Saturday, August 28, 2010

Cold fronts related to bird influenza outbreaks in Europe

Kate Kelland LONDON Thu April 8, 2010 10:37pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Outbreaks of H5N1 influenza in between birds in Europe came at the edges of cold fronts that caused wild birds to shift emigration patterns, scientists pronounced on Thursday, suggesting cold snaps competence vigilance destiny outbreaks.

Science

Dutch and American researchers found European outbreaks of avian influenza during the 2005-2006 winter were driven by common movements of wild waterbirds to places where the uninformed H2O they need to feed and tarry had not frozen.

"This has critical implications for surveillance, that should aim areas where temperatures are close to frozen in winter, generally in poultry-dense regions close to areas where waterfowl aggregate," the researchers wrote in a investigate in the Public Library of Science biography PloS Pathogens.

The investigate can be found here

It is formidable for people to catch H5N1 bird flu, but when they do it can be deadly. Since 2003 it has putrescent 492 people and killed 291 of them, according to the World Health Organization, and experts fright the H5N1 pathogen could mutate at any time in to a form simply upheld from one chairman to another.

The pathogen emerged some-more than a decade ago in ornithology in Southeast Asia. In 2005 it widespread outward Middle East infecting both ornithology and wild birds in the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

Most human cases have been in Middle East but Egypt has had 108 cases and 33 deaths.

Romanian officials reported an conflict of bird influenza last month on a ornithology plantation close to Ukraine in an area on an critical roving pathway for wild birds.

Leslie Reperant of Princeton University in the United States and Thijs Kuiken of the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands pronounced their commentary offering a probable approach to envision and carry out where and when bird influenza competence explode again.

"Forecasts presaging near-freezing temperatures in Europe competence action as an denote for concern," they wrote.

They found that majority H5N1 outbreaks occurred at sites where limit temperatures were in between 0 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius. This was customarily on the corner of cold fronts where uninformed H2O remained unfrozen.

"Many wild waterbirds need unfrozen bodies of uninformed H2O in winter to feed," they wrote.

"To minimize the area flown, they additionally try to stay as close as probable to the northern tact drift to that they will quit during spring...The ensuing assemblage of opposite class of waterbirds along the frozen front expected combined preferred conditions for the delivery of the H5N1 virus."

The right away loss pestilence of H1N1 hog influenza has driven the growth of new drug to quarrel flu, that kills 250,000 to 500,000 people globally in a normal year and far some-more in a serious pandemic.

Drugs now on the marketplace embody Roche and Gilead Sciences"s oseltamivir, a tablet sole underneath the code name Tamiflu, and GlaxoSmithKline"s Relenza or zanamivir, that contingency be inhaled.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Matthew Jones)

Science

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