UNCLASSIFIED
Avian Influenza Daily Digest
October 29, 2008 14:00 GMT
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Article Summaries ...
Announcement
PlanFirst Webcasts on Pandemic Influenza
On October 29, 2008, at 1:00 pm ET, Secretary Leavitt will provide formal remarks regarding the Nation?s pandemic planning effort. He will then join a roundtable discussion with our special guests to discuss the Nation?s level of pandemic preparedness and related issues. As always, our guests, including Secretary Leavitt, will take questions from our viewing audience. No registration is required. Email your questions for the Webcast panelists before and/or during the program to hhsstudio@hhs.gov. Please include your first name, state and town. Before the Webcast, please ensure that your system can access the live stream: Test Your Video Player.
Announcement
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
Australia: Catching birds to stop the flu
10/29/08 ABC News Australia--Giant nets shot out of cannons are the latest tools being used to protect Australia from foreign diseases like Avian Influenza.
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
Egypt: Donors meeting nets funds for avian flu fight
10/29/08 CIDRAP--A group of international donors who met yesterday in the final session of an avian influenza conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, pledged more support for avian and pandemic flu preparedness and prevention, led by $320 million from the United States.
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
New Zealand hosts bird flu exercise at Auckland International Airport
10/29/08 Radio New Zealand--New Zealand's ability to cope with an outbreak of bird flu is being tested on Wednesday in an exercise at Auckland International Airport.
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
Science and Technology
Pneumococcal vaccine could prevent numerous deaths, save costs during a flu pandemic, model predicts
10/29/08 Eureka Alert--A new predictive model shows that vaccinating infants with 7 valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7)--the current recommendation--not only saves lives and money during a normal flu season by preventing related bacterial infections; it also would prevent more than 357,000 deaths during an influenza pandemic, while saving $7 billion in costs.
AI Research
Rockeby Biomed Awarded 750,000 Dolars Of Grants By Singapore Government For Influenza And Bird Flu Research, Singapore
10/29/08 Medical News Today--Australia-listed, Singapore-based healthcare group, Rockeby biomed Ltd today announced that it has been awarded two grants by the Singaporean Standards, Productivity and Innovation Board (SPRING Singapore) under the Technology Enterprise Commercialisation Scheme (TECS). The first grant of S$250,000 awarded under Proof of Concept (POC) is for the development of a magnetic detection platform for influenza A, including avian flu, while the second grant of S$500,000 is awarded under Proof of Value (POV), to upscale the production of a rapid and sensitive test incorporating fluorescence technology for the field diagnosis of influenza A, including avian flu.
Vaccines
Full Text of Articles follow ...
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
Australia: Catching birds to stop the flu
10/29/08 ABC News Australia--Giant nets shot out of cannons are the latest tools being used to protect Australia from foreign diseases like Avian Influenza.
A group of bird enthusiasts in collaboration with Australian Quarantine Inspection Services are spending the week in Darwin using the nets to catch migratory shorebirds which have flown in from as far away as the Arctic.
Chief of the operation, Dr Clive Fenton, says the birds are banded, and faecal samples taken, to test if they've brought Avian Influenza into Australia.
"Because these migrant birds come through Asia where this disease is prevalent, it is possible they could bring it into Australia," he says.
"And we've set up a net, it's called a cannon net.
"It's pulled over the birds by a weight which you can set off in the hide here where we're observing the catching area.
"You can catch birds, sometimes five, 10, sometimes 100, sometimes 1000."
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
Egypt: Donors meeting nets funds for avian flu fight
10/29/08 CIDRAP--A group of international donors who met yesterday in the final session of an avian influenza conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, pledged more support for avian and pandemic flu preparedness and prevention, led by $320 million from the United States.
Paula Dobriansky, the US State Department's undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, said in an Oct 25 statement that the new $320 million pledge brings the total US support for avian and pandemic flu assistance to $949 million. She announced the pledge at the Sixth International Conference on Avian and Pandemic Influenza.
The World Bank, in a press release today, did not name a total pledge amount, but noted that countries had an opportunity at the meeting to pledge additional support. Japan's Kyodo News Service said the total from the meeting was $350 million, including a pledge of $24 million from Japan, the second largest amount behind the United States.
Olga Jonas, the World Bank's influenza coordinator, said in the statement, "At this point, political commitment on response and preparedness is as important as funding.
The $350 million total from the donor's conference is well below the $500 million that United Nations officials had asked countries to pledge to help the world battle avian influenza and make pandemic preparations, according to previous reports. The amount pledged at this year's donor conference is also less than the $406 million raised at last year's conference in New Delhi.
The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, had indicated earlier that it would not pledge an additional amount, because it said half of the funds had not yet been spent, according to an Oct 25 report from Reuters.
The United Nations (UN) and the World Bank, in a recent progress report, expressed concern about a growing funding gap between what's needed to control and prevent avian flu and the amount donors are pledging. The report, which was published before the meeting in Egypt was held, said donors have pledged $2.7 billion, of which $2 billion has been committed. Of that total, $1.5 billion has been disbursed, of which 59% was cash or loans and 41% was in-kind contributions. Declines in funding threaten the sustainability of control and planning investments that have already been made, the report said.
African countries find challenges, success
The international conference drew representatives from more than 100 nations and 20 regional and international organizations, according to the State Department press release. Sessions included a review of progress, sharing of best practices, and discussion of the threat avian flu virus poses to the global community.
Representatives from West Africa said their countries were vulnerable to the virus, because of porous borders, weak infrastructure, and poverty, Reuters reported today.
Anna Nyamekye, Ghana's deputy agriculture minister, told the conference about the difficulty in monitoring the movement of people and animals across unapproved routes. "Nigeria still has it [avian influenza in poultry], Togo, our direct neighbor still has it, and on our north we are bordered by Burkina Faso, which also has it," she told Reuters. "We are hemmed in."
However, some West African countries have had success controlling outbreaks quickly by offering farmers compensation for dead or culled poultry. Junaidu Maina, Nigeria's chief veterinary officer, told Reuters that since 2006 the country has culled 1.3 million birds and paid $5.4 million in compensation.
Nyamekye said Ghana also has a compensation program that provides farmers financial incentives to abide by national biosecurity standards.
UN officials warn against flu fatigue
David Nabarro, the UN's influenza coordinator, warned against complacency in the fight against avian influenza, according to a report today from Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "Things are a lot better now than they were when we started this work in 2005, but they are not good enough," he said. "We are not sufficiently prepared to properly bring a pandemic under control quickly."
Nabarro pointed to difficulties in getting government departments, other than health ministries, to work on pandemic prevention and preparedness, and he called for greater international cooperation.
Piers E. Merrick, who helps coordinate the World Bank's avian flu response in the East Asian and Pacific regions, said in the statement that despite some success in controlling the spread of H5N1, the disease represents the persistent threat of zoonotic diseases. "Addressing many of these infections will require a more sophisticated and comprehensive long-term action plan" he said.
Next year's international avian flu conference and donors meeting will be held in Vietnam, according to a report today in The Guardian, a British newspaper.
Announcement
PlanFirst Webcasts on Pandemic Influenza
On October 29, 2008, at 1:00 pm ET, Secretary Leavitt will provide formal remarks regarding the Nation?s pandemic planning effort. He will then join a roundtable discussion with our special guests to discuss the Nation?s level of pandemic preparedness and related issues. As always, our guests, including Secretary Leavitt, will take questions from our viewing audience.
No registration is required. Email your questions for the Webcast panelists before and/or during the program to hhsstudio@hhs.gov. Please include your first name, state and town.
Before the Webcast, please ensure that your system can access the live stream: Test Your Video Player.
AI Research
Pneumococcal vaccine could prevent numerous deaths, save costs during a flu pandemic, model predicts
10/29/08 Eureka Alert--A new predictive model shows that vaccinating infants with 7 valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7)--the current recommendation--not only saves lives and money during a normal flu season by preventing related bacterial infections; it also would prevent more than 357,000 deaths during an influenza pandemic, while saving $7 billion in costs.
Keith P. Klugman, PhD, professor of global health at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, will present results of the research using the predictive model at the joint ICAAC/IDSA meeting in Washington, DC, Oct. 25-28. (Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy/Infectious Disease Society of America.
Bacterial infections, particularly pneumococcal disease, can follow a viral illness such as flu and cause secondary infections that worsen flu symptoms and increase influenza-related risk. Bacterial infections may have been the cause of nearly half of the deaths of young soldiers during the 1918 flu pandemic.
"We've known for years that bacterial infections can develop after influenza," says Klugman. "Unlike the 1918 flu pandemic, which preceded the antibiotic era, we now have vaccines that can prevent these types of pneumococcal infections. This model shows what a dramatically different outcome we could expect with standard PCV vaccination."
Klugman and colleagues at Harvard University, i3 Innovus in Medford, Ma. and Wyeth Research constructed a model to estimate the public health and economic impact of current pneumococcal vaccination practices in the context of an influenza pandemic.
Since 2000 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Immunization Practices Advisory Committee (ACIP) has been recommending PCV vaccinations for infants and children.
The new predictive model was used to compare the results of no PCV vaccination to the current routine vaccination of infants less than two years old. The researchers assessed the effect of vaccination policies under both normal and pandemic influenza conditions. They included both direct vaccination effects in vaccinated individuals and indirect vaccination effects (called herd immunity) in the unvaccinated. For manifestations of pneumococcal disease, they included invasive pneumococcal disease (meningitis or bacteremia), all-cause pneumonia and all-cause acute otitis media (ear infections). The model's estimates were based on the 1918 pandemic.
The new model predicted that current pneumococcal vaccination practices reduce costs in a typical flu season by $1.4 billion and would reduce costs by $7 billion in a pandemic. In a pandemic, they would prevent 1.24 million cases of pneumonia and 357,000 pneumococcal-related deaths.
"Our research shows that routine pneumococcal vaccination is a proactive approach that can greatly reduce the effects of a future flu pandemic," says Klugman. Countries that have not yet implemented a pneumococcal vaccination program may want to consider this as part of their pandemic flu preparedness."
Regional Reporting and Surveillance
New Zealand hosts bird flu exercise at Auckland International Airport
10/29/08 Radio New Zealand--New Zealand's ability to cope with an outbreak of bird flu is being tested on Wednesday in an exercise at Auckland International Airport.
Exercise Spring Fever is based around the scenario that a plane arrived with suspected influenza patients aboard.
More than 20 health, border control and Government agencies will be involved as if the outbreak was real.
The Ministry of Health says the exercise is designed to test how prepared New Zealand is for a global influenza pandemic.
Vaccines
Rockeby Biomed Awarded 750,000 Dolars Of Grants By Singapore Government For Influenza And Bird Flu Research, Singapore
10/29/08 Medical News Today--Australia-listed, Singapore-based healthcare group, Rockeby biomed Ltd today announced that it has been awarded two grants by the Singaporean Standards, Productivity and Innovation Board (SPRING Singapore) under the Technology Enterprise Commercialisation Scheme (TECS). The first grant of S$250,000 awarded under Proof of Concept (POC) is for the development of a magnetic detection platform for influenza A, including avian flu, while the second grant of S$500,000 is awarded under Proof of Value (POV), to upscale the production of a rapid and sensitive test incorporating fluorescence technology for the field diagnosis of influenza A, including avian flu.
The letters of offer were presented to Dr. Tan Sze Wee, Managing Director and CEO of Rockeby biomed at the TECS award ceremony today.
The POC project is planned to take one year. After which, the platform will give Rockeby a unique patent protected technology that can also be applied to human seasonal influenza. Under the Proof of Value, the project is planned to take two years. The platform can then be expanded to other infectious disease tests such as Chlamydia, Dengue, Hand, Foot & Mouth. Both projects that have been approved for funding by TECS work towards the development of faster and more sensitive tests for influenza A including avian flu, which have been subjected to fears of pandemics worldwide.
Under POC, proposals were assessed on their technicality feasibility and commercial potential while POV is for applicants keen to further R&D developments on proprietary technology projects, including the development of working prototypes. Rockeby biomed has been granted the maximum funding of S$250,000 and S$500,000 respectively for each project.
Dr. Tan said: "We are pleased to have been able to participate in the inaugural call for applications by the SPRING TECS programme, and proud to have two applications formally approved by the committee. We believe that the programme will help to develop innovation among technology-driven small and medium enterprises in Singapore, and provide Singapore with the competitive advantage going forward."
About Rockeby biomed
Rockeby biomed Limited is a Singapore-based, ASX-listed (ASX: RBY) healthcare company specialising in research, development and marketing of rapid testing technologies for infectious disease in humans and animals and lifestyle health products including CanDia5®, Avian Influenza Virus test kits and Pepp®. The company currently has products that do rapid testing for diseases such as the Avian Flu, HIV, Vulvovaginal Candidiasis and Systemic Candidiasis. For more information, visit http://www.rockeby.com.
About SPRING Singapore
SPRING Singapore is the enterprise development agency for growing innovative companies and fostering a competitive SME sector in Singapore. It works with partners to help enterprises in financing, capabilities and management development, technology and innovation, and access to markets. As the Singaporean national standards and accreditation body, SPRING also develops and promotes internationally-recognised standards and quality assurance to enhance competitiveness and facilitate trade. TECS was established this year by SPRING Singapore to provide vital support and resources for start ups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to develop prototypes for commercialisation.
