Scientists at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and colleagues at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have succeeded in imaging, in unprecedented detail, the virus that causes influenza.
A 26-year-old Egyptian man died of bird flu on Wednesday, the third member of his extended family to die of the virus, a World Health Organisation (WHO) report highlighted.
A 15-year-old girl became the ninth fatal victim of the avian influenza virus and the first minor to lose her life to the disease in Egypt, said health ministry media official Sayyid Al-Abbasi.
Egyptian health ministry reported that a 15-year-old Egyptian girl has died of bird flu. Nine people in Egypt have died from the H5N1 strain of avian flu since the virus first appeared in the country’s poultry in February.
Much like flipping a light switch, the hepatitis C virus turns on human immune defenses upon entering the body but also turns off those defenses by manipulating interaction of key cellular proteins, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found.
Bird flu has popped up again in chickens and ducks in Vietnam and Asian countries are scrambling to limit its spread. Vietnam has ordered a mass slaughter of chickens and ducks in two Mekong Delta provinces where bird flu outbreaks were confirmed this week.
South Korea’s quarantine officials have completed slaughtering tens of thousands of poultry after a fresh outbreak of bird flu. A total of 23,000 chickens and ducks have been killed in Asan, about 90 kilometers south of Seoul.
Lancet study forcasts if a worldwide flu pandemic like the one in 1918-20 were to strike today it would kill between 51 and 81 million people, with 96 per cent of deaths being in poorer countries. The US study was led by Professor Chris Murray of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health.
Influenza experts have borrowed a page from economists, creating a futures market for influenza activity that predicted outbreaks two to four weeks in advance. The influenza prediction market is presented in the January issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Vietnam has confirmed a lethal H5N1 bird flu outbreak among its domestic poultry in the south of the country.