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China Has Withheld Samples of a Dangerous Flu Virus (nytimes.com)
For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus from the United States -- specimens needed to develop vaccines and treatments, according to federal health officials, The New York Times reports. From the story: Despite persistent requests from government officials and research institutions, China has not provided samples of the dangerous virus, a type of bird flu called H7N9 [Editor's note: the link maybe paywalled; alternative source]. In the past, such exchanges have been mostly routine under rules established by the World Health Organization. Now, as the United States and China spar over trade, some scientists worry that the vital exchange of medical supplies and information could slow, hampering preparedness for the next biological threat. The scenario is "unlike shortages in aluminum and soybeans," said Dr. Michael Callahan, an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School. "Jeopardizing U.S. access to foreign pathogens and therapies to counter them undermines our nation's ability to protect against infections which can spread globally within days." Experts concur that the world's next global pandemic will likely come from a repeat offender: the flu. The H7N9 virus is one candidate.
The PRC has never "played well with others" when it comes to infectious diseases, their first instinct is to claim nothing is happening, see SARS, they exclude the ROC (Taiwan) from as much of the international health network as they can, it's what you expect from a government were politics trumps (heh) everything else, especially including human lives. They don't much care if they kill their own Han Chinese by the tens of millions, why would even they care about foreign devils?
If, as you claim, they're doing this to spite Trump, that just further proves that they always put politics ahead of human lives.
nope. CHina found it 5 years ago and has never shared with the world. It was not an issue 5 years ago, or even last year. Problem is, that information is leaking out of CHina that this stain is spreading amongst farm workers, getting them sick and appears to have a fairly high mortality rate.
This is NOT good.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not really, Ebola, like this bird flue, is zoonotic, it's not adapted to us humans and kills us way too fast to spread widely and quickly, especially with minimum levels of isolation that e.g. Nigeria was capable of implementing.
A bird flu like this might be much worse, though, since it's spread by aerosols ... but it also might no be as easily caught by humans ... except if the PRC is doing their usual thing of trying to sweep cases under the rug, they're giving it a chance to adapt better to humans (e.g. hybridization when a human or pig gets both it and a normal to them strain of the flu), although that could decrease its lethality.
Do you have any reason to believe we wouldn't?
My Google and Bing fu wasn't good enough to find anything about this, but I can't recall ever hearing of such a case, we can be sure the usual suspects would scream about it, and there's also the minor detail that mainland China has been one of the biggest sources for novel diseases. Which has been true for a very long time, e.g. the Black Death is thought to have come from China.
That is stupid. When the Chinese government falls it will be to a Chinese who becomes popular by blaming the existing Chinese government for it's failures, real or otherwise.
#butheremails
Problem is, that information leaking out of CHina, that they are not sharing with the world, is that it HAS started human2human transmission. Yeah, it was zoonotic, but if the leaks are true, then it has finally made the jump. This is why CDC is screaming about it. From what I have heard, ECDC and WHO has been quietly begging for samples from China, but that is getting nowhere.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's because we had so few cases (most in fact health workers evacuated from Africa, right? Was there even more than 1 secondary in the US?) we could actually treat them in the dozen or less beds in the 3 of the 4 facilities that can do this (the 4th was reserved for any healthcare workers in the first 3 who contracted it, which fortunately didn't happen).
If it gets dire in a First World country, you do essentially what the Third World does, pretend to treat it but isolate it, and let the chips fall where they may. Although as we're discovering, survivors can transmit for a long time, so we'd have to get even more strict with quarantine measures.
The point is that, while it wasn't "routine" (except this sort of thing actually is routine in Africa), it wasn't The Big One, more people get killed in a normal flu season, let alone a pandemic one. Because, you know, Ebola is not transmitted by aerosol.
A pandemic that's more like 1918, or worse, is what we're trying to forestall, with the PRC not cooperating at all for the last 5 years. Obviously because they knew Trump would be elected 3 years after it started breaking out in the PRC.
Yes, Ebola and flu are both zoonoses, but they are not obligately so. The majority of cases are due to human to human transmission. That's pretty much the template for an emergent infectious disease: they don't come from nowhere. They smolder away slowly in some isolated animal population for millennia, then suddenly hop onto a human migration path.
That's what happened to smallpox, which was an insignificant African rodent disease until around three thousand years ago, when evidence emerges for it in Egyptian human populations. Egyptian traders brought it into the Near East and possibly as far as India by 1500 years ago; by the 1st Century CE it was in China. Then a particularly virulent strain emerged in China a few centuries later. This kind of thing happens all the time in nature, but the more aggressive strain burns itself out. The difference here is that China had extensive trade connections that reached as far west as Rome and east to Melanesia, giving the more aggressive strain global scope. In the 8th cenutry it killed 1/3 of the population of Japan. From late Roman times to the middle ages it made periodic incursions into Europe, but only became endemic there after the Crusades.
Human trade tilts the evolutionary playing field in favor of aggressive infectious agents. Ebola never spread anywhere before 1976, but it must have been around. It just never had access to a network of cities with hundreds of thousands of people as it did in '76. When it took weeks to travel between villages or to cross the ocean, Ebola was never going anywhere. Today you can catch Ebola in the African bush and be in New York two days later, well before any symptoms emerge.
So while Ebola isn't something we should panic over, it's not an empty bogeyman either. The US needs forward defenses against such things, because Ebola is not the only one.
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