Hong Kong raises bird flu alert level, bans imports

Hong Kong raises bird flu alert level, bans imports

medicalxpress.com

The city's health chief York Chow announced the measures after a dead chicken at a wholesale market and two other wild birds tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease.

Authorities banned all live poultry imports with immediate effect while they trace the source of the dead chicken, whether it was imported or from local poultry farms.

(visit the link for the full news article)

...around 20 students from a girls' school, aged between six and seven, have developed flu-like symptoms including fever, cough and sore throat, but none has been taken to hospital.

Hong Kong was the site of the world's first major outbreak of bird flu among humans in 1997, when six people died from a mutated form of the virus, which is normally confined to poultry. Millions of birds were then culled.

The cull at the poultry wholesale market where the infected chicken was found will be held on Wednesday...

Well, we can see that H5N1 is being warmed up for Big Pharma... Let's hope this turns out to be a non-starter for the season. The last thing we need is another global fear festival.

Stay healthy everyone.

"We are now raising the bird flu response level from alert to serious."

Earlier on Tuesday, the agriculture authorities confirmed an Oriental magpie robin found dead in a secondary school on Saturday had tested positive for H5N1, the second such case in a week.

I normally try to remain ambivalent about such news except ...

A novel highly contagious strain of H5N1 was created by Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who first presented his work to the public at an influenza conference in Malta in September 2011. The new H5N1 strain was genetically altered to readily transmit from human to human and was found to be as contagious as the human seasonal flu, thus making it the most vicious and dangerous flu strain up to date.

en.wikipedia.org...

medicalxpress.com

www.physorg.com...
(visit the link for the full news article)

Hurry, get vaccinated or we’ll going to die!

no really, this is real this time. /sarc

reply to post by Maxmars


Its strange that H5N1 was created in a lab and now its being reported in bird deaths around the world. WTF is going on? did someone unleash this?

reply to post by Maxmars

Ok, first things first...

...around 20 students from a girls' school, aged between six and seven, have developed flu-like symptoms including fever, cough and sore throat, but none has been taken to hospital.

So they have found the H5N1 virus and around 20 little girls are showing symptoms but none have been taken to the hospital? Is this part of China's population control? Quarantine them and get them some help for pete's sake!

Secondly, it appears that this is the orginal H5N1, not the newly created version that is transmissible between humans, correct?

reply to post by tvtexan


I don't believe that this is the new 'strain' developed in the Netherlands.... but then, it seems like a noteworthy coincidence that just as the new strain was developed and discussed in the scientific community, we start to see news reports like this from China.

Also, there were precious few details offered about the school children who have "flu-like" symptoms.... not even a comment whether we are supposed to think it was H5N1 or anything else.... so I can't say anything about the wisdom of not quarantining the whole lot of them (and their families I suppose)

reply to post by tvtexan


We don't know yet.

It is being explained as coming from birds in a market, although it wouldn't have been difficult to release the genetically engineered, deliberately mutated strain and blame the birds at the market.

We'll have to wait and see.

Here's a link to a post i made about these 'scientists' creating a virus that would potentially kill millions of us if it 'escapes' from a key locked cabinet, in a University basement, with NO guards watching it...no danger there then.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by Maxmars


Quite a 'coincidence' isn't it.

Now it's capable of airborne transmission, there are numerous methods that can be used to disperse this....if someone wanted to wipe out large portions of humanity of course.

The back end of an aircraft for example.

New strains of flu show up all the time. Which is why there is a new flu vaccine every year. So different flus showing up in different places is nothing unusual.

reply to post by nixie_nox

You've not been paying attention, have you mate?

www.abovetopsecret.com...

This is very unusual. And it's deliberately engineered, there's no debate or conspiracy issue about that fact. It's news.

H5N1 is an avian influenza that can be caught by humans, but is unlikely. But unlike other avian influenzas, is fatal to birds.
Humans can catch it by direct exposure to contaminated birds. But there isn't a lot of human to human transmission.

The poster is trying to scare people by comparing unknown infections of schools to the H5N1.

The only people that should be worried is the poultry industry.

reply to post by spikey


What is going around is a typical strain of H5N1. There is no proof that the engineered flu has been released.

reply to post by Maxmars


For the record - Hong Kong reported a wild seagull with H5N1 bird flu a few days ago. ...Flu researchers have been flagging new mutations AND a resurgence of H5N1 bird flu in Asia for some time.

The focus on "bioterrorist" and "accidental release" threats from experiments by Fouchier in the Netherlands and Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin are distract and deflect strategies: factory farms create virulent human diseases, but the necessary prevention measures were NOT taken - to protect industry profits.

UW scientists under scrutiny over bird flu research

Food Safety Consequences of Factory Farms

…..scientists suspect that it was in poultry factory farms that avian flu mutated from a relatively harmless virus found in wild birds for centuries to the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus that is killing birds and humans today.

Peculiar new diseases have been amplified by aberrant agribusiness practices. For example, "Mad Cow Disease" (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE), a fatal dementia affecting cattle, spread throughout Britain when dead cows were fed to living cows. When people ate cows with "Mad Cow Disease," they got Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a fatal dementia that afflicts humans.

Another farm animal disease beginning to jeopardize human health is avian influenza. In Hong Kong, where scores of people have died from the so-called "bird- flu," over one million chickens have been destroyed in the panic to stop the spread of the disease.

Millions of Americans are infected, and thousands die every year from contaminated animal ‘food’ products. Despite repeated warnings from consumer advocates, the USDA's meat inspection system remains grossly inadequate, and consumers are now being told to "expect" animal products to be tainted.

Meanwhile, the agribusiness industry, rather than advising consumers to curtail their intake of animal products, has devised extreme measures (overcooking, antibiotics, etc.) to help consumers circumvent the hazards of animal products and maintain their gross over-consumption of meat and dairy.

Europeans demand investigation of the CAFO/swine flu link

… USDA chief Tom Vilsack has been much more zealous about protecting the pork industry than investigating its potential for incubating deadly pandemics. In a Congressional heating last month, he cravenly defended the safety of industrial meat production - even though U.S. regulatory agencies have no mechanism in place to test the U.S. herd for H1N1.

Few outside of a few bloggers seems outraged by this state of affairs here in the U.S. Over in Europe, things are different. The Swiss group Avaaz.org has launched a petition demanding that the WHO and the UN’s FAO take action to investigate links between industrial hog operations and swine flu. Their demand is simple and direct - and it’s a sign of our deregulated times that it has to be made in the first place:

We call on you to investigate and develop regulations for factory farming in accordance with public health safety standards. Food production must be regulated to ensure global health security.

Scientific American: U.S. Pig Farms May Be 'Flu Factories'

Scientists find threat in livestock feedlots

reply to post by nixie_nox

No proof no, but that is not what is being said.

We're saying that the timing of this reported 'natural version' of H5N1 is a big coincidence, coming so soon after the revelation of the genetically engineered, and far more dangerous version of H5N1 has been made known.

The mutated, man made version is reported to be 'under lock and key' in the Netherlands University engineering it, but without guards, and with the engineers apparently intent on publishing the data of the engineered virus in open literature, even though they claim as one of their reasons for doing the work in the first place as a guard against terrorists getting hold of or engineering their own.

Don't you see a contradiction there? At the least, the lack of admitted security for something more deadly than nuclear weapons, is criminally irresponsible.

reply to post by spikey


Flu mutates like crazy - and the strains in the wild already were showing really bad traits before the Netherlands and U of Wisconsin developed those new strains.

The focus on Fouchier is a cover-up - U of Wisconsin did the same thing - and industrial factory farming is the real culprit anyway, just like with H1N1 swine flu.

reply to post by soficrow


The deliberately and SPECIFICALLY engineered the virus to be easily transmissible between humans, rather than birds to humans...and you don't find that alarming in the least?

H5N1 has been around in it's mainly Bird strain for at least a decade...now, because of what these 'scientists' have done, it is now a human to human virus with at least a 60% mortality rate.

It may have mutated into something similar in the wild Yes, but it hasn't for years, and it may even have mutated into something LESS dangerous, not more so too.

We have deadly Earthquakes and Volcanic eruptions here on Earth too, and sooner or later another will happen somewhere at sometime...is this knowledge reason enough to deliberately set off volcanoes and fracture fault lines? Because they 'might' erupt or fracture in the future?

No, of course it isn't.

Why is this VERY deadly virus being stored in a low containment, low security University basement, if they are worried 'terrorists' may try to GE it themselves?

Forgetting Terrorists, what about an accident? What about common theft, what about accidental exposure?

Why isn't the world demanding this virus is destroyed and the data locked away more safely than nuclear weapons are?!

I don't believe this.

reply to post by spikey

The deliberately and SPECIFICALLY engineered the virus to be easily transmissible between humans, rather than birds to humans...and you don't find that alarming in the least?

Yes - but I find it FAR more alarming that agribusiness practices like factory farming and genetic engineering routinely create virulent diseases that can infect humans - and have for decades - but nothing is done. I'm also very alarmed by the facts that:

* On-salary scientists routinely create chemicals, compounds and biological products that are dangerous to public health - for industry and their corporate employers.
* Industrial corporations routinely release dangerous chemicals, compounds and biological products that threaten public health into the environment, and in consumer products.
* The only real difference is, salaried scientists are constrained by confidentiality agreements, and do not expect their work to be published to benefit the public - unlike the scientists and experiments currently being censured.

H5N1 has been around in it's mainly Bird strain for at least a decade...now, because of what these 'scientists' have done, it is now a human to human virus with at least a 60% mortality rate.

It may have mutated into something similar in the wild Yes, but it hasn't for years,

Erm, no. H5N1 bird flu was first isolated in Scotland in 1959 - it resurfaced in the late 1990's after disappearing into a corporate lab for decades. Since then it has become progressively worse, and become endemic in the water and soil, and animal populations from Egypt to Indonesia, Vietnam and mainland China.

Scientists discover deadly bird flu began in Scotland

Scientists tracing the history of the H5N1 virus have traced its first recorded episode to an Aberdeen farm. ...A scientist identified only as Dr JE Wilson, of the Veterinary Laboratory in Lasswade, outside Edinburgh, is recorded as having worked on the case - sending the chicken to Addlestone, where the strain was medically isolated so it could be used in experiments. The Scottish H5N1 has been used in experiments, named "chicken/Scotland/1959".

No medical agency in Scotland or England was able to give many details - except to say that the disease has become heartier and deadlier since it was found in Scotland. There is also no sign of Dr Wilson. The Moredun Research Institute at Penicuik said that it had no record of him and that he was likely to have passed away.

Why is this VERY deadly virus being stored in a low containment, low security University basement, if they are worried 'terrorists' may try to GE it themselves?

Forgetting Terrorists, what about an accident? What about common theft, what about accidental exposure?

These kinds of experiments are done all the time - perhaps this very one too. The difference is, it looks like a flu pandemic will hit this season, and these guys were set up to take the fall.

....to take the heat off industry and Big Pharma.

Why isn't the world demanding this virus is destroyed and the data locked away more safely than nuclear weapons are?!

Why isn't the world demanding that agricultural, chemical, nano-tech, pharmaceutical and bio-nanotech be regulated to protect public health? Why scapegoat the only 2 well-meaning researchers who want to share their work with other scientists to benefit the public?

Originally posted by Maxmars

Hong Kong raises bird flu alert level, bans imports

medicalxpress.com

The city's health chief York Chow announced the measures after a dead chicken at a wholesale market and two other wild birds tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease.

Authorities banned all live poultry imports with immediate effect while they trace the source of the dead chicken, whether it was imported or from local poultry farms.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Lol Nice wonder if that has anything to do this bird flu article?

Originally posted by nixie_nox

.....

The poster is trying to scare people by comparing unknown infections of schools to the H5N1.

.......

I would prefer if no one got scared at all and just continued to contribute to the discussion.

I didn't write the article, nor did I imply that people should be scared.... I only want to learn.

my nephew caught it last time it went around, and they ended up having to artificialy put him in a coma. it's real. messed him up big time.