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Officials are trying to get to the bottom of how vaccine manufacturer Baxter International Inc. made “experimental virus material” based on a human flu strain but contaminated with the H5N1 avian flu virus and then distributed it to an Austrian company.
That company, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then disseminated the supposed H3N2 virus product to subcontractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany. Authorities in the four European countries are looking into the incident, and their efforts are being closely watched by the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Control.
Though it appears none of the 36 or 37 people who were exposed to the contaminated product became infected, the incident is being described as “a serious error” on the part of Baxter, which is on the brink of securing a European licence for an H5N1 vaccine. That vaccine is made at a different facility, in the Czech Republic.
Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries. The “mistake” (if you can call it that, see below…) was discovered by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The World Health Organization was alerted and panic spread throughout the vaccine community as health experts asked the obvious question: How could this have happened?
(2009-01-20) Influenza: Barack Obama’s Presidency under viral pandemic flu threat
thanks for posting this, Oui.
once again, nobody is minding the store, nobody is paying attention to what the corporations are doing.
makes one wonder just how valuable human life is in the U.S.
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CNN does not provide accurate information on timeline of H1N1 developments in La Gloria, Mexico.
(JohnBatchelor) – Days after the European media identified the the mega pig farm “manure lagoon” of La Gloria in Veracruz State as the most likely source of the A/H1Ni outbreak, the chief epidemiologist of Mexico M.A. Lezana has directly challenged the solution “Highly improbable,” asserts Dr. Lezana. Smithfield Foods of Virginia asserts that it’s one million pigs in the CAFO at La Gloria are virus free and that it is a Mexican company to blame. Lezana’s office says that the pigs at La Gloria are from North America and the genetic material in the virus are from North America and Europe.
“The company also noted that its joint ventures in Mexico routinely administer influenza virus vaccination to their swine herds and conduct monthly tests for the presence of swine influenza.”
Earlier reports, also in the Guardian.
(HuffingtonPost/AP) – Until now, the first flu death confirmed by Mexican authorities had been a woman in the southern state of Oaxaca, who died on April 13. But Health Secretary Cordova “suggested an earlier timeline for documented swine flu cases.” Cordova said “tests now show that a 4-year-old boy contracted the disease at least two weeks earlier in neighboring Veracruz state, where a community has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm,” the AP says. “The farm is run by Granjas Carroll de Mexico, a joint venture 50 percent owned by Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, Inc.”
Company officials said there were no “clinical signs or symptoms” of swine influenza in their vast herds anywhere in Mexico, “But local residents are convinced they were sickened by air and water contamination from pig waste,” according to AP. “There was a widespread outbreak of a particularly powerful respiratory disease in the area early April, and some people reported being sick as early as February. Local health workers intervened in early April, sealing off the town of La Gloria and spraying to kill off flies they said were swarming through their homes.”
Cordova said people in the town had normal flu, and only one sample was preserved — that belonging to the four-year-old boy. It was only after U.S. and Canadian epidemiologists discovered the true nature of the virus that Mexico submitted the sample for international testing, and discovered what he suffered from. Epidemiologists want to take a closer look at pigs in Mexico as a potential source of the outbreak.
In the town of Xonacatlan, just west of Mexico City, Antonia Cortes Borbolla told The Associated Press that nobody has given her medicine in the week since her husband succumbed to raging fever and weakened lungs that a lab has confirmed as swine flu.
No health workers have inspected her home, asked how her husband might have contracted the illness or tested the neighbors’ pigs, she said.
Cordova acknowledged that her case isn’t unique. “We haven’t given medicine to all of them because we still don’t have enough personnel,” he said.
≈ Crossposted from a diary@ET ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Traveler returning from Mexico a few days earlier, infects a herd of pigs on a farm in Canada.
(TimesOnline) – A farm worker in Canada has infected a herd of pigs with swine flu, the first documented case of the virus being passed from humans to animals.
The herd of pigs tested positive for the H1N1 virus after the worker returned from Mexico with the disease. The herd has been quarantined.
Brian Evans, a senior official from Canada’s food safety agency, said that up to 200 pigs had been infected at the Alberta Farm, and that both the man and pigs are recovering, adding that the virus did not seem to have spread.
He emphasised that there was no food safety concern related to this finding. “The chance that these pigs could transfer virus to a person is remote,” he said.
The case adds to growing international concern about the safety of eating pork products, with Russia, China, Indonesia, Ukraine, Philippines and Serbia introducting partial or total import bans of pork from the US.
Transmission takes place through direct contact between animals (secretions, excretions, semen, blood) or indirect contact through vehicles, clothes, instruments, needles, insufficiently cooked waste food fed to pigs; it can also be spread by pig traders and farm visitors. Transplacental infection leading to persistently infected offspring can also take place.
Sources for the virus are blood and all tissues, secretions and excretions of sick and dead animals. Congenitally infected piglets may be persistently viraemic and may shed the virus for months. Spread from infected wild boar to domestic pigs and vice versa has taken place on several occasions in the past in some areas of Europe.
Prevention can be achieved through effective communication between veterinary authorities, veterinary practitioners and pig farmers, effective disease reporting and animal identification system, a strict import control of live pigs, fresh and cured meat, prohibition of feeding pigs with waste food and virological and serological surveillance.
In case of outbreaks in the EU, one needs to resort to the slaughtering of all pigs in the infected farms and the destruction of cadavers. A protection zone (3 km radius) and surveillance zone (10 km radius) are established around each outbreak, with restrictions on pig movements. An epidemiological investigation with the tracing of the source of infection and the possible spread is carried out. If appropriate, emergency vaccination can also be used. Additional ad hoc protection measures may be adopted by the Commission.
Risk Analysis of Classical Swine Fever Introduction (pdf)
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
It was reported that Smitfield’s subsidiary Granjas-Carroll in Perote, Mexico uses a vaccination program for their pigs …
The European Commission adopted a decision approving a new test to be used after vaccination against classical swine fever (CSF). This test will in the future make it possible, in case of emergency vaccination with a marker vaccine, to distinguish vaccinated pigs from pigs naturally infected with CSF. This distinction is not possible when using conventional vaccination.
European Union (EU) measures for the control of classical swine fever (CSF), laid down in a Council Directive of 2001, include the possibility to make use of vaccines in case of an emergency. However, their use is seriously hampered by the possibility that, in case of CSF infection, vaccinated pigs may then further spread the disease, but cannot be distinguished from those that are vaccinated but not infected .
Therefore, certain prevention measures are necessary to avoid the further spread of disease from the areas where vaccine is used. These measures include restrictions on the trade in vaccinated pigs and their products which reduces the viability of vaccination for disease control.
In recent times two new vaccines have been developed and authorized by the Commission which could be potentially used as “marker vaccines” thanks to some specific features. As they only induce antibodies against one of the virus proteins, the vaccinated but CSF infected animals could then be detected by means of an appropriate blood “discriminatory” test. However, tests with these properties have not been available until now.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
(New York Times) Feb. 7, 2007 – Indonesia, which has had more human cases of avian flu than any other country, has stopped sending samples of the virus to the World Health Organization, apparently because it is negotiating a contract to sell the samples to an American vaccine company, a W.H.O. official said.
The strains of the H5N1 virus circulating in Indonesia are considered crucial to developing up-to-date vaccines and following mutations in the virus. The official, Dr. David L. Heymann, said the agency was “clearly concerned” about the development and was in talks with Indonesia.
Dr. Heymann, the agency’s chief of communicable diseases, said he was not blaming the company involved, Baxter Healthcare of Deerfield, Ill. “But now that this has happened,” he said, “we have to sit down and figure out how to rectify it.”
Indonesia signed a memorandum of agreement with Baxter
A Baxter spokeswoman said the company had not asked Indonesia to stop cooperating with the W.H.O. She added that the agreement under negotiation would not give it exclusive access to Indonesian strains.
The virus has not yet mutated into a strain easily transmitted among humans. But it has infected 81 people in Indonesia, 63 of them fatally. It killed more people in 2006 than in any previous year and is out of control in poultry in Indonesia, Egypt and West Africa, so experts fear it as much as ever.
…
The Financial Times reported the move by Indonesia, the country has not released a flu sample since late last year.
Getting affordable flu vaccines has not been a high priority for poor countries, because they are worried about greater threats that can be prevented by vaccines — including measles, polio, rotavirus and other killers of children — and about medicine for AIDS.
Some leading flu experts said they believed that Indonesia was acting on its own, not understanding the ramifications.
“This is counterproductive — it will hurt Indonesia more than it hurts other countries,” said Dr. Arnold S. Monto, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “The W.H.O. should be their biggest friend. Indonesia has a virus with a 70 percent case fatality, and we don’t know why. If they want to work with the best laboratories in the world, they should make sure that virus samples can get out.”
With human cases breaking out in Egypt, Nigeria and elsewhere, new pandemic flu vaccines could be produced from other strains, Dr. Monto added. Indonesia’s Asian neighbors are the most threatened by its outbreak and may press it to back down.
In the United States, Thomas W. Skinner, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, declined to comment specifically on Indonesia or Baxter, but said his agency “takes this very seriously and supports the notion of the W.H.O. that this type of information should be shared in a timely manner.”
SEASONAL INFLUENZA VACCINATIONS
Because flu mutates so rapidly, samples are normally gathered from all over the world. For seasonal flus, an expert committee meets each February to try to predict which three are the most likely to be a problem by October, when the Northern Hemisphere’s flu season begins.
The strains are usually rendered harmless by laboratories that consult with the W.H.O., and the genes responsible for the ability of the virus’s outer coat to invade cells are spliced to older, well-known strains. Then this “seed virus” is given free to private companies that produce millions of doses.
The arrangement was informal until the W.H.O. started writing rules for it last fall. To assure countries like Indonesia a supply of vaccine, Dr. Heymann favors helping them get plants where they can produce it themselves at low cost.
Until recently, Indonesia had been very cooperative about releasing genetic information about H5N1 flu found in animals and humans there, said Henry L. Niman, a Pittsburgh biochemist who runs a Web site tracking the genetics of flu cases, recombinomics.com.
The release of sequences — not the virus itself, but the pattern of nucleotides in its genes, which shows what mutations it has made — is a touchy subject because some scientists try to keep the data secret until they can publish scientific papers.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."it take a seriously twisted kind of logic…or greed…to drive a government, or a corporation to stoop this low.
and père bush, rumsfeld, etal, stand to profit handsomely l suspect.
you just knew there had to be a connection. it’s astounding how all these interconnections just keep reappearing.
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For the elderly or chronically ill … Get a shot for protection: the swine flu shot.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Now everyone can see the face of pharma….all about money.