/news/story.aspx?brand=ESTOnline&category=News&tBrand=estonline&tCategory=News&itemid=IPED12%20Dec%202007%2014%3A41%3A14%3A653

TAXPAYERS have forked out £121,000 in less than a month on accommodation for officials dealing with the second bird flu outbreak in Suffolk.

There were 160 people put up in accommodation for a combined total of 1,295 nights by The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) between November 12 and December 2.

This works out at an average of £94 per night or £758 for each individual.

The figures emerged after MP for Bury and Stowmarket, David Ruffley, questioned Jonathan Shaw MP, parliamentary under-secretary at the Home Office.

Mr Ruffley said: “I am quite simply staggered by the size of the hotel bill DEFRA seem to have racked up while staying in Suffolk.

“On average they have spent £94 per night putting up their officials. This is incredibly frivolous when one considers that bed & breakfasts in the area charge in the region of £30 to £35 per night.

“This wasteful attitude will make farmers in the region sick - they are struggling to make ends meet, following bluetongue and avian influenza outbreaks, while the government is sending their officials to some of the finest hotels our area offers.

“By my calculations, if these officials had been found bed & breakfast accommodation the bill would have been in the region of £40,000. Not only would this have saved nearly £80,000 but it would have supported the very communities that have been shattered by these outbreaks.

“The government should be ashamed of this colossal waste of tax payers' money and Suffolk's farmers, who are receiving very little in the way of support or compensation, have every right to be livid.”

In answering Mr Ruffley's question, Mr Shaw said: “In an emergency, a large number of staff need to be found hotel rooms near to the local disease control centre at very short notice.

“DEFRA employs the services of an external provider to ensure that the most appropriate accommodation is secured and provides the best value for money.”

Do you think too much money was spent on accommodation? Write to Your Letters, Evening Star, 30 Lower Brook Street, Ipswich, IP4 1AN or e-mail eveningstarletters@eveningstar.co.uk