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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.
Oh, don't be so dramatic. Sure, China won't share the specimens with us, but all we have to do is get one of our friends to ask for it....
Oh, wait.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Just like his great negotiating skills have gotten Affordable Healthcare repealed, even with a majority in both the House and Senate.
And The Wall.
ayup.
The line "For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus from the United States" says the virus comes from the United States. What they mean is "For over a year, the Chinese government has withheld from the United States lab samples of a rapidly evolving influenza virus."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You must be new here.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Exactly this ... the US is pissing off friends and allies all over the place. And while most of them probably wouldn't withhold medical stuff, America has fewer friends these days they can count on ... because those friends are tired of being blamed for everything by the Cheeto in Chief.
I'm not actually surprised that China has said "fuck you" and decided not to play nicely.
I won't be surprised if other countries decide similar things.
This is one of those "be careful what you wish for" things. Trump is doing more damage to international relationships than will be easily remedied, so if suddenly other countries are a whole lot less enthusiastic about what the US wants, then we'll just get another bullshit cycle of Trump blaming everyone else.
At some point, if the diplomatic equivalent of "bummer dude, not my problem" happens, you'll know who to blame.
What we need is more walls to keep the birds from flying into this country and spreading flu.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If this turns out to be the next break out super-flu like the 1918 variety, every egg laying chicken in the world will be conscripted by every company in the world that can make flu vaccines so we maybe keep the death toll in the mere 100s of millions.
In the meanwhile, it's vital that the few research labs capable of mutating raw flu strains into ones that express the vital proteins while growing well in egg membranes get going. Especially since this is particularly difficult with avian flu strains, they're much more vicious towards chicken eggs.
The normal flu pattern is for the new pandemic strain to emerge in the Asian bird population and then make its way here to the US. Without getting it from China it is hard for us to manufacture enough of the vaccine in time.
This sounds like a job for James Bond.
#DeleteChrome
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.
Although it is true that the PRC has never really played nice with others (I do remember the SARS kerfuffle), it does not refute the fact that this ridiculous trade war is making a bad situation worse.
it's the year of the Twelve monkeys
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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?
My theory is this - China knows that if enough of their own population falls, they could be left vulnerable to invasion for regime change via outside sources. So if a pandemic takes them down, it's to their benefit the rest of the world become too debilitated to attempt such a move on China.
MAD = Mutually Assured Death
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
One thing greg missed is that this strain has always been in China. IOW, it has not been seen outside of China. That is the problem. Right now, leaks from inside china indicate that this has spread around China and it appears that it IS jumping from human2human. With a 40% mortality rate (i.e. if you get sick, 40% chance that you will die), this is not something to sneeze at, so to speak.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Citation needed, seeing as how per the report the withholding started before the trade war. If they've been doing it for 5 years as others have claimed, you ought to be blaming Obama for starting it.
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
The mortality rate is 39%. Luckily, human-to-human transmission so far is rare, it's usually poultry-to-human, but this could change as the virus evolves.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
It's also a very slow process, and each egg produces at most 3 doses. I was appalled with 2 'p's when the FDA tried to deny Protein Sciences a licence with the excuse the old methods were good enough. They use modern biotech, splicing the relevant antigen coding DNA into ... whatever, insect? cells that grow well in bioreactors to quickly mass produce the antigens, as I recall something like 100,000 doses in each run. Something like what they're doing would be the only real hope if we were facing a true death plague.
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.
This is why we should be investing more in modernizing flu vaccine manufacturing. If the next super flu is also highly infectious to chickens, they will be culled and burned.
We already have that.... One of them is a recombinant protein-based technique approved in 2013. As I understand it, the protein-based techniques are supposed to create a more consistent vaccine batch than eggs (due to the intermingling of egg DNA). Plus, some people are allergic to chicken eggs and are unable to take the flue vaccine created using the egg based techniques.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/protec...
For the PRC and our betters in the US, this has nothing to do with science, medicine, avoiding the possible deaths of 100s of millions to billions of lives, etc., the alpha and omega is politics. The usual stuff the PRC has always done with infectious diseases like SARS, and TDS here.
...you're suggesting that perhaps China is a SHITTY international actor, whose interests lie solely with its own people and geopolitical goals? /shock.
For all of you who think Pax Americana has been odious and oppressive, brace yourselves. You haven't the faintest idea what it's going to be like with a TRULY racist, TRULY self-interested, TRULY ethnocentric hegemon.
-Styopa
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.
From memory, and what I was just able to look up, there's 3 or so labs in the US that do this, St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, New York Medical College in Westchester County (maybe the top place, or maybe they just get the best press since a woman runs it), and maybe the CDC, all mustache twirling evil non-profit academic labs.
Your worldview is severely stunted and parochial.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's also a very slow process, and each egg produces at most 3 doses. I was appalled with 2 'p's when the FDA tried to deny Protein Sciences a licence with the excuse the old methods were good enough. They use modern biotech, splicing the relevant antigen coding DNA into ... whatever, insect? cells that grow well in bioreactors to quickly mass produce the antigens, as I recall something like 100,000 doses in each run. Something like what they're doing would be the only real hope if we were facing a true death plague.
The FDA is a scam and everyone knows it. It's job is to protect their own jobs first, big pharmas profits second, and Americans a distant third. If they cared about helping Americans we would be able to buy drugs from Canada still.
To be honest, I wish that I would hear more. Gov, like businesses, have their own communication channels. the big difference is that within the gov, you have the majority of ppl that want nothing to do with the partisanship, but just want to work. However, that was not the case for what I saw. And it sounds like things have gotten worse, but I suspect that it is more a case of old age no longer looking past the BS. But who knows.
On a side note, back when reagan got in and was screaming about Herpes, we knew about HIV (actually AIDs, still had not IDed the virus though knew it was carried in the 'homosexual' community, and suspicion was that it was a retrovirus). Had tried right at tail end of carter to get him to drop some 500M on epidemiology for this. We knew that at that time, it could not be stopped, but also knew that less than 1000 infected (later on, determined that it was less than 200 at that time). They wanted to shut down all gay bathhouses and try to really slow it down.
Carter had already lost so his attitude was to move all decisions to next admin. reagan shot it down. Not once, but multiple times. And last attempt was my boss going to DC and talking to him. When he came back, he said that we would have nothing to do with AIDs, Nothing to do with Republican Party and had turned from a major backer of reagan to HATING the man. And this was a mormon bishop who was well known for being one of the top virologists in the world.
Have to say that I have lost 2 cousins to HIV so to this day, I am also not a republican and esp not a reagan fan.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Canada has one of the highest drug costs in the world, so it isn't like we get much of a discount. The way things are going, we'll be back to pre-NAFTA and manufacturing our own drugs. That will get the pharmaceutical companies attention, which will turn on Trump. Right now they're trying to do the TPP bullshit, but with NAFTA instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
H7N9 is just a general subtype of the influenza A species, here we're talking about a particular strain in the PRC. New strains are generated all the time, especially in the PRC where men, birds and pigs live in very close proximity, and after one of them causes a pandemic, it's subtype generally becomes a or the dominant subtype till there's another pandemic of another subtype. E.g. historically, the 1918 flu was H1N1, and the recent 2009 swine derived flu was also of that subtype. In between, H3N2 for example caused the 1968 pandemic, and became established alongside H1N1 (all this partly from memory and double checked a bit with Wikipedia). There are many, many other type A subtypes.
Breaking the largest trade block in the world by breaking treaties (as if Canada is a security threat) is something especially when the guy breaking them doesn't even know anything. He actually thinks Mexico is the US's largest trade partner and doesn't consider the huge advantage the US has with services negating the couple of percent advantage Canada has in material goods currently.
There's also the softwood treaty that America breaks regularly, driving up housing costs for Americans.
And then there is bringing the worst part of the TPP under NAFTA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Perhaps Japan can or is sharing some of theirs: http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news...
More likely than your conspiracy imagination is that the many flus start in S. China where contact between humans and animals is less than sterile...pigs and chickens. The PRC, knowing they have no real legitimacy, is reluctant to allow that sort of bad press come out if they can avoid it. The fact that those diseases could kill millions never enters into the calculation.
And they aren't worried about invasion. Japan cannot and wouldn't want China. Russia cannot even manage their own country. There is no one else. Also, there isn't much China has that anyone wants except access to their domestic markets. And no invasion could supply that.
Plus wild guesswork, which is often wrong, i.e it was mostly so for the prevalent circulating A strain or strains in the last season's Northern hemisphere vaccine. The 6 months is to create new seed strains if needed, and to produce millions of doses in the old fashioned way with eggs, max 3 doses per egg ... and for the elderly, they're now preferring to use 4 times the normal dosage to better insure a sufficient immune system reaction. Plus you need to do this 3 to 4 times, one each for the A H1N1 and H3N2 strains, then for 1 or 2 less lethal but still bad B strains.
As for my knowledge, I've got a strong for a non-specialist biology and medical background (major was chemistry), and studied this intensively when the 2009 swine flu pandemic happened.