27 May 2006 By KAMALA HAYMAN taken from www.stuff.co.nz

Nurses will sign death certificates and medical officers will be able to seize any land, buildings or cars needed during a flu pandemic if far-reaching law changes are approved.

New Zealand health authorities are planning for a pandemic that could infect 40 per cent of the population and kill 33,000 people, overwhelming health services.

May 23, 2006, 1:29AM

By TODD ACKERMAN Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle www.HoustonChronicle.com

A small group of skeptics says the warnings are just a lot of hype, scare talk that does more harm than good to the public health. Such doomsday predictions go well beyond good science and siphon money and attention from more important threats, they say.

"It's a great story, a disease that can wipe out mankind as we know it," says Dr. Gary Butcher, a University of Florida veterinarian specializing in avian diseases. "Fortunately, the facts are contrary to what's being reported. This disease is going to fizzle out, be forgotten in the near future and be replaced by another 'potential worldwide threat.' "

That view may have received a boost last week when the United Nations' chief pandemic flu coordinator confirmed that the flu virus known as H5N1 largely has been contained in the Asian countries where it first hit.

Bird flu, they argue, is just the latest in a line of overhyped scares that include anthrax, West Nile virus, smallpox and SARS, which taken together claim a mere fraction of the lives lost every year to, say, pneumonia.

The skeptics warn of the dangers of overreaction, citing 1976's swine flu debacle, when more than 40 million people received a vaccine against a new pig virus that, ultimately, never took hold. The virus killed one person, a military recruit whose speedy death ignited the crash program. But as many as 1,000 people who were inoculated developed a paralyzing nerve condition; 32 died. The public relations nightmare and lawsuits against the government helped drive many drug companies away from making flu vaccines at all.

One reason some remain unconvinced of the new virus's potential transmissibility is because it has infected so few people to date. Since 1998, hundreds of millions of chickens in Asia have been infected with the virus. Millions of people lived with the diseased birds, but, as of last Friday, 217 had become infected. Of those, 123 died.

The high fatality rate also is suspect, according to the nay sayers. No one knows how many people in close contact with domesticated birds may have picked up the virus, but never got sick or only showed mild symptoms, and, thus, never reported the disease.

The current flu virus, H5N1, is what is infecting birds. That virus, however, infects humans by lodging deep in the lungs, and, thus, isn't likely to be spread by coughing or sneezing.

Some critics see a different "agenda" behind the public concern about bird flu — funding. Butcher says President Bush's $7.1 billion flu pandemic plan means a bonanza of grant money for researchers and the justification of the budgets and existence of agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the World Health Organization.

May 11, 2006 ~ ROME (May 10) The New York Times [www.nytimes.com] by Elisabeth Rosenthal

In thousands of samples collected in Africa this winter, the A(H5N1) bird flu virus was not detected in a single wild bird, health officials and scientists said. In Europe, only a few cases have been detected in wild birds since April 1, at the height of the migration north…..Specialists contend that the northward spring migration played no role…..Many European countries are lifting restrictions.

April 15, 2006 ~ MILAN ~ by Elisabeth Rosenthal from NYTimes.com ~ Bird Flu Virus May Be Spread by Smuggling – There is increasing evidence that a thriving international trade in smuggled poultry – including live birds, chicks and meat – is helping spread bird flu, experts say….There is extensive smuggling between China and Africa…."We’ve been looking for it in wild birds for the last two months and it is surprising that we’ve come up with zero," [quote from a UN senior veterinarian Dr. Juan Lubroth].

The spread of industrial poultry production and trade networks has created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses like the H5N1 strain of bird flu. Once inside densely populated factory farms, viruses can rapidly become lethal and amplify. Air thick with viral load from infected farms is carried for kilometers, while integrated trade networks spread the disease through many carriers: live birds, day-old chicks, meat, feathers, hatching eggs, eggs, chicken manure and animal feed. Chicken feces and bedding from poultry factory floors are common ingredients in animal feed.

"Everyone is focused on migratory birds and backyard chickens as the problem," says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN. "But they are not effective vectors of highly pathogenic bird flu. The virus kills them, but is unlikely to be spread by them."

For example, in Malaysia, the mortality rate from H5N1 among village chickens is only 5 per cent, indicating that the virus has a hard time spreading among small-scale chicken flocks. H5N1 outbreaks in Laos, which is surrounded by infected countries, have only occurred in the nation's few factory farms, which are supplied by Thai hatcheries. The only cases of bird flu in backyard poultry, which account for over 90 per cent of Laos' production, occurred next to the factory farms.

"The evidence we see over and over again, from the Netherlands in 2003 to Japan in 2004 to Egypt in 2006, is that lethal bird flu breaks out in large scale industrial chicken farms and then spreads," Kuyek explains.

The Nigerian outbreak earlier this year [2006] began at a single factory farm, owned by a cabinet minister, distant from hotspots for migratory birds but known for importing unregulated hatchable eggs. In India, local authorities say that H5N1 emerged and spread from a factory farm owned by the country's largest poultry company, Venkateshwara Hatcheries.

"Farmers are losing their livelihoods, native chickens are being wiped out, and some experts say that we're on the verge of a human pandemic that could kill millions of people," Kuyek concludes. "When will governments realize that to protect poultry and people from bird flu, we need to protect them from the global poultry industry?"