SUPERMARKETGURU FOOD &
HEALTH WEEKLY NEWSFLASH!
Deadly Avian Flu Found in UK as US Offers Pandemic Guidelines
Published on: February 5, 2007
An outbreak of the deadly A(H5N1) strain of bird flu has been discovered on a turkey farm in eastern England, and the timing is ironic considering that the US government has just issued guidelines to states and communities in the US about how to deal with a severe pandemic.
"The disease has killed 2,500 turkeys near Lowestoft since Thursday, making it the biggest outbreak of the strain reported in Britain since concern about its global spread began to take root in 2003," according to a story in the New York Times. "An additional 160,000 birds will now be culled in an effort to contain the outbreak, government officials said." A six-mile radius around the farm where the disease was found has now been restricted, and the British government says it has not yet identified the cause of the outbreak.
Fred Landeg, a senior government veterinarian, tells the Times that there is no public health concern. "Avian influenza is a disease of birds and whilst it can pass very rarely and with difficulty to humans, this requires extremely close contact with infected birds, particularly feces." However, the Times also notes that "since 2003, 164 people, most of them in Asia, have died of the A(H5N1) strain, and authorities worry that the virus could easily become transmissible among humans to create a global pandemic."
The scenario in Great Britain is reminiscent of when foot-and-mouth disease was found in the UK in 2001, resulting in the mass slaughter of almost four million animals.
Ironically, the discovery in the UK comes in as the US Centers for Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) issued new flu guidelines designed to help communities deal with the possibility of any sort of severe flu pandemic while waiting for enough vaccine to be produced.
For the first time, CDC has created a model that breaks pandemics into five categories, with a Category One outbreak assuming that 90,000 Americans would die of the flu, and the worst case, Category Five, assuming that 1.8 million people have died. In an average year, about 36,000 Americans die of flu-related causes.
"We have to be prepared for a Category 5 pandemic," said Dr. Martin S. Cetron, the CDC's director of global migration and quarantine. "It's not easy. The only thing that's harder is facing the consequences. That will be intolerable."
Among the other steps that the CDC urges communities to think about is the closing of schools, the cancellation of sporting events and entertainments like movies, and, where possible, discouraging the use of public transportation, the changing of working hours so that fewer people are interacting and more people can work from home.
