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Avian Influenza Daily Digest
August 28, 2008 19:40 GMT
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Article Summaries ...
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
Australia: The battle to secure our borders against a tiny, but lethal, enemy force
8/28/08 Sydney Morning Herald--We once thought the battle against infectious disease was won. Security experts now tell us this is not so. In a globalised, interconnected world - where people, trade and goods move around like never before - people, their pets, livestock, wildlife and crops are still vulnerable.
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
Science and Technology
HHS, Homeland Security Release Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Guidance
8/28/08 Occupational Health and Safety--The U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security have released Guidance on Allocating and Targeting Pandemic Influenza Vaccine. The purpose of the guidance is to provide a planning framework to help state, tribal, local, and community leaders ensure that vaccine allocation and use will reduce the impact of a pandemic on public health.
Vaccines
How Long Does Flu Immunity Last?
8/27/08 Time--Every year in the fall, physicians dispense a new flu vaccine. Typically it is designed to protect against the three flu strains that epidemiologists predict will be the most pervasive that season. But how often have patients received the flu shot, only to catch a bad illness anyway? The problem is that cold and flu viruses mutate so rapidly that sometimes they're unrecognizable to the antibodies created by the body in response to any particular vaccine. It turns out, however, that those antibodies ? unlike those against illnesses like tetanus or whooping cough ? can provide a formidable and life-long defense against the flu, as long as they're pitted against the correct strain. For an explanation, TIME asks Eric Altschuler, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and co-author of a recent paper in Nature about antibodies to the 1918 pandemic flu virus.Q: How long do flu antibodies last?
AI Research
Full Text of Articles follow ...
Vaccines
HHS, Homeland Security Release Pandemic Influenza Vaccine Guidance
8/28/08 Occupational Health and Safety--The U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security have released Guidance on Allocating and Targeting Pandemic Influenza Vaccine. The purpose of the guidance is to provide a planning framework to help state, tribal, local, and community leaders ensure that vaccine allocation and use will reduce the impact of a pandemic on public health.
Target groups are defined in the guidance by a common occupation, type of service, age group, or risk level and are clustered into four broad categories: homeland and national security, health care and community support services, critical infrastructures, and the general population. These four categories together cover the entire population.
Across these categories, according to the document, vaccine should be allocated and administered according to tiers where all groups designated for vaccination within a tier have equal priority for vaccination. Groups within tiers vary depending on pandemic severity.
For more information, visit www.pandemicflu.gov/vaccine/allocationguidance.pdf.
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
Australia: The battle to secure our borders against a tiny, but lethal, enemy force
8/28/08 Sydney Morning Herald--We once thought the battle against infectious disease was won. Security experts now tell us this is not so. In a globalised, interconnected world - where people, trade and goods move around like never before - people, their pets, livestock, wildlife and crops are still vulnerable.
Animal and human diseases and insects respect no national borders. They move easily across time and space. Infections and insect pests once thought limited to certain parts of the world are now able to spread easily and quickly to Australia. And we still do not fully appreciate that human health is intimately connected to animal health and that wildlife and domestic animals and insects continue play a huge part in whether our livestock and crops prosper and whether we remain healthy.
SARS, Avian influenza and equine flu demonstrated quite clearly how poorly prepared we are for such events and the vulnerability of our trade, tourism, agricultural industry, biodiversity and human health to introduced diseases.
There are many potential threats to Australia's biosecurity. Some, such as invasive alien species, invertebrate and vertebrate pests, as well as animal infections, threaten the viability of our wildlife and rural industries, on occasions reaching out to affect us as well. The equine flu disaster and the Hendra virus outbreak in Queensland demonstrate this only too clearly. Others, such as avian influenza or a new pandemic of human flu, threaten the health of millions of citizens.
Most Australians believe that only developing nations have to worry about insect-borne diseases. Yet over the last 200 years, mosquitoes and fleas have been responsible for thousands of deaths and sickened millions of people in Australia.
We remain vulnerable to a wide range of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue, Ross River virus and Barmah Forest virus. Naturally occurring infectious diseases and invasive pests are the predominant threat, but what about insects or disease purposely released for political reasons? You might think it far-fetched, but perhaps our next terrorist attack will come on six legs and target our agricultural industry.
One of the cheapest, most easily obtained and potentially most destructive means available to terrorists is not anthrax or smallpox, but insects. They are easy to sneak into the country, they reproduce and spread quickly, and the effect would be devastating for livestock and crops.
The economic consequences of such an attack could be vast. The social, economic and political impact of human disease outbreaks, whether natural or deliberate, could well be greater. Infectious diseases do not just make our bodies sick, they can also poison the well of community spirit and damage our faith in governments.
Natural disasters such as bushfires, floods and droughts bring out the best in people, but when everyone is a potential carrier of deadly germs, there is less enthusiasm for volunteer relief services.
Most people would assume that infectious diseases could only seriously affect the politics of the developing world, yet Australian history is littered with examples of widespread public hysteria and disputes between local, State and Commonwealth governments over how best to respond to epidemics.
The lessons from this are clear. Infectious disease is never far away. To protect all Australians we need to better understand the ecology of emerging infections, the significance of wild and domestic animals in the disease transmission process and the vulnerability of Australia to infectious disease, whether natural or deliberate, as well as to insects and alien species.
The sooner we appreciate the critical links between all these things the sooner we will be able to develop a coordinated and all encompassing national and regional biosecurity surveillance and response system that provides 24/7 protection for all Australians.
Peter Curson is professor of population and security, and Jonathan Herington is projects officer (biosecurity), in the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.
AI Research
How Long Does Flu Immunity Last?
8/27/08 Time--Every year in the fall, physicians dispense a new flu vaccine. Typically it is designed to protect against the three flu strains that epidemiologists predict will be the most pervasive that season. But how often have patients received the flu shot, only to catch a bad illness anyway? The problem is that cold and flu viruses mutate so rapidly that sometimes they're unrecognizable to the antibodies created by the body in response to any particular vaccine. It turns out, however, that those antibodies ? unlike those against illnesses like tetanus or whooping cough ? can provide a formidable and life-long defense against the flu, as long as they're pitted against the correct strain. For an explanation, TIME asks Eric Altschuler, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and co-author of a recent paper in Nature about antibodies to the 1918 pandemic flu virus.Q: How long do flu antibodies last?
A: According to our study, it appears they can last the entire lifespan of the human organism ? 90 years plus.
In our study we were looking for antibodies to the 1918 flu. This flu virus was reconstructed a number of years ago in the lab, so we were able to test to see if 90 years later we could still find antibodies. I recruited survivors, people who were born in 1915 or earlier and thus presumably survived the 1918 flu. We found that virtually all the people born in 1915 or earlier ? about 90% of them ? had good "titers" to the 1918 flu, which means they still had reasonably high concentrations of the antibodies in their blood, whereas among controls, people who were born in 1926 or later, it was only about 10%. That was really quite a remarkable finding.
The important question in this study is whether the antibodies still work after all that time, and I think my colleagues really found some very decisive results. I sent the blood samples from the survivors to my colleagues, Chris Basler at Mount Sinai, who's a professor of microbiology, and James Crowe at Vanderbilt, who's in pediatrics, microbiology and immunology. Dr Crowe and his colleagues at Vanderbilt isolated five different antibodies to the 1918 flu. Then Dr. Basler and colleagues looked at how those antibodies bind to the virus. It was quite strong and specific. We tried to compare it to other viruses, studying, for example, whether the antibody would bind to the flu of 1999 or to earlier ones, like the 1943 flu. Most antibodies bound to 1918, and only 1918. One of them bound, but much more weakly, to a couple of others. So that was really quite good evidence, we thought.
I think the most definitive experiment we did was in mice. If you give mice the 1918 influenza, it kills them quite rapidly. It's very lethal. Terry Tumpey at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention infected mice with the various strains that made up the 1918 flu. Then we treated the mice either with our five antibodies or with controls. (There were two controls. One was human gamma globulin, which are just pooled antibodies that bind to a lot of different things. The other was the antibody to one of the modern bird flus.) And all of the control-treated mice, whether they got the gamma globulin or the bird-flu antibody, they all died. All of those mice died. Meanwhile all the mice that were treated with the highest doses of our antibodies survived. That's really very strong evidence ? the strongest ? that these antibodies are functional against this virus.
I think that diseases, other viruses and other pathogens, can behave differently. Antibodies are made by something called memory B cells, and the memory B cells for the 1918 flu clearly live for the lifespan of the human organism, which is wonderful. It raises important questions for looking at other pathogens, however, and it's important to try to look at these questions for different pathogens individually. Evidence shows it's important to get a regular tetanus booster, for example. Still, our new study may suggest another angle to look at things, which is how long do memory B cells last for this or that? Maybe there's some underlying biology that could explain why one thing might last longer than another.
Podcast
How Long Do Antibodies Last?
TIME talks to Eric Altschuler, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
