4 BF deaths in one week

[Cat]

Fourth bird flu death in a week in Egypt: reports

 

Jan 1 07:23 AM US/Eastern

 

Egypt's health ministry said another woman has died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu, the fourth such death in a week, local media reported on Tuesday.

 

Hanem Atwa Ibrahim, 50, from Damietta north of Cairo, died late on Monday in a hospital in the capital and was the 19th death from the disease in Egypt, the state-owned daily Al-Ahram reported.

 

Atwa was admitted to hospital on December 24 and had been in critical condition ever since.

 

Another woman, 36-year-old Fardos Mohammed Haddad from the Nile Delta province of Menufia, also died on Monday from the disease.

 

On Sunday, Fatma Fathi Mohammed, 25, from the Nile Delta province of Daqahliya, died of bird flu just days after the death of Ola Yunes Ali.

 

Another woman, a chicken seller from Menufia, has been in hospital since December 26 and is currently recovering in intensive care, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

 

Egypt's location on major bird migration routes and the widespread practice of keeping domestic fowl near living quarters have led to it being the hardest-hit country outside Asia.

 

The government says it is conducting a vigorous campaign to combat the spread of the virus through vaccinations and raising awareness, but experts and officials have warned against people dropping their guard.

 

Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali warned on Sunday against "slackness in the preventive measures taken to fight bird flu especially as winter approaches."

 

Some experts believe the government has not done enough and tends to react rather than act.

 

Talaat Khatib, a professor of food hygiene at Assiut University, said on Monday the government awareness campaign was not comprehensive enough.

 

"Most doctors can't even recognise the symptoms of bird flu on a human being," he told AFP by telephone.

 

There have been 43 cases of bird flu in humans since the disease was first recorded in Egypt in February 2006.

 

Before Ali's death a week ago, no bird flu fatality had been recorded in six months.

 

"People became too relaxed, poultry shops began to reopen and the old slaughtering techniques came back without proper supervision from the authorities," Khatib said.

 

Health ministry spokesman Abdel Rahman Shahin has urged the public to remain vigilant and deplored the relaxation of precautions because of the belief that the virus had disappeared.

 

He called for "banning the raising of fowl in towns, transporting them between provinces without authorisation and also reinforcing controls on where they are raised and sold."

 

He also warned that sick people denying they have been in contact with contaminated domestic fowl makes it more difficult to detect the virus and to treat it.

 

Women and children have borne the brunt of the virus because of their role in taking care of domestic fowl.

 

The WHO said earlier this year that countries around the world had improved their defences against bird flu, but the situation remained critical in Egypt and Indonesia where the risk of the H5N1 virus mutating into a major human threat remains high.

 

 

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=08...;show_article=1

 

 

[Cowgirl]

I miss having chickens so much, and I want so badly to get some again this year. But then I read bird flu articles and I wonder if it would be foolish. We live about a mile from the river, which is a major migratory route for all manner of birds. (I even saw the extremely endangered whooping crane this year - a small flock of them settled not far from us). At any rate, where we live, domestic fowl COULD be exposed to H5N1 if it passed through the area in wild migratory birds. And some of those birds traverse the globe to get here.

 

And it seems that keeping poultry during such times is a major hazard - so far, nearly all the bird flu victims handle fowl or care for those who got sick handling fowl. I would hate to have our birds be a reservoir for a flu that could kill us.

 

Something to ponder.

 

 

[nmchick]

Cowgirl, I don't have chickens now, but I'm hoping to get them next spring, so I've really been looking in to this bird flu thing. At least at the moment, it looks like the human tissue that is able to be infected by H5N1 is the tissue deep in the lungs, i.e., you really have to snort some virus good and deep. It can't infect the tissue in your nose, for instance. This was explained really well in a BBC documentary someone posted about a couple months ago. (Sorry, I can't find it right now.)

 

So, I think if we don't take big gasping breaths of chicken "stuff", we're probably ok. A mask would probably keep you safe.

[Cowgirl]

Yes, I saw such a report too, NMchick, but I have also noted that some articles report that some bird flu victims merely butchered chickens. So I wonder if that deep lung theory is correct - one does not deeply inhale chicken excrement whilst butchering a bird, after all!

[Mother]

I'm of the opinion that there is a lot of unknowns about the Bird Flu and we are not being told even everything they do know about it.

 

I wonder if we need to worry less about chickens infecting us and more about the virus mutating to the point that it's easily caught from humans but I understand your concern.

 

We recently got chickens again after not having them for a couple of years. These are older organic egg layers who never saw the light of day until we got them. They were originally meant for butchering but as they were nothing but skin and bones (literally, very few feathers even)we had opted to beef them up before hand. We have butchered many but some were still laying and we kept them. They are allowed access to the outdoors all day long and we will continue to do that until early spring when the migration starts again but the same cannot be said about our eight geese. They have constant access to our pond and early spring will find wild geese landing there daily for weeks. I'm not sure what we will do about them at that time but even keeping them confined until the wild geese leave might not mitigate the problem. I understand the virus can live a long time in and around water if it's cool but how long and do we know that for sure?

 

There is also the issue of pigs and other animals harboring the virus and passing it on to us. Even cats are known to be carriers in some countries.

 

Still, the health benefits of fresh eggs and meat might outweigh the risks if the Bird Flu comes in the form of H to H transmission and we need to isolate ourselves for long periods of time. It's definitely a judgement call I won't make until I see which way the wind seems to be blowing. If there is any possibility of my birds being contaminated I would not hesitate to butcher them, using proper precautions when I do. If the studies are correct, cooking kills the virus and my birds would serve a useful purpose perhaps.

 

((( )))