If you abuse nature by mass producing meat in appalling conditions, you pay the price by incubating diseases such as swine flu, writes Ben Macintyre of The Times.

1 MAY 2009 | I once worked on a chicken farm. Actually "farm" is far too gentle a word for the way these chickens were raised. This was the seventh circle of chicken hell - a clucking, stinking, filthy production line with just one aim: to produce the maximum quantity of edible meat, as quickly and as cheaply as possible, regardless of quality, cruelty or hygiene. The creatures were raised in vast hangars, living on a diet of hormones, antibiotics and cheap grain, thousands crushed together in their own dirt under artificial light, growing from chick to slaughter size in a few grim weeks.

28 AUGUST 2009 | Swine Flu update from the World Health Organisation Webpage

 GENEVA -- Monitoring of outbreaks from different parts of the world provides sufficient information to make some tentative conclusions about how the influenza pandemic might evolve in the coming months.

WHO is advising countries in the northern hemisphere to prepare for a second wave of pandemic spread. Countries with tropical climates, where the pandemic virus arrived later than elsewhere, also need to prepare for an increasing number of cases.

Countries in temperate parts of the southern hemisphere should remain vigilant. As experience has shown, localized “hot spots” of increasing transmission can continue to occur even when the pandemic has peaked at the national level.

With the increase in dispensation of Tamiflu in response to the swine flu outbreak, it is becoming apparent through medical studies that the drug has limited effectiveness and negative side effects when prescribed to children under the age of twelve.

10 AUGUST 2009 | Chidren under the age of 12 should not be given Tamiflu or Relenza, the two antiviral drugs that form the cornerstone of the government's fight against swine flu, because their side-effects outweigh any benefits, Oxford University researchers said yesterday.

A study by Dr Matthew Thompson, a clinical scientist, and Dr Carl Heneghan, a clinical lecturer, found that antivirals were no "magic bullet" and only led to a minor reduction in the length of time that a child with mild sickness was ill or the chance of their spreading the disease.

29 JULY 2009 | ATLANTA - About half the U.S. population should get vaccinated against H1N1 influenza and pregnant women and healthcare workers should be at the front of the line, U.S. health advisers agreed on Wednesday.

Up to 160 million doses of flu vaccine will be available for the start of a vaccination campaign planned for mid-October. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that state and local health officials prepare to vaccinate as many as 160 million people.

'Worst case scenario' projected by Chief Medical Officer 255,000 new cases as pandemic claims 29 lives

17 JULY 2009 | The NHS is planning for up to 65,000 deaths from swine flu, between three and 10 times the normal winter flu death rate, the Chief Medical Officer says.

The figure was a "reasonable worst case scenario", to allow the health service to put in place "robust" plans to deal with the pandemic's first wave, the full scale of which will not be known for months. It was not a prediction of what was expected to happen, Sir Liam Donaldson said yesterday.

"We cannot give an estimate of the likely deaths. It is far too early, and there are not enough cases on which to give even ballpark figures," he said.

12 JULY 2009 | People who are obese but otherwise healthy might be at a special risk of severe complications and death from the new H1N1 swine flu virus, US researchers report. They described the cases of 10 patients at a Michigan hospital who had to be put on ventilators. Three died, nine of the ten were obese, seven of which were severely obese, including two who died.

The study was published in advance in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's weekly report on death and disease "and five of these patients had... evidence of blood clots in the lungs". This has not been previously known to occur in patients with severe influenza virus infections said CDC virus expert Dr Tim Uyeki.

Sourced from Reuters

The Nelson Mail - February 20, 2009

A surge in deadly "superbugs" suggests hospitals are in danger of being over-whelmed by drug resistant bacterial infections. There has been a 150-fold increase in cases of vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) in the past five years, and a 43 per cent increase in cases of the superbug methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), figures provided to Green Party spokesman Sue Kedgley show.

In 2005, another superbug strain, gentamicin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, killed three babies in Welligton Hospital's neonatal ward and infected a further nine. Five years ago statistics showed one case of VRE a year, last year there were 154.

"This could just be the tip of the iceberg, as there is no effective monitoring of antibiotic-resistant infections in New Zealand," Ms Kedgley said. "This exponential increase is alarming. New Zealand is losing the war against drug resistant bacterial infections."

Most VRE cases stemmed from an outbreak in Auckland City Hospital that began in July 2007 and lasted 13 months. During the outbreak period, 165 cases of VRE were reported. The hospital confirmed the outbreak in late October 2007 after admitting that three infected patients had died. Board officials insisted that VRE did not cause their deaths.

One victim, 62 year old Aucklander Jacqueline Hooton died from "excess bleeding" after being infected by the bug. VRE is cause by a common bowel bacteria, which is harmless unless it gets into the bloodstream. Up to five percent of the population may be carriers. Ms Kedgley said monitoring was "voluntary, ad hoc and could be seriously underestimating the extent of the problem".

"Clearly, government policies to reduce the spread of antibiotic resistance are failing miserably, and we urgently need better monitoring, better infection control and reduced use of antibiotics in humans and animals." She could not understand why the national surveillance program for antibiotic resistance, for which the Green Party secured funding last year, had not been set up.

The Health Ministy's chief adviser on population health, Greg Simmons, said the major increase in VRE in 2007-2008 was the result f a specific outbreak occuring in Auckland hospitals. "VRE is a significant and emerging problem in many overseas hospitals. Many of the isolate currently being identifed are from patients who have spent time in overseas hospitals."

Infection prevention and control was one of the five key areas for the Ministry's quality improvement committee, he said, and revised hand-hygiene guidelines for district health boards were being rolled out. Other projects under way included measures to cut infections from catheters and surgical sites.

-Fairfax

10 JULY 2009 | LONDON (Reuters) - Fourteen Britons who had contracted H1N1 flu have died and the rapid spread of infection in two areas of the country is close to epidemic level, health officials said on Thursday.

The Department of Health said Britain now had 9,718 laboratory-confirmed cases, the third most in the world behind the United States and Mexico. Britain's Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson said the actual number of cases was likely to be higher. All 14 who have died had underlying health issues and it was not clear in how many cases the patients had died as a direct result of the virus, known as swine flu.

26 JUNE 2009 | As many as one million Americans now have swine flu, US health officials said, adding that 6% or more of some urban areas are infected. The estimate - voiced by a government flu scientist - was no surprise to the experts who have been closely watching the virus. "We knew diagnosed cases were just the tip of the iceberg," said Dr William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious diseases expert who was in Atlanta for the meeting of a vaccine advisory panel. "We knew diagnosed cases were just the tip of the iceberg," said Dr William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious diseases expert who was in Atlanta for the meeting of a vaccine advisory panel.

25 JANUARY 2006 | GENEVA - Countries must speed up preparations to deal with an "inevitable" human flu pandemic, which could strike soon, a senior United Nations official warned today.

David Nabarro, the UN coordinator on avian and human flu, said countires must work fast because the H5N1 strain of bird flu could mutate into a form that spreads easily between people much faster than some officials seem to believe. Experts fear that a mutation in the bird flu virus, which has ravaged poultry stocks across Asia since late 2003 and killed at least 82 people world wide, could spark a pandemic killing millions of people.

"I say to them, please act as though it's going to start tomorrow. Don't keep putting off the difficult issues," Mr Nabarro, who is attending the World Health Organisation's annual week long executive board meeting, told reporters. "It may be months, it could mean that we are going to get human to human transmission tomorrow," he said.

With the recent global outbreak of swine flu in mind, this article looks at how Indonesian authorities dealt with the earlier outbreak of bird flu.

SEPTEMBER 2008 | With almost half of the world's human bird flu deaths occuring in Indonesia, concern is building over the country's refusal to share virus samples and its health minister's increasingly strident denunciations of global "conspiracies". Indonesia stopped sharing the samples with the World Health Organisation in December 2006 on fears pharmaceutical companies would make vaccines that are too expensive for poor countries.

The initial move by Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari earned international plaudits for taking on an unfair global health system, raising the possibility earlier this year the United States was using the virus to develop biological weapons in her book It's Time for the World to Change: Divine Hands behind Avian Influenza.