A flap over bird flu

Ratio of CD4+ to CD8+ T-Cells in the Recent Reported Cases of Bird Flu Infection in Asia

Alarm bells ring over bird flu threat

Recent cases of bird flu infecting humans in southeast Asia have raised fears about the possibility of a new strain of human flu that could spark a pandemic. The new outbreaks of the influenza virus (strain H5N1) in poultry in Asia were linked by sporadic reporting of human cases of infection with this virus in Vietnam and Thailand last year. By the end of last month, there had been 54 cases of...

Responding to the Challenge of Bird Flu in Rural Poultry - Insights from West Bengal

Since 1997 when bird flu claimed its first human victims in Hong Kong and more particularly after the SAARS outbreak in 2003 and its widespread reappearance in 2004, this disease has not only gained enormous notoriety but has also generated intense debate and attention the world over on how it can be eradicated or at least prevented from causing a human pandemic. Countless papers and books cont...

Efficient Influenza A Virus Origin Detection

This research describes a novel, alignment-free method of genomic sequence comparisons based on absent nucleotide words and expression levels. Testing this method on Influenza A virus isolates, three classifications are presented which successfully identify; 1) the geographic origins of domestic bird H5N1 isolates through China and Southeast Asia during 2006, 2) the country of human H5N1 isolat...

Human bird flu infection: is there any relationship to hypertension?

Human Bird Flu Infection: Is There Any Relationship to Hypertension? To the Editor: Bird flu or avian flu, caused by H5N1 virus, is a new emerging infectious disease. In 2004, it became a new emerging infectious disease with high mortality in humans in Vietnam and Thailand. Most infected cases usually developed progressive pneumonia with acute respiratory distress syndrome and consequently died...

Bird flu fears heading west

but nobody took any notice, because this was also the day J.F. Kennedy was shot dead. Similarly, the biggest influenza pandemic of the 20th century killed 20 million people in 1918/19, but did not make the top headlines, because there was a World War going on at the same time. To this day, the disease wrongly labelled the Spanish flu has remained a footnote in the history books. Recently, howev...