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China has just reported yet another outbreak of bird flu. This time in a northern province.

Last week a lorry driver contracted H5N1 bird flu in a town in the south of China, very close to Hong Kong, and China recently suffered an outbreak in a remote region to its East.

Of course China is a vast country, however there is much poverty amongst its rural population, so domestic poultry plays an important role in local economies. I’ve not been to China, but I imagine that rural people live in close proximity to their poultry as they do in other disadvantaged countries. The fact that China is suffering these outbreaks in a number of seperate areas, must be of real concern, as the lives of many rural people could be blighted by this diease.

Chinese officials are acting quickly to contain these outbreaks, but it seems that as they deal with one outbreak, another occurs somewhere else in the country.

Lets hope that they can contain these outbreaks effectively, but you can’t help wondering if we are seeing the start of bird flu becoming endemic throughout China.

Research shows that cats are susceptible to H5N1 bird flu and many have died from the disease in Asia.

I guess it was inevitable that the finger of suspicion would point to our feline friends - afterall they enjoy hunting and will find a dying bird easy prey. Having had a nibble at a bird riddled with the H5N1 virus, they then come into our home and decide that they want to be our friend again.

Their viral “treat” becomes our viral nightmare.

There is no vaccine to defend cats againt avian flu and, in the UK at least, no one is talking about a mass cull of cats (imagine the outcry if that was a reality), however the study does raise concerns about how mammals with close ties to humans can put us at risk from a potent virus such as H5N1.

I received an email from a visitor at SurvivingFlu.com today that got me thinking.

The sender of the email was asking for my views about stock-piling food and provisions for when the pandemic engulfs us.

It made me remember my thoughts in January of this year when I really did feel that the world was about to be hit by a bird flu pandemic.� Of course running SurvivingFlu means that I’ve learnt a huge amount more about avian influenza now and I’ve seen how it is spreading throughout the world.

The more I’ve learnt about bird flu over the last six months, the more convinced I’ve become that H5N1 bird flu will not be the next pandemic - its been around for a long time now and hasn’t made the evolutionary leap into a human transmissable killer.

Then along came the Indionesian cluster of bird flu cases.� It is likely that human transmission was playing a part there.

My confidence in our safety from the disease was shaken.� Maybe, I thought, this is the spark that could create a world wide pandemic.

However those seven cases were contained within a tight cluster and the surrounding population was not infected with H5N1.

So I did wobble, albeit briefly, but I still remain reasonably confident that the next influenza pandemic, whenever it comes along, will not be from the current H5N1 strain.

Just when bird flu news was settling down into some sort of routine, along comes the news that pigs in Sumatra have tested positive for the H5N1 virus.

Not humans, pigs - so why the concern?

Pigs are often quoted as being the “mixing bowl” where the H5N1 bird virus can intermingle with a human influenza virus to create a mutant strain that is transmissable between humans. The fact that H5N1 has now been found in the “mixing bowl” is a major concern, to say the least.

There is a chance that this is the catalyst that could trigger a global bird flu pandemic, but of course, there is just as much chance that a variant strain emerging from the “mixing bowl” could also be non pathogenic or of low pathogenicity ie not very harmful to humans.

Of course no variant strain may emerge from the pigs in Sumatra, howwever the fact that there is a cluster of human fatalities from H5N1 bird flu nearby, raises its own concerns. The World Health Organisation cannot, at this time, rule out the possibility that these victims caught the disease from each other ie the H5N1 virus was transmitted from human to human.

Its too early to get a clear picture about what is happening in Sumatra, but these snippetts of news seem to me, to move the bird flu story along a bit further - in a direction that could be concerning.

It’s interesting to see that several European countries are removing the bird flu restrictions they put in place a few months ago.

I guess this is to be expected as the migration season has now finished so the threat of wild birds spreading avian flu into other European countries and the United States has now diminished.

Of course, bird flu can be spread by other means, however I would expect to see the interest in this disease slowly decrease as we progress through the summer. I expect bird flu will still occupy some of the news footage, with its continued presence in Africa and Asia, but if it is contained in the western world, then we will start to forget about it.

That is until the next flu and migratory season.

Bird flu isn’t going away, it will still be with us next autumn and early spring and I expect we will be hearing about new outbreaks of this damaging disease.

Well I guess it’s happened sooner than I thought - a movie about a bird flu pandemic already!

In the movie, the H5N1 virus is brought to the United States by a businessman from Hong Kong. The virus then follows the worst case scenario by passing from chickens to humans and then between humans, causing a pandemic.

It’s only a movie, but I wonder what effect it will have. There is still plenty of ignorance around about bird flu and it’s risk to humans. Showing a worst case scenario, presumably for dramatic effect, seems a bit mistimed, as it could easily height anxiety about this disease.

I realise that screening a movie like this once bird flu has gone away, would have little impact and publicity as we would by then know that bird flu wasn’t the cause of the next flu pandemic, however it should be made very clear by the producers that this film is portraying a worst case scenario which will almost certainly not happen.

News that an experimental vaccine is successfully protecting mice from the H5N1 bird flu virus shows how much research is being undertaken to find effective protection against this deadly disease.

This research must bring other benefits too. Reading the article, we learn that the vaccine may potentially protect animals from other influenza viruses too.

Of course what happens in mice cannot be directly translated to the efficacy of a vaccine in humans, but it is a start. The scientists are learning more about how the H5N1 interacts with animal cells and how it can therefore might be stopped in its tracks. They are getting closer to reducing the threat of this virulent virus.

But the scientists are doing more than that.

By learning more about H5N1, they are also learning more about influenza viruses in general. Better vaccines for other forms of influenza will almost certainly be created from this rush to stop H5N1 and that is good news.

It is noticeable that the number of news items about bird flu is decreasing at the moment.

When preparing the news today for survivingflu.com, there were really only two news items that seemed of interest to the growing numbers of people who are now visiting that site every day.

This is good news, as it means that there have not been any major new outbreaks recently, and even better, that there have not been any more human cases of H5N1 infection.

Of course it doesn’t mean that bird flu is going away, it just means that we are in a welcome lull phase at the moment. We have been warned that H5N1 will be with us for a number of years so we just have to get used to it being a part of our lives.

So the United Kingdom wakes up to another bird flu story - this time a commercial flock of 35,000 chickens is found to be infected with an H7 variant of avian influenza.

Suddenly these “H” and “N” letters take on a significance that very few of us realised six months ago. Even with my scientific background, I had no idea about all these different variants of the influenza virus, yet these small differences in the surface properties of the virus make huge differences to its lethality and species specificity.

This is an excellent article about the various forms of influenza viruses, but in essence, an influenza virus binds to a specific cell with its “H” surface proteins and then blows a hole in that cell with its “N” proteins.

Like a lock and key, the configuration of a virus’s H proteins (H5, H7 etc) determine which cells can bind the virus. This is why the H7 avian flu virus found in the UK bears no threat to humans - that virus cannot lock onto our cells - its H7 “key” doesn’t fit our cell “locks”.

A few months ago, the discovery of a variant of avian flu in a poultry farm would have gone almost unnoticed, however today it is different.

We want to know about it, yet we are relieved by those H’s and N’s. In this case they signify a virus that is bad news for chickens, but not bad news for humans.

I am beginning to wonder if avian flu is predominantly a disease that affects asian countries.

We read today that Hungary is removing its bird flu restrictions as no new cases have been found. Scotland, too, no longer has any avian flu restrictions, and the small outbreaks in France and Germany seem to have been contained very effectively.

Elsewhere, though, both Pakistan and India are suffering serious outbreaks of bird flu and Afghanistan now has it throughout the whole country.

If I am correct, then it probably is not down to weather and environmental factors, but down to the social and economic conditions in these asian countries, notably in rural areas.

Poverty forcing people to live in close proximity to their chickens, markets overflowing with thousands of live fowl, and lower standards of animal care make these countries a breeding ground for the H5N1 virus.

These conditions don’t exist in other, more affluent countries, making an outbreak more easy to contain.

Of course, many african countries share similar conditions to those in Asia, however we are hearing less news about avian influenza in those countries, other than Egypt, and I’m not sure why that is.

For Westerners this might well be good news, however we must remember that bird flu is having a major economic impact in those asian countries infected with it. I have been receiving some emails from people in Indian and Pakistan who testify to this.

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