They're routinely injected with the stronger antibiotics while chicks, but infections take'em out by the thousands anyway. Whole houses of birds have been destroyed at once in attempts to stop the spreading. My reply to the claims that this is an avian strain of the flu is a question. Why do they incubate polio and other vaccines in chicken eggs? Do chickens not have a respiratory system so close to our own that they catch our bugs? Are the antibiotics being used commercially at chicken farms not the same ones we use?
There's been a recurring respiratory bug going around locally that seems to mutate so fast that as soon as you get over it you catch it again. Kids and COPD folks seem most at risk. It starts out with drying, tingly lips and watery eyes, moves to the back of the throat making it scratchy, then either goes up into the sinuses or down into the stomach. After the second day or so there's about a 24 hr. period of low grade fever. When that breaks, there's muscle/joint aching and lymphnode swelling.
I thought after you caught a bug you were supposed to develope immunity to some degree. This one just keeps repeating. A week or so sick, a week recovery, and back to a week sick....
Hhhhmmmmm? conspiracy theory or head in the sand?
In Vietnam, A Dark Side To Good News On Bird Flu (washingtonpost.com)"
"The virus could be adapting to humans," said Peter Horby, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization in Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital. "There's a number of indications it could be moving toward a more dangerous virus."
The mortality rate for bird flu in Vietnam this year is about 35 percent, almost exactly half that of last year, according to Health Ministry statistics. The mortality rate of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, by comparison, was less than 5 percent, but the outbreak killed an estimated 40 million people worldwide.
Officials said the drop in the bird flu mortality rate was more marked in northern Vietnam than in the south. While the virus in southern Vietnam is still killing at the same pace as last year, the rate in the area around Hanoi and elsewhere in the north has dropped from that level to as low as 20 percent. Vietnamese health experts said their suspicion that the disease is shifting is further supported by preliminary research showing a genetic change in the virus in the north resulting in the production of a protein with one less amino acid than in the south.
Health researchers believe that nearly all the 52 people known to have died of bird flu in Southeast Asia caught the virus from infected poultry. But with more clusters of cases among families reported in Vietnam this year -- including that of Tuan, his sister and their grandfather -- experts say they are growing increasingly suspicious that the disease has begun passing from one human to another.
Also worrying is the discovery of at least five cases, including that of Tuan's grandfather, in which people tested positive for bird flu but showed no symptoms. This could make it more difficult to contain an epidemic because people could transmit the disease without anyone realizing it.
Last year, U.S. researchers reported that ducks in Southeast Asia had begun carrying the bird flu virus without showing symptoms. Now, scientists in Vietnam have found numerous asymptomatic cases in the country's vast chicken population, according to Nguyen Tran Hien, director of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology.
"It seems that the virus may adapt in humans and in poultry a little bit. Therefore, the symptoms are not as severe as before," Hien said. "Also, the transmission may be faster and easier."
Moreover, the existing virus strain is not the only threat. Each human case also presents a chance for the bird flu virus to swap genetic material with an ordinary flu bug -- if the person becomes infected with both strains at the same time -- potentially creating a new hybrid that is highly lethal and even easier to catch.
"We are concerned that if the virus is changing, maybe a new virus is coming in the future," Hien said.
