ALERT: H5N1 Virus Replikin Gene Counts Indicate a New More Virulent Influenza Cycle Has Begun

Replikins Ltd. has found that H5N1 virus replikin peak gene counts in 2007 in Hong Kong, Russia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Israel indicate that a new replikin cycle has begun. The mean replikin count exceeded the maximum of the previous cycle identified by the company. Although several conditions are required to produce a pandemic, the increase in replikin count, a feature of each of the last three pandemics, is now in the range of the increase seen in the 1918 H1N1 pandemic.

Black Death did not kill indiscriminately + H5N1 Breaking News

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Black Death that decimated populations in Europe and elsewhere during the middle of the 14th century may not have been a blindly indiscriminate killer, as some experts have believed.

An analysis of 490 skeletons from a London for Black Death victims demonstrated that the infection did not affect everyone equally, two U.S. scientists said on Monday.

While many perfectly healthy people certainly were cut down, those already in poor health prior to the arrival of the plague were more likely to have perished, they found.

"A lot of people have assumed that the Black Death killed indiscriminately, just because it had such massive mortality," anthropologist Sharon DeWitte of the University at Albany in New York, said in a telephone interview.

People already in poor health often are more vulnerable in epidemics. "But there's been a tradition of thinking that the Black Death was this unique case where no one was safe and if you were exposed to the disease that was it. You had three to five days, and then you were dead," DeWitte said.

The plague epidemic of 1347 to 1351 was one of the deadliest recorded in human history, killing about 75 million people, according to some estimates, including more than a third of Europe's population.

DeWitte analyzed skeletons unearthed from the East Smithfield cemetery in London, dug especially for plague victims and excavated in the 1980s, for bone and teeth abnormalities that would show that people had health problems before they died of plague.

She found such abnormalities in many skeletons, suggesting these people had experienced malnutrition, iron deficiencies and infections well before succumbing to the Black Death.

The proportion of people with such signs of frailty in the cemetery, compared to those who appeared to have been of robust health before the epidemic, indicated that the infection was somewhat selective in who it killed, DeWitte and Pennsylvania State University anthropologist James Wood reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some experts have thought the Black Death -- named after the black spots the bubonic form of the plague caused on the skin -- killed indiscriminately regardless of age, sex or level of health because it was so virulent and the European population so immunologically unprepared, DeWitte and Wood wrote.

"The Black Death was highly virulent and undoubtedly killed many otherwise healthy people who would have been unlikely to die under normal-mortality conditions," they wrote. But people already in poor health were more likely to die, they wrote.

By Will Dunham
More.

Bird flu spreads to fresh areas, culling target jacked up

NVDL: H5N1 unleashes a cytokine storm, and the degree of this reaction is directly proportionate to immunity. In a bizarre and macabre twist, the healthier you are, the more your body would fill up with puss.
(Wiki: a healthy immune system may have been a liability rather than an asset).Thus H5N1 has been found to be most lethal in healthy individuals aged 20-40. Naturally people suffering from AIDs etc. present a brush fire scenario for such an epidemic. The story immediately above was posted yesterday. The story below was posted 12 hours ago:

Indonesia logs 4 H5N1 cases; death toll reaches 100

This story appeared 58 minutes ago:
H5N1 bird flu detected in two Thai provinces

This story appeared two days ago:
Sixth swan tests positive for H5N1 bird flu: British officials

Bird flu kills 590 ducks in northern Vietnam (REUTERS)

NVDL: Right now we're experiencing a seasonal change, which coincides with the movements of migratory birds.

HANOI, Nov 7 (Reuters) - Bird flu has killed 590 ducks in a northern Vietnam province, the fifth to have reported outbreaks among poultry within about a month, the government said on Wednesday.

The two-month-old ducks started dying on Monday at a farm in Ha Nam province. Tests confirmed on Wednesday the presence of the H5N1 bird flu virus, the Animal Health Department said in its daily report.Further tests also found the H5N1 virus in samples taken from two dead chickens dumped in a river in Ha Nam province, 60 km (37 miles) south of Hanoi, the report said.

The case in Ha Nam brought to five the number of provinces that have confirmed bird flu in poultry since early October. Three of the provinces are in the north, one is in the southern Mekong delta, while the fifth is in the central province of Quang Tri.

Floods that affected Quang Tri in the past two weeks could help spread the virus to nearby areas, an Agriculture Ministry official said.

No human infections have been reported in Vietnam since the virus killed a teenager in early August, one of four deaths among seven Vietnamese known to have been infected this year. Since 2003, bird flu has killed 46 people in Vietnam.

Globally, the H5N1 virus has killed 205 people out of 334 known cases, with most of the deaths in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Egypt, the World Health Organisation figures show. (Reporting by Ho Binh Minh, editing by David Fogarty)

Bird flu kills Indonesian toddler, raises country's death toll to 89
1 day ago

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesian health officials say a toddler has died from bird flu after apparently coming into contact with dead poultry.

Nyoman Kandun, a senior health ministry official, says the four-year-old girl from Tangerang, about 20 kilometres west of the capital Jakarta, died Monday after being in hospital for two days.

Kandun says investigators concluded the girl had contact with dead poultry in her neighbourhood.

Kandun says the death raises the number of people in Indonesia who have died from the disease to 89. The girl is the fourth Indonesian killed by the disease this month.

The World Health Organization says Indonesia's death toll from bird flu now accounts for almost one-half of the recorded 203 fatalities worldwide.

The disease remains hard for people to catch - most cases have so far been traced to contact with infected birds. But experts fear it could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans, potentially sparking a global pandemic.

Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country and home to millions of backyard chickens, is considered a possible hot spot for spreading the disease.