Archive for February, 2008
These days all one seems to hear in India is “Bird Flu”. The disease which has taken a major part of India in its grip, has not only severly affected the poultry industry of the nation but also it has sent panic bells ringing across the states - from Delhi in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South, to West Bengal in the East, the latter being worst affected. Even the World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the current outbreak of Bird Flu in India as the worst case reported till date.
In the affected areas, chickens are being culled at a rapid pace, but still the disease is spreading its wings from one district to the other, from one state to another. One primary reason for the rapid spread of Bird Flu is the lack of awareness about the virus which causes the disease. Almost everyone knows that the disease is lethal, but not many know what causes it, how it spreads, and how it can be prevented.
A relatively new A virus subtype that occurs mainly in birds, is highly contagious among them, and can be deadly to them, is the Influenza A (H5N1) virus. Also known as “H5N1 virusâ€, it has already caused an outbreak in eight Asian countries during the late 2003 and early 2004. Another outbreak was reported in June 2004, still in Asia. Infections were reported in mid-2005 in Europe and in early 2006 in Africa and the Near East.Â
Â
About 200 cases of human infection by influenza A (H5N1) virus were reported in almost 13 Asian countries. Usually, this virus does not infect people. Most of the reported cases of human infection have occurred from direct and close contact with infected poultry or contaminated surfaces. Out of these cases of influenza A (H5N1) virus, some occurred to have been transmitted from human-to-human.
Medicine Net explained that:
Avian influenza cannot be diagnosed by symptoms alone, so a laboratory test is required. Avian influenza is usually diagnosed by collecting a swab from the nose or throat during the first few days of illness. This swab is then sent to a laboratory, where they will either look for avian influenza virus using a molecular test, or they will try to grow the virus. Growing avian influenza viruses should only be done in laboratories with high levels of protection. If it is late in the illness, it may be difficult to find an avian influenza virus directly using these methods. If this is the case, it may still be possible to diagnose avian influenza by looking for evidence of the body’s response to the virus. This is not always an option because it requires two blood specimens (one taken during the first few days of illness and another taken some weeks later), and it can take several weeks to verify the results.
Creating a good bird flu vaccine is proving to be a lot harder than researchers thought it was going to be due to how much this bird flu changes. It is always changing and developing in more ways and this makes it hard to make one bird flu vaccine that will work all of the time. The scientist working on the bird flu vaccine are monitoring the bird flu very well to watch for any significant changes that will affect the usability of the bird flu vaccine. All of the data that they collect can be used to make the bird flu vaccine more and more effective.
The bird flu vaccine is a completely different vaccine than the standard flu shot. This bird flu vaccine will only protect against the bird flu and not any other strains of flu. There is not even a real bird flu vaccine available that we the public are able to get yet. It will be some time before we can get a bird flu vaccine.
The only known bird flu vaccine is still in the experimental stages and they do not even know yet how effective it will be, it may not work at all. We hear about the bird flu every day and about how many people it is going to kill throughout the world but to keep things in perspective it is important that you realize that very few people have actually caught the bird flu and even fewer have actually died from it and this is all without the help of a bird flu vaccine.