Latest Bird Flu News - 20th November 2005

A summary of the latest Bird Flu news from around the world.

US clears bird flu drug Tamiflu - BBC News

America's powerful medicines regulator has ruled there is no evidence of a link between the bird flu drug Tamiflu and the deaths of 12 children in Japan.

A Food and Drug Administration panel found no "causal link" between the deaths over the past 13 months and the drug, which is widely distributed.

Swiss manufacturer Roche welcomed the ruling, saying: "The positive role of Tamiflu remains unchanged."

Tamiflu, it added, would be relabelled to warn of possible skin side-effects.

Countries have placed huge orders for Tamiflu to ward off a feared pandemic that scientists fear could result from the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

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Reforms critical if China to win Bird-flu fight - The Globe

By GEOFFREY YORK

BEIJING -- In the coastal city of Ningbo, jittery residents have been queuing up for tables at a hot-pot restaurant that promised a special dish to prevent bird flu. The restaurant's popularity soared -- until its secret recipe was exposed as a fraud.

The story of the hot-pot hoax, which made headlines in the Chinese media this week, is another sign of the widespread gullibility and ignorance about avian flu in the country where the deadly strain first emerged.

Beijing is desperately trying to educate its local officials and health officers about the realities of the disease, but the first instinct of many Chinese bureaucrats is to conceal and cover up. The greatest danger is that those same bureaucrats might even conceal a case of human-to-human transmission, the potential trigger of a global bird-flu epidemic that could kill millions of people.

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Vietnam's battle against bird flu - BBC News

More humans have died from the bird flu virus in Vietnam than any other country but, as Jonathan Head discovered, the government there believes it will be able to contain the problem using new vaccines from China.

"The Vietnamese people can beat this virus."

Mr Quang, our Foreign Ministry minder, radiated confidence - as no doubt he was required to - in front of journalists.

But he was also articulating the self-belief of a country which once defeated the Japanese, the French and the Americans.

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Past Gives Few Clues for Predicting Flu - Herald Daily News Dakota

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE AND MALCOLM RITTER

History is supposed to teach lessons. But past flu pandemics, it turns out, don‘t teach much about whether today‘s bird flu will become a human mega-killer or just make some scientists and officials look like Chicken Little.

Back then, there weren‘t surveillance systems or modern genetic tools to detect and document viruses as they evolved into killer strains. Because scientists don‘t know how that evolution happened or how long it took, they can‘t tell us whether what we‘re seeing with bird flu now is the run-up to a pandemic or a near miss.

Leading scientists now discount the notion that flu pandemics happen in regular intervals and that the world is overdue for a new one.

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