Scientists Infect Chicks in Race to Halt Bird Flu Spread

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-30/scientists-infect-chicks-in-race-to-halt-bird-flu-spread.html

Deep inside a high-security laboratory an hour from Melbourne, scientists working behind air-locked doors inject six-week-old chickens with a virus that has killed one in five people it’s known to have infected.

The pathogen is H7N9 bird flu, and it came to Australia’s second-biggest city 12 days ago in a 0.5 milliliter sample -- 10 would fit on a teaspoon -- from a patient in China’s Anhui province. Antibodies from the chickens will help create tests for the virus, part of a race to head off a global outbreak.

While disease trackers have yet to pinpoint how the 127 human infections in China and Taiwan occurred, they say contact with poultry is the most likely cause. Birds carry the disease without showing symptoms, making tests to monitor farms and markets vital to halting its spread, said Peter Daniels, assistant director of the Australian Animal Health Laboratory.

“If one in five people getting infected die, that’s a pretty frightening infection,” said Daniels, 64, whose lab is the world’s largest high-security bio-containment research facility. “It may be that it won’t start spreading person to person. But if it does, the world is facing a severe disease situation.”

[Mojorabbit]

1. Have you read the Chinese Scientists assessment in their bulletin?

It is pretty grim. See section titled Possible enormous risk of the H7N9 influenza
outbreak
It is a pdf file. http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11434-013-5880-5.pdf

[xchrom]

2. +1