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Avian Flu Update Bulletin Board -

The Latest News on the Avian Flu Pandemic Threat

Background Information on Avian Flu from the:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the official U.S. Government website for information on a flu pandemic is www.pandemicflu.gov to assist in current status and preparation, with an Individual and Family Checklist of suggested items to keep in a home inventory and extensive additional information.. Additional FDA information is available by clicking on "Avian Flu Information."

Annually, flu from non-avian (bird) sources sickens 60,000,000 Americans, puts 400,000 in the hospital and is fatal to more than 36,000 adults and children. While Avian flu in the deadly H5N1 strain is a worldwide threat for a Pandemic, individuals must be aware that influenza in other forms is already a deadly disease in the United States and worldwide, with acute risk to children and the elderly. Recent locations of Avian Flu cases is shown on the world map at left with specific information in the numerous press releases posted below.

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Avian influenza is an infectious disease of birds caused by type A strains of the influenza virus. The disease, which was first identified in Italy more than 100 years ago, occurs worldwide. ...Of the 15 avian influenza virus subtypes, H5N1 is of particular concern for several reasons. H5N1 mutates rapidly and has a documented propensity to acquire genes from viruses infecting other animal species. Its ability to cause severe disease in humans has now been documented on two occasions [Many more have occurred since this release in January 2004 - Click on Current Infections and Deaths for the most recent WHO Update]. In addition, laboratory studies have demonstrated that isolates from this virus have a high pathogenicity [ability to cause disease] and can cause severe disease in humans. Birds that survive infection excrete virus for at least 10 days, orally and in faeces, thus facilitating further spread at live poultry markets and by migratory birds.

The epidemic of highly pathogenic avian influenza caused by H5N1, which began in mid-December 2003 in the Republic of Korea and is now being seen in other Asian countries (and Europe with suspected cases in Canada) and is therefore of particular public health concern. H5N1 variants demonstrated a capacity to directly infect humans in 1997, and have done so again in Viet Nam in January 2004. The spread of infection in birds increases the opportunities for direct infection of humans. If more humans become infected over time, the likelihood also increases that humans, if concurrently infected with human and avian influenza strains, could serve as the “mixing vessel” for the emergence of a novel subtype with sufficient human genes to be easily transmitted from person to person. Such an event would mark the start of an influenza pandemic.

For the complete World Health Organization (WHO) Fact Sheet on Avian Flu, click on "WHO Avian Flu" or go to www.who.int for more current WHO information.   

Current Avian Flu News Releases Worldwide

U.S. Issues Guidelines in Case of Flu Pandemic

February 1, 2007 - New York Times - By Donald G. McNeil, Jr. - ATLANTA, Feb. 1 — Cities should close schools for up to three months in the event of a severe flu outbreak, ball games and movies should be canceled and working hours staggered so subways and buses are less crowded, the federal government advised today in issuing new pandemic flu guidelines to states and cities. Health officials acknowledged that such measures would hugely disrupt public life, but they argued that these measure would buy the time needed to produce vaccines and would save lives because flu viruses attack in waves lasting about two months.

“We have to be prepared for a Category 5 pandemic,” said Dr. Martin Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in releasing the guidelines. “It’s not easy. The only thing that’s harder is facing the consequences. That will be intolerable.” 

In an innovation, the new guidelines are modeled on the five levels of hurricanes, but ranked by lethality instead of wind speed. Category 1, which assumes 90,000 Americans would die, is equivalent to a bad year for seasonal flu, Glen Nowak, a C.D.C. spokesman, said. (About 36,000 Americans die of flu in an average year.) Category 5, which assumes 1.8 million dead, is the equivalent of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. (That flu killed about 2 percent of those infected; the H5N1 flu now circulating in Asia has killed more than 50 percent but is not easily transmitted.)

The new guidelines also advocate having sick people and all their families even apparently healthy members stay home for 7 to 10 days.

... Any pandemic is expected to move faster than a new vaccine can be produced; current experimental vaccines against H5N1 avian flu are in short supply and based on strains isolated in 2004 or 2005. Although the government is creating a $4 billion stockpile of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, it is only useful when taken within the first 48 hours, and Tamiflu-resistant flu strains have already been found in Vietnam and Egypt. Dr. Levi said that using the National Guard to set up temporary clinics or move pharmaceutical supplies might make sense.

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Bird Flu Poses Threat to Global Markets January 16, 2007 - The Korean Times - The risk of a bird flu pandemic hitting the world this year is rising and it could cause a notable fall in global stock markets, the Financial Times said Monday citing a new research project based on market surveys. If avian flu spreads across 60 countries this year, the losses to the Dow Jones Industrial Average might be as a high as 10 per cent, according to analysis from Thomson Financial and the World Economic Forum (WEF). The times reported the analysis implies that avian flu now presents one of the biggest risks to the behavior of stock markets this year, potentially larger than the threat posed by a terrorist attack. Reuters, one of world's leading news agencies, said bird flu remains a threat that the U.S. health care system must take seriously despite less frequent media coverage and the absence so far of human cases in the United States. The agency quoted John Bartlett, an infectious disease expert at John Hopkins University, as saying that the decentralized U.S. health system will make it more difficult to get ready for a possible human pandemic of H5N1 avian virus _ or anything else. It said the virus mainly affects birds but the deaths of two Indonesian women last week brought the worldwide death toll among people from the virus to 159, out of a total of 256 infected since 2003. ``It's there to stay in birds, which means it is just waiting for the opportunity to make the mutation," Bartlett was quoted as saying. The H5N1 virus is steadily changing and could at any time acquire the changes it needs to be easily transmitted from human to human. It would then spark a pandemic that could kill millions within months. The fatalities raised Indonesia's death toll from the virus to 61, the highest in the world. The vast majority of bird flu cases have occurred after contact with infected poultry. Leaders from 16 regional nations meeting here Monday expressed concern about the battle against bird flu in the region.

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Nations Pledge $475 Million Against Bird Flu

December 14, 2006 - Healthday News - Health Highlights - The world's nations have pledged an additional $475 million to fight bird flu, United Nations officials said in concluding a three-day avian flu conference in the African country of Mali.

The United States topped the list with a pledge of $100 million, followed by Canada ($92.5 million), the European Union ($88.2 million), and Japan ($67 million), the Agence France Presse news service reported. At the last similar world meeting in January in Beijing, donors pledged $1 billion in loans and donations toward fighting bird flu. Experts have long feared that the current H5N1 strain could mutate from a deadly form that affects mostly birds to one that is more easily transmitted between people, sparking a human pandemic.

H5N1, primarily spread so far to people by contact with sick birds, has killed more than 150 people worldwide since late 2003, AFP said. The virus also has led to mass culls of tens of millions of domestic poultry.

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South Korea says third bird flu case confirmed

December 11, 2006 01:09:36 AM PST - Reuters - A third case of bird flu has been discovered in southwestern South Korea just as officials have completed culling hundreds of thousands of poultry from two earlier outbreaks. Last month South Korea confirmed its first cases of the H5N1 strain in about three years, saying the virus had been found at two poultry farms close to each other in the North Cholla province. The fresh case emerged after South Korea completed culling all 760,000 poultry near the two farms, raising concerns that quarantine measures had failed to control the outbreak.

"The new case could have nothing to do with the first two cases. We cannot say the virus has spread through the country," said an official at quarantine authorities who declined to be named. The third case was discovered at a quail farm in the same province about 170 km (100 miles) south of Seoul, some 18 km from the original outbreak, according to the agriculture ministry. The farm has 290,000 quail and about three thousand had died over the past four days.

Quarantine authorities would cull 360,000 poultry within a 500 meter (1,640 ft) radius of the latest infected farm. There were no reports to suggest residents or quarantine officials had been infected in or abound the infected farms, the official said. The infected three farms lie on a path for migratory birds that head south from Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan and sparked concern that other parts of South Korea could become infected.

Between December 2003 and March 2004, about 400,000 poultry at South Korean farms were infected by bird flu. During that outbreak, the country destroyed 5.3 million birds and subsequent testing in the United States indicated at least nine South Korean workers involved in the culling had been infected with the H5N1 virus. None developed major illnesses. Bird flu remains essentially an animal disease, but it has infected nearly 260 people worldwide since late 2003, killing more than 150, according to the World Health Organization. Since 2003, outbreaks have been confirmed in about 50 countries and territories.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Releases Pandemic Planning Update III

November 13, 2006 - FDA

To review the U.S. Plan from the U.S. Government for a influenza pandemic, click on "Pandemic Planning Update III"

More bird flu vaccine capacity urgently needed: WHO

October 23, 2006 - World Health Organization

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday called for a multi-billion-dollar drive to make more pandemic flu vaccines, saying bird flu still threatened a global pandemic.

Outlining a plan to protect the world's 6.7 billion people against bird flu, or other flu viruses with pandemic potential, the U.N. health agency said manufacturing capacity would shield only a percentage of the population.

"We are presently several billion doses short of the amount of pandemic influenza vaccine we would need," said Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the WHO's initiative for vaccine research. Since it re-emerged in 2003, H5N1 bird flu has infected 256 people, killing 151, mainly in southeast Asia. Although it has been difficult for humans to catch, health authorities fear it could evolve into a form more easily passed between people and trigger a pandemic. "Our assessment continues to be the same. The risk of a pandemic has not gone down," David Heymann, the WHO's acting assistant director-general for communicable diseases, told a news conference to launch the plan.

Pharmaceutical companies have announced promising animal trials for a possible H5N1 vaccine, but the WHO says an effective serum is probably still a year away.

Global output of seasonal flu vaccination -- which could be switched to anti-pandemic production if needed -- stands at 350 million doses, with existing spare capacity for around a further 150 million if needed, the WHO said. Current expansion plans could see this figure rise to some 780 million doses by 2009, but this was still far short of what might be required in the event of a global epidemic of a killer flu strain. The plan, drawn up in consultation with 120 experts, urged governments to increase vaccination campaigns against normal seasonal flu in order to give industry an economic incentive to boost their production capacity.

But this would not be enough. States must also encourage the development of capacity specifically for producing pandemic vaccines, even if this meant companies would have to be paid for keeping some capacity idle when such vaccines were not needed. The third strand of the strategy would see stepped up research into more potent vaccines. These could cut the number of preventive doses needed to one from the two currently forecast, the WHO said.

The agency estimated the cost of the development plan at $3 billion to $10 billion over the next decade. But besides bringing global protection against pandemic flu viruses, the campaign would help cut the toll from seasonal flu which kills up to 500,000 people worldwide every year. "Immunization is a critical control strategy for limiting the impact of an influenza pandemic. Immediate, collaborative action to increase vaccine supply could have a massive payoff," Heymann said.

Bird Flu More Deadly For Younger People

June 30, 2006 - Medical News Today - The present H5N1 bird flu virus strain seems to be more deadly for younger people, as was the case with the flu pandemic in 1918, says the World Health Organization (WHO). The average death rate for infected people is 56%, while for 10-19 year-olds it is 73%.  WHO says the chances of a pandemic occurring as a result of a H5N1 mutation is still significant, according to its report in its Weekly Epidemiological Record.  The report highlights the similarity between the death rates among young people today and 1918. In 1918, Spanish Flu had a much higher death rate among young people.

Normal human flu tends to be more deadly for the elderly and people with weakened immune systems. Normal human flu is estimated to kill up to half a million people every year worldwide. The report looked at information gathered from over 200 confirmed H5N1 infection cases - all since 2003. Carefully following the epidemiology of all these and future human cases allows us to track the virus' evolution. In some parts of the world H5N1 has established, and is now be classed as an epidemic among birds, including farmed and backyard poultry. This provides the environment for further human cases to occur, which gives H5N1 the opportunity to mutate and become more human transmissible.

The rate at which humans have become infected has gone up sharply this year. This is mainly because H5N1 is now present in Asia, Europe and Africa. Human infections have mainly happened as a result of close contact with infected poultry. There was a case in Indonesia where 7 family members all became infected and some of them most likely infected each other. However, they all shared a small room and slept together in it. H5N1 has always had the ability to spread from human to human if the sick person is in very close and continuous contact with another person - even in such cases, passing the infection on is rare.

In 2005 19 people died of bird flu infection during the first six months of the year. For the first six months of 2006 the number stands at 54 - 50% of these people were less than 20 years old, 90% were under 40. Human cases tend to peak during the winter months. It is expected that numbers will rise again toward the end of this year when temperatures go down in the Northern Hemisphere.  For the H5N1 virus strain to mutate it ideally needs to enter a human who is infected with the normal human flu virus. It could then exchange genetic information with the normal human flu virus and pick up its ability to easily spread from human-to-human.

One of the reasons H5N1 has such a high death rate for humans is that it only infects deep down in the lung. It does not, for the moment, infect the upper-respiratory tract. When patients start to feel symptoms the infection has already taken a grip. This is also why it is not easy for humans to become infected. A large cluster of viruses have to be continuously around a human for a long time so that some of them can eventually make their way deep down into the lungs and infect. The reason humans cannot infect other humans easily is because of this deep down infection. When an infected person coughs or sneezes very few viruses are expelled (they are too deep down).

For the virus to become easily human transmissible it will probably need to infect higher up, nearer the throat - the upper-respiratory tract. The good news is that upper-respiratory tract infections tend to be easier to treat. Hopefully, this means that when the virus does mutate, although it will spread among humans quickly, it will not be so deadly.

Written by: Christian Nordqvist, Editor: Medical News Today;  Article URL: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/healthnews.php?newsid=46351

Human Bird-Flu Transmission Confirmed in Indonesian Cluster

June 24, 2006 - Healthday News - Health Highlights - The first case of human-to-human transmission of the bird flu virus has been confirmed in laboratory tests of samples taken from a 10-year-old Indonesian boy who died last month from the H5N1 avian influenza strain, a World Health Organization official said Friday.

Genetic sequencing of a virus sample taken from the boy showed a minute change that was also found in a sample taken from his father, who also later died, said Dick Thompson, a spokesman for the United Nations health agency in Geneva, Switzerland. Human-to-human transmission had been suspected as the cause of the infection in seven members of a family of eight from the island of Sumatra.

"We have seen a genetic change that confirms in a laboratory that the virus has moved from one human to another," Thompson told Bloomberg News. The change in the virus "doesn't seem to have any significance in terms of the pathology of the disease or how easily it's transmitted,' he said.

The Sumatran cluster attracted international attention because it represented the largest reported instance of bird-flu spread among people and the first evidence of a three-person chain of infection. A 37-year-old woman suspected of being the first family member to die was buried before samples were taken. She reportedly mixed fowl manure with soil with her bare hands to fertilize her garden. The woman's 10-year-old nephew, an 18-month-old niece, two teenage sons and a 29-year-old sister became sick between May 2 and May 4, and later died after having close contact with the woman during her illness, Bloomberg said. A 25-year-old brother was also infected but survived.

The New York Times reported that the first five family members to fall ill had identical strains of H5N1, but the virus had mutated slightly in the sixth victim, the 10-year-old boy, who passed it to his father. That mutation allowed the lab to confirm the route of transmission. World health officials said there was no evidence that the mutated virus is any better adapted to human infection than before. In fact, the WHO has been following 54 neighbors and family members who lived near the family for a month, and none has contracted the virus, the newspaper said.

At least 130 of the 228 people known to be infected with bird flu since 2003 have died, according to the WHO. World health officials are tracking the spread of the virus in the event it becomes more adept at infecting people.

Officials Backtrack Bird Flu Cluster

By MARGIE MASON
AP Medical Writer

March 25, 2006 - Jakarta Indonesia - Associated Press - The first person infected in a cluster of bird flu cases in a family in Indonesia may have come into contact with sick or dead chickens before possibly passing the virus on to relatives, a World Health Organization official said Thursday. The woman grew vegetables and sold them in a market, which may have brought her into contact with infected poultry, said Steven Bjorge, a WHO epidemiologist in Jakarta. Investigators also haven't ruled out contamination from chicken feces that the woman used as garden fertilizer, he said.

WHO prepares defenses against flu pandemic threat

March 6, 2006 - Washington - Reuters - The global spread of bird flu is unprecedented and the threat of a human pandemic will not go away, but the world is not totally defenseless, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. Speaking at the start of a three-day meeting of experts called to sharpen the global response to any human outbreak, the WHO's top influenza official said the first thing would be to try to stamp it out before it really took hold.

If that fails, the next move would be to attempt to curtail its spread and avoid the high death toll and economic devastation that a full-blown pandemic would bring, said Margaret Chan. "When a notoriously unpredictable virus like the influenza virus is given unprecedented opportunities, we must be prepared to see some surprises," she said in opening remarks to the meeting at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. "But we are not without defenses, if we act collectively right now," she added.

Some 30 epidemiologists, virologists, and laboratory experts will take part in the talks, along with health officials from affected countries. The aim is to further hone the WHO's draft "pandemic containment strategy," which calls for using quarantines and Swiss firm Roche's antiviral Tamiflu in the front line against the threat. H5N1 has killed birds in more than 30 countries stretching from South Korea to France and into Nigeria. It has spread to 15 new countries in the past month and infected 174 people since 2003, killing 94 of them.

"Events in recent weeks justify our concern," said Chan. Scientists say the deadly virus is mutating steadily and may eventually acquire the changes it needs to be easily transmitted from human to human. Because people lack any immunity to it, it could sweep the world in a matter of weeks or months, killing millions and bringing economies to their knees. Even if a pandemic cannot be stopped, public health interventions such as quarantines might buy time to allow countries to tighten their control measures, the WHO says.

Bird flu likely in US flocks soon: Health Secretary
 

By Richard Cowan

March 1, 2006 - WASHINGTON - Reuters - The lethal avian flu that is spreading rapidly around the world could soon infect wild birds and domesticated flocks in the United States, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said on Wednesday.  In testimony to a congressional panel on his agency's budget for combating a possible avian flu outbreak among humans, Leavitt told senators that no one knows when or if the virus will pose a threat to people. But, he said, "it's just a matter of time -- it may be very soon" when wild birds and possibly poultry flocks contract the disease.

Leavitt said that infection of birds alone in the United States with the H5N1 virus would not create a public health emergency. Such an emergency would occur if the disease mutated so that it became easily transferred from human to human. The H5N1 disease so far has killed 94 people in seven countries.

Nevertheless, Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee criticized the Bush administration's preparedness, saying not enough federal funds were being allocated for vaccine production, stockpiling other medical supplies, disease detection and community readiness. "It could be the disaster of our time. Two billion dollars is not enough," North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad, the senior Democrat on the committee, told Leavitt. Conrad was referring the $2.3 billion in additional emergency funds the Bush administration has requested from Congress. Late last year, Congress approved a first injection of more than $3 billion in emergency money.

While U.S. poultry flocks have suffered from isolated cases of highly contagious avian flu, they have not yet been hit by the virulent H5N1 strain that has killed or led to the culling of about 200 million birds, mostly in Asia, since late 2003. Recently, the animal disease has been found in western Europe and worries escalated this week when German authorities said avian flu may have jumped species and killed a cat.

CONTACT WITH SICK BIRDS

So far, human fatalities have largely been limited to people who have had close contact with sick birds.  Leavitt told the committee that by the end of this year, the United States will have about 20 million doses of anti-viral drugs, mostly Tamiflu, stockpiled.  But the development of a vaccine is three to five years away, Leavitt said. He downplayed chances that this timetable could be accelerated significantly and added that even with vaccine technology, it would take drug companies six months after the start of a pandemic to produce an effective one.

"In the first six months of a pandemic we are dependent on basic public health, social distancing; every business, every school, every church, every county to have a plan," Leavitt said, adding, "We are overdue (for a pandemic) and under-protected, but we are moving with dispatch."

Leavitt also was skeptical that the federal government could provide all localities with the full arsenal of basic medical equipment, such as ventilators, masks, gauze and gloves, needed during a pandemic. That surprised Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, who said he had thought the billions of dollars being spent would cover such stockpiles. Instead, Leavitt put the responsibility of local preparedness mostly with local officials.

EU Agriculture Ministers Discuss Bird Flu

February 20, 2006 - AP - The European Union's agriculture ministers met Monday to discuss ways to combat bird flu — such as vaccinating poultry — as the lethal H5N1 strain spread to a half-dozen EU nations. France, the EU's largest poultry producer, became the latest EU country to confirm H5N1 in wild fowl. Birds in Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy and Slovenia also have tested positive for the strain. Hungary also has reported five cases of suspected H5N1 and has sent samples to an EU reference laboratory for testing. France has said it will vaccinate some 900,000 birds — but there is no specific vaccine to prevent H5N1, only generic flu drugs. Germany, meanwhile, deployed 250 troops to help clear away dead birds from Ruegen, an island in the Baltic Sea where 81 dead birds, mostly swans, have tested positive for H5N1.

Last week, EU governments imposed an EU-wide order to apply a 6 1/2 mile quarantine and surveillance zone around suspected or confirmed outbreaks of bird flu and a wider buffer zone to keep the virus from spreading. On Monday, agriculture ministers discussed further measures, such as vaccinations. However, EU financial aid is not available for vaccinating poultry as a preventive measure. Countries only qualify for EU aid after bird flu is found in commercial stocks and those stocks are killed, officials said. EU officials also discussed the economic impact of bird flu and debated whether the EU should provide financial or other relief to businesses affected by the falling poultry prices.

Officials have reassured the public that eating cooked poultry remains safe. In France, where a wild duck has tested positive for H5N1, French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand urged consumers to keep eating poultry — and foie gras. "No farms on our territory are affected" by bird flu, he said on LCI television. But farmers said consumption has fallen, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. France's chief farmers' union demanded that the government free up funds to support poultry producers' efforts to prevent and fight the flu.

Elsewhere in Europe, bird flu has been confirmed recently in Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine, with Bulgaria announcing Monday that H5N1 was confirmed in three more swans found dead in Bulgaria. The EU extended restrictions on imports of poultry and bird products from Bulgaria. A regional ban also will apply for imports of poultry meat, eggs and products from wild fowl. Two dead swans found in central Bosnia have tested positive for an H5 strain of bird flu, and samples were sent to the laboratory in Britain to determine the exact strain, the country's Veterinarian Institute said Monday.

The Netherlands, which had a bird flu outbreak in 2003 that sickened dozens of people and killed one person, ordered millions of chickens, ducks and turkeys kept indoors to reduce the risk of being infected by migrating birds. Ninety-one people have died from bird flu, mostly in Asia, since 2003, according to the World Health Organization. Direct contact with infected poultry or surfaces contaminated by their feces is the main way humans are infected by the virus, WHO said.

Avian Flu in People May Be More Common Than Thought

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

January. 9, 2006 - HealthDay News -- Many more people have been infected with bird flu than reported, but they've only shown mild symptoms, a new Swedish study finds. This raises the possibility that the illness may not be as dangerous as thought, some infectious disease experts suggest. According to the report, there's a connection between direct contact with dead or sick poultry and flu infections in humans, and transmission from birds to humans is probably more common than believed. The finding about contact with sick fowl seems to confirm new developments in Turkey, where preliminary tests on Sunday showed that two young brothers and an adult in the capital city of Ankara have the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.

The cases, not yet confirmed by World Health Organization (WHO) officials, would raise to 15 the number of cases detected in Turkey since Wednesday, heightening concerns that the virus is spreading across that country. Two of three teenaged siblings who died of bird flu in the city of Van last week had been playing catch with the heads of dead chickens, according to published reports. Those deaths marked the first time the virus has killed humans outside of East Asia, WHO officials told the Associated Press.

The Swedish study appears in the Jan. 9 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. "Our results are consistent with H5N1 among humans being a lot more common than has previously been recognized," said study author Dr. Anna Thorson, of the Division of International Health at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm. "In addition, they suggest that the symptoms of H5N1 in humans most often are relatively mild, and that close, direct contact with sick or dead poultry is needed for transmission to humans."

In its study, Thorson's team collected data on 45,478 people in the FilaBavi area of Vietnam, which has been hard hit by the H5N1 flu virus, from April 1 to June 30, 2004. The researchers asked people about exposure to poultry and flu-like illness during the preceding months; individuals with a history of disease and/or exposure were interviewed in person. "We found a dose-response relationship between flu-like illness and degree of contact with sick or dead poultry," Thorson said. "In layman's language, this would read as the closer the contact with sick or dead poultry, the higher the risk for flu-like illness."

Thorson's group found that simply having sick or dead poultry in the house did not significantly increase the risk of flu-like illness; those people only showed a 14 percent higher risk of flu-like illness compared to someone without poultry. However, having direct contact with sick or dead poultry raised that increased risk to 73 percent, Thorson said. The researchers found that between 650 and 750 of the human cases with flu-like illness could be attributed to direct contact with sick or dead poultry. "Taking into account the type of symptoms reported from the human cases and the reported ongoing H5N1 epidemic in poultry in the district, transmission of highly pathogenic avian flu to humans is the most likely cause of the 650 to 750 cases," Thorson said.

Without blood tests, it's not possible to know for sure if the flu-like illness reported is actually bird flu, Thorson explained. "However, if transmission from poultry to humans is more common than what has earlier been anticipated, as suggested in our study, it may imply an increased risk of viral re-assortment through infected individuals serving as mixing vessels for highly pathogenic avian influenza and human influenza," Thorson noted.

One expert is not sure what the finding means in terms of evaluating the actual danger of avian flu. "There certainly is considerable concern that relatively asymptomatic infections with H5 or other avian viruses may be occurring in situations where there is a high level of exposure to sick birds," said Dr. John Treanor, a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester. "After all, only a tiny fraction of all of the exposed persons goes on to develop recognized H5 influenza. It would seem like the attack rates should be much higher."

"One possibility might be that the virus is actually very poorly infectious, and it is only the unfortunate few who are exposed to extremely high levels that become infected," Treanor said. "The other possibility is that for each recognized case there are many others that are not recognized." Another expert sees the finding as proof that the fear of an avian flu outbreak among people has been exaggerated. "It's exactly what I suspected all along," said Dr. Len Horovitz, a pulmonary specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. "Basically this illness exists as a very mild cold or flu in thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people in China, and it's never reported because they're not sick enough to go to the doctor." Horovitz thinks that since this flu has been around since 1997, if it were going to become a deadly pandemic it would have done so already. "It's just like any other flu," he said. "It kills some vulnerable people, and gives other people a mild illness that goes unreported." According to the WHO and local governments, six countries have had 146 confirmed cases of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, with 76 fatalities.

Turkish deaths put Europe on bird flu alert          The Sunday Times        Jonathan Leake and Gareth Jenkins

January 8, 2006 - The Sunday Times - The number of Turkish people thought to be infected with avian flu rose to more than 50 this weekend, prompting concern that the disease may be about to spread into Europe. Yesterday a British laboratory confirmed that a Turkish brother and sister who died last week had the feared H5N1 strain of avian flu. A third child from the same family in Dogubayazit, in eastern Turkey, has now died of avian flu and dozens more suspected cases have emerged. “The laboratory in the UK said that they have detected H5N1 in samples of the two fatal cases,” said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization. They are the first fatalities outside East Asia. The disease is most likely to have been carried to Turkey by migratory birds, which have already spread it across Asia and parts of Russia. Last year a number of birds with the illness were found in Europe. The fear is that these will cross-infect domestic poultry, which will pass the disease on to humans. Yesterday six more children who have tested positive for avian flu remained in a critical condition in the Turkish city of Van, near Dogubayazit. Another 24 suspected cases are being treated in a special ward in the university hospital. A further 18 patients with symptoms of the disease, most of them children, are being treated in hospitals in the eastern cities of Yozgat, Erzurum and Diyarbakir. Other cases are being investigated. The more the virus comes into contact with humans, the more likely it is to mutate into a form that can be transmitted between people. This has not yet happened; if it does it could start a global pandemic. The H5N1 strain has killed half of all the people who have contracted it. The Spanish flu of 1918, which killed 40m people, was fatal in fewer than one in 10 cases. Professor John Oxford, an expert on flu at Queen Mary’s medical school, London, said the most worrying aspect of the deaths in Turkey was the large number of human cases resulting from exposure to a small number of birds. He urged British authorities to follow the Dutch in ordering farmers to separate poultry from wild birds by keeping them indoors. Yesterday Mehdi Eker, the Turkish agriculture minister, confirmed that bird flu had also been identified in two dead ducks found by a reservoir near Ankara, the capital, about 750 miles west of Dogubayazit. And Necdet Unuvar, of the Turkish health ministry, said: “There has also been a large number of suspicious deaths amongst birds in three other counties in Ankara.” The finds suggest that the disease is moving rapidly westwards and that its arrival in western Europe is only a matter of time. Officials around Dogubayazit warned the government on December 16 of a surge in bird deaths but it took another 12 days for an investigation to begin. When Muhammet Ali Kocyigit, 14, became Turkey’s first avian flu victim last week, a government spokesman criticised doctors for mentioning the disease because they were “damaging Turkey’s reputation”. In southeast Asia, more than 70 people have died from H5N1 since 2003 but none has involved human-to-human transmission. A European commission spokesman said last night: “The latest deaths are a tragedy but, for the moment, we believe we are doing all we can and that we have in place the measures we need to guard against the spread of bird flu.” This weekend Zeki Kocyigit, the father of the three dead children, said they contracted the disease after the family slaughtered and ate a sickly chicken. At his two-room house in the poor Kockiran neighbourhood of Dogubayazit, he said: “When Muhammet Ali was getting worse, everybody in the hospital was too busy celebrating the new year to pay any attention. On the evening of January 1, when he began to deteriorate, I was alone by his bedside. His last words were, ‘Cuddle me, Daddy.’ I did and I felt him kiss me on my cheek. Then he died.”

Ted Koppel on Meet The Press
December 25, 2005 (Meet the Press TV Show) - "You have to alarm people because until people are sufficiently alarmed or they're not going to listen to what has to happen. What you don't hear in that sound bite, and what is rarely spoken of, especially among politicians, is that the kind of vaccine that would be necessary to treat the avian flu does not exist. It cannot exist until the strain of avian flu is developed and can be sampled and can be tested and then and only then can you begin to develop the vaccine.

In order to develop sufficient quantities of that vaccine to vaccinate people twice you're going to need so many hundreds of millions of doses that it will take a minimum of two to three years to get them. In other words, by the time you get them, it'll be too late to treat the people who get the flu. Obviously, that raises questions as what needs to be done, what can be done. I tried just before I left Nightline to do a broadcast in which we brought some of the best experts on and said "Tell us what we need to know, tell us what we need to do." Among the things we need to do, and it sounds horrific to say it, is to put in a decent supply of food and water and whatever medicine is needed by a family, in each American home, now, before it's too late."  

UN health chief warns over flu                                           

November 7, 2005 - Daily Mail - A deadly new global pandemic of human influenza is inevitable and suffering will be "incalculable" unless the world is ready, the chief of the UN health agency has said. "We have been experiencing a relentless spread of avian flu" among migratory birds and domestic poultry, Lee Jong-wook, director-general of the World Health Organization, told a meeting of 600 health experts and planners. Lee stressed that a human flu pandemic has yet to begin anywhere in the world. "However, the signs are clear that is coming," he said, noting that a changed avian flu virus caused the deadly "Spanish" flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people in 1918-1919.

Already the virulent H5N1 strain of avian flu, which appeared in Hong Kong in 1997, is killing birds in 15 countries of Europe and Asia, he said. "It is only a matter of time before an avian flu virus - most likely H5N1 - acquires the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza," Lee said. "This is the time for every country to prepare their national action plan - and act on it," Lee said.

"If we are unprepared, the next pandemic will cause incalculable human misery - both directly from the loss of human life, and indirectly through its widespread impact on security. No society will be exempt. No economy would be left unscathed." Estimates of the number of people who would die in a new pandemic have varied widely between 2 million and 360 million, but WHO says a reasonable maximum would be 7.4 million. The World Bank put the possible economic cost at a minimum of £450billion.

Asian Report Warns of Bird-Flu Catastrophe                                                                        

November 3, 2005 - AP - A flu pandemic could kill 3 million people in Asia, trigger economic carnage in the region worth almost US$300 billion (euro248 billion) and push the world into a recession, the Asian Development Bank warned Thursday.

The warning was among several dire scenarios pictured by the bank in a report that examined the likely effects on the region if bird flu produces a human pandemic that slashes consumer demand and sickens millions of workers.

In its grimmest scenario, in which the psychological impact of a pandemic lasts one year, the bank said Asia could loss almost US$282.7 billion (euro235.6 billion) — or 6.5 percent of gross domestic product — in consumption, trade and investment and another US$14.2 billion (euro11.8 billion) due to workers' incapacity and death.

"... Growth in Asia would virtually stop," the report said. The economic impact would likely force the world into a recession, it said. The scenario assumes about 20 percent of Asia's population would fall ill, and 0.5 percent of them would die. ...The reports came as governments stepped up cooperation to prepare a global response to the risk that the bird flu virus that has swept through Asia and entered Europe could mutate into a form transmissible between people and produce a pandemic that could kill millions.

U. S. Could Restrict Travel to Prevent Flu                                                                    

November 2, 2005 - AP - Sustained person-to-person spread of the bird flu or any other super-influenza strain anywhere in the world could prompt the United States to implement travel restrictions or other steps to block a brewing pandemic, say federal plans released Wednesday. If a super-flu begins spreading here, states and cities will have to ration scarce medications and triage panicked patients to prevent them from overwhelming hospitals and spreading infection inside emergency rooms, the plan says.

It provides long-awaited guidance to the front-line local officials urging them to figure out now how they would take steps to prevent such a crisis scenario and exhorts officials to practice their own plans to make sure they'll work. Pandemics, or worldwide outbreaks, strike when the easy-to-mutate influenza virus shifts to a strain that people have never experienced before, something that happened three times in the last century. ...but a bad one could infect up to a third of the population and, depending on its virulence, kill anywhere from 209,000 to 1.9 million Americans, the Bush administration's new Pandemic Influenza Plan says. The illness would spread fastest among school-aged children, infecting about 40 percent of them, and decline with age, the plan estimates. It puts the health costs alone, not counting disruption to the economy, at $181 billion for even a moderately bad pandemic.

It's also impossible to predict when the next pandemic will strike. But concern is rising that the Asian bird flu, called the H5N1 strain, might trigger the next one if it eventually becomes easily spread from person-to-person. ...President Bush on Tuesday outlined a $7.1 billion strategy to get ready for the next pandemic. Topping his list is improving systems to detect and contain the next super-flu before it reaches the United States and overhauling the vaccine industry so that eventually, scientists could quickly make enough for everyone within months of a pandemic's appearance. That vaccine improvement will take years to implement and the details released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services stress that early on, the public will be depending on scarce supplies of anti-flu drugs and stockpiled vaccines.

Bird flu is a global threat requiring international cooperation, European Union declares          HEALTH NEWS

18 Oct 2005 - Health News - As the more virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu enters Europe via Romania and possibly Greece as well, the European Union is now talking about a global threat.  Markos Kyprianou, EU Health Commissioner, reminded Europeans that the arrival of bird flu in Europe does not mean the flu pandemic is here. The risk of a human catching bird flu is still very small, he said. He said the European Union will prepare properly for a possible flu pandemic.  Many European countries do not have the required stocks of antiviral drugs to cover 25% of their population. Some have, the United Kingdom has enough to cover over 30% of its population. The European Union is working with pharmaceutical companies to find a way of significantly increasing the number of people who will be vaccinated against normal flu this autumn (fall). Both are finding ways of building up manufacturing capacity, said EU Kyprianou. He admitted that the level of vaccination preparedness was lower than they had wished.

If as many people as possible are vaccinated against normal flu, the chances of the bird flu virus mutating are lessened. The most likely way the bird flu virus may mutate is by infecting a person who has the flu - the two types of viruses (normal flu and bird flu) would then have the chance to exchange genes and create a new strain. This new strain could be a mutation of the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus which could then spread from human-to-human, this would be the birth a new flu pandemic - a very dangerous one for all of us on this planet.

The present bird flu virus strains can only be passed easily from bird to human - a mutated strain would easily pass from human to human. It is true that humans can catch bird flu from another human, but not easily, a lot of contact is needed - as with the case of some health professionals in South East Asia who were caring for a patient infected with bird flu. However, they did not then go on to infect other humans.         Written by: Christian Nordqvist;  Editor: Medical News Today

Bird flu vaccine could take months: UN                             

October 11, 2005 - "We do not know what the genetic makeup of the eventual mutant virus will be, therefore we cannot be sure that existing vaccines that have been stored up will be effective," he [David Nabarro, U.N. coordinator for global readiness] said.

Drug firms could take six months to manufacture adequate stocks of bird flu vaccine, far too long to stem damaging fallout if the virus triggers a human pandemic, a top United Nations official said on Tuesday. David Nabarro, U.N. coordinator for global readiness against an outbreak, said current stockpiling by governments around the world may prove useless since they are preparing for an unknown mutation of the virus. He said "very high priority" efforts were underway to raise manufacturing capacity so that a vaccine could be produced more quickly once a virus with pandemic potential manifested itself.

"The general view in a pandemic situation is that we need to have vaccines much more quickly than six months because of the speed at which the pandemic can take hold and start to affect the functioning of society and cause suffering." The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed at least 65 people in four Asian nations since late 2003, and has killed or forced the destruction of tens of millions of poultry. Experts say it is mutating steadily and fear it will eventually acquire the changes it needs to spread easily from person to person. If it did, it could sweep around the world in months or even weeks and could kill millions of people.

Asked by reporters if vaccine stockpiling was futile, Nabarro said: "I would not identify any preparatory activity being taken by governments at the moment as wasteful. "What we're talking about here is very difficult choices being made by governments in a situation of uncertainty." The U.N. expert said that although an eventual flu pandemic seemed inevitable, strong, coordinated and well-funded prevention efforts could stop the H5N1 virus from creating a widespread human outbreak.

He pointed to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization's call for funds for a $175 million prevention effort. Only around $30 million had been pledged, an FAO official said. "There will one day be a human influenza pandemic. It will not necessarily result from this current strain of avian influenza H5N1," said Nabarro. "If we act to control H5N1 well, then we can have a very good chance of preventing a pandemic resulting from H5N1. It is in our hands to make this happen."

U.S. Health Secretary Warns of Flu Epidemic             

October 10, 2005 - The likelihood of a human flu pandemic is very high, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt warned Monday [October 10, 2005] as he sought Southeast Asian cooperation to combat the spread of bird flu. Leavitt and the director of the World Health Organization are touring Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to seek their collaboration in preparing for the anticipated public health emergency linked to the H5N1 strain of the disease.

That strain [H5N1] has swept through poultry populations in many parts of Asia since 2003 and jumped to humans, killing 65 people, mostly through direct contact with sick fowl. While there have been no known cases of person-to-person transmission, World Health Organization officials and other experts have been warning that the virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily among people. In a worst-case scenario, millions could die.

Three influenza pandemics have occurred over the last century and "the likelihood of another is very high, some say even certain," Leavitt said after meeting with Thai health officials to review the their preparations. "Whether or not H5N1 is the virus that will ultimately trigger such a pandemic is unknown to us," he said at a news conference. "The probability is uncertain. But the warning signs are troubling. Hence we are responding in a robust way."

Leavitt's tour comes after President Bush last month established the "International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza" to coordinate a global strategy against bird flu and other types of influenza. Leavitt said "containment" was the first line of defense against the illness, encouraging countries to step up development and production of vaccines and strengthen efforts to detect any cases of human transmission early. World Heath Organization Director General Dr. Lee Jong-wook said preparation was the key to preventing a flu epidemic such as the one that struck in 1918, killing an estimated 40 million to 50 million people. "Now we know in advance what is happening and we have to prepare ourselves. That is our duty," he said.

Drugs no answer to bird flu: experts                     

October 10, 2005 - Many governments around the world are stockpiling antiviral drugs and some companies are trying to speed up vaccine production but these measure give a false sense of security and will do little to counter a flu pandemic, an expert cautioned on Monday. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert who has been studying the risk of pandemic flu for decades and is a U.S. government adviser, said governments should be preparing to cope with the pandemic instead of relying entirely on the hope of using vaccines and drugs to control it.

If the H5N1 avian flu begins to easily infect humans, it will move too quickly for drugs and vaccines to be of much use, Osterholm said. "It doesn't matter if we have a vaccine now or not. We can't make it," Osterholm said in a telephone interview. The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed at least 65 people in four Asian nations since late 2003, and has killed or forced the destruction of tens of millions of poultry. Experts say it is mutating steadily and fear it will eventually acquire the changes it needs to spread easily from person to person.

If it does, it will sweep around the world in months or even weeks and could kill millions of people -- as many as 150 million, according to the most dire forecast by the World Health Organization. When avian flu infects people it looks like any other flu with respiratory symptoms, fever and other common effects but it will kill many more than the 500,000 people who die of ordinary flu each year around the world. People have known about the risk of an influenza pandemic for a very long time, said Osterholm, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota who advises the federal government on such issues.

"We have had a pandemic flu plan as a planning process since 1976," said Osterholm. "Nobody has completed it. It been one of the most long-standing incompleted processes in Washington. Nobody wants to believe that modern medical science can't handle something." But it cannot, said Osterholm, who has seen the current U.S. flu plan. The plan has not been published yet but leaked versions suggest the country has done little to prepare for an H5N1 pandemic. Osterholm and other experts have long been complaining that there are not sufficient hospital beds, equipment or trained workers to cope with a major epidemic. "The one thing I worry desperately about it is the impact of over-reliance on neuraminidase inhibitors," he said.

There are two drugs in the class -- Roche and Gilead's Tamiflu, known generically as oseltamivir, and GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza. They work to reduce the severity of annual influenza and may prevent infection if used at the right time. Tests suggest they also work against H5N1, but no one knows how well. "I think that potentially neuraminidase inhibitors may work if you are already on them as prophylaxis (prevention)," Osterholm said. That would mean taking them daily for days or weeks. " That means that very, very limited supply is going to become a lot more limited."

FIGHTING OVER SCARCE SUPPLIES

The United States has enough courses of Tamiflu to treat about 2.3 million people. The Health and Human Services Department says another 2 million treatment courses are on order and will arrive by the end of the year. But some 90 million people would need the drug in the event of a flu pandemic, University of Virginia flu expert Dr. Frederick Hayden told a meeting on Saturday. At current capacity, it would take about 10 years to produce enough oseltamivir to treat 20 percent of the world's population, Hayden said. "Now people are saying whoever has the most Tamiflu wins," Osterholm said. "I worry so much that Tamiflu is a surrogate for protection."

And vaccines are not an answer yet and will not be for years. There is an experimental vaccine against H5N1 but there are only a few thousand doses of it. It takes months to make influenza vaccine and H5N1 kills chickens -- the source of the eggs that are needed under current old-fashioned production methods to make flu vaccines. Companies are trying to develop more modern methods but are years away from doing so. And work cannot begin on a true vaccine against H5N1 until it actually starts infecting many people, because the vaccine must match the virus precisely and no one can predict just how H5N1 will mutate.

And it is mutating.

A study published last week showed that the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed at least 40 million people globally and may have killed more, depending on estimates, was a purely avian virus that acquired a few mutations that gave it the ability to infect people easily, spread among them and cause highly fatal disease. H5N1 is mutating in a similar way and experts believe it is only a matter of time before it, too, infects people easily.

Health Experts Say Strengthening Your Immune System is Your Primary Protection Against Influenza Viruses

• Dr. James F. Balch, M.D. and Phyllis A. Balch, C.N.C. in their best seller, “Prescription for Nutritional Healing” state, “If an adult gets colds often, it may be a sign that his or her immune system is not working properly. …Antibiotics are useless against viral illnesses like influenza. The best way to get rid of the flu or any other infectious illness is to attack it head-on by strengthening the immune system.”

• Michael Murray, N.D. in his “Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine” tells his readers,  “Maintaining a healthy immune system is the primary way to protect yourself against getting an excessive number of colds.”

• Gary Null, Ph.D. in “The Complete Encyclopedia of Natural Healing” sums it up by saying, “Individuals with weak immune systems seem to catch every new bug around and to stay ill longer, while those with strong defenses remain healthy.”

• Bill Gottlieb in "Alternative Cures" quotes Dr. Peter Holyk, M.D., Director of the Contemporary Health Clinic in Sebastian, Florida, " 'With alternative home remedies, I believe that you can knock out the flu in less than 24 hours."' says Dr. Holyk...The reason you can beat the flu with natural medicine is that these remedies help boost the power of your immune system, allowing it to quickly ...beat the infection that's beating on you."

• William Kellas, Ph.D. in "Surviving the Toxic Crisis" in the section on "Treatments" for viruses states, "The most effective measures for both prevention and cure are any ways in which immune system function is enhanced.  Stronger and more numerous antibodies will then mount an attack on the viruses."

• Kenneth Bock, M.D. in "The Road to Immunity" tells us, "The virulence of a virus depends not only on the organism but also on the state of your immune system."

• Lorna R. Vanderhaeghe and Patrick J.D. Bouic, Ph.D. in "The Immune System Cure" explain about viruses, including influenza, "Viruses live in the fluid-filled interior of cells and interact with and use many components of the cell. ...Although it makes it more difficult to seek and destroy viruses because of this adaptation, fortunately the immune system has circumvented these problems. ...Cytoxic T-cells are enlisted to respond to virus-infected cells in order to kill the infected cell. ...Potent cytokines, gamma-interferon and tumor necrosis [killing] factor are also released to inhibit viral replication and bring other immune warriors such as macrophages to destroy the cell."

Viral Infection Research

• Viral Diseases: Browder IW., Williams D., Pretus H., et al; “Beneficial Effect of Enhanced Macrophage Function in the Trauma Patients.” Ann. Surg.;  Vol 211: 605-613. Dept of Surg and Physiol, Tulane U Sch of Med, LA and Istituto Di Chirurgia D’Urgenza, U of Torino, Torino, Italy.* 1990. Quote: “Previous studies have demonstrated that glucan, a beta-1,3-linked glucopyranose polymer, isolated from the inner cell wall of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is a potent  macrophage stimulant and is beneficial in the therapy of experimental bacterial, viral, and fungal diseases.“

• Viral Infections: Jamas S, Easson D, Ostroff G: "Underivatilized aqueous soluble beta (1,3) glucan, composition and method of making same." U.S. Patent Application 20020032170, March 14, 2002. Quote: "The use of soluble and insoluble beta glucans alone or as vaccine adjuvants for viral and bacterial antigens has been shown in animal models to markedly increase resistance to a variety of bacterial, fungal, protozoan and viral infections."

• Viral Infections: Czop, Joyce K., “The Role of Beta.-Glucan Receptors on Blood and Tissue Leukocytes in Phagocytosis and Metabolic Activation”.  Pathology and Immunopathology Research; 5:286-296. Harvard Medical School. 1986. Quote: “…the presence of a particulate activator can rapidly initiate assembly and amplification of a host defense system involving humoral and cellular interactions with B-glucans. …Animals pretreated with purified glucan particles are subsequently more resistant to bacterial, viral, fungal, and protozoan challenge, reject antigenically incompatible grafts more rapidly and produce higher titers of serum antibodies to specific antigens.”

• Viral Infection: DiLuzio N.R.,”Immunopharmacology of glucan: a broad spectrum enhancer of host defense mechanisms,” Trends in Pharmacol. SCI., 4:344-347. Dept of Physiology, Tulane U, New Orleans, LA.* 1983. Quote: “The broad spectrum of immunopharmacological activities of glucan includes not only the modification of certain bacterial, fungal, viral and parasitic infections, but also inhibition of tumor growth.”

• Viral Pathogens: Hunter K, Gault R, Jordan F; “Mode of Action of B-Glucan Immunopotentiators-Research Summary Release,” Department of Microbiology, University of Nevada School of Medicine, Jan 2001. Quote: “MG Glucan [micronized glucan insoluble particulate] has been shown to enhance the envelopment and digestion (phagocytosis) of pathogenic microorganisms [viral, bacterial, fungal, etc.] that cause infectious disease…Laboratory studies have revealed the new MG Glucan is significantly effective at activating Macrophages, and via the Macrophages, the entire immune cascade including T-Cells and B-Cells.”

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