Chinese health authorities have confirmed that a 19-year-old woman has died of the H5N1 bird flu virus, according to the
. The report appeared in a story from
. Experts are worried the virus could mutate into a form that may be transmitted from person to person, but authorities say the woman who died had recently purchased ducks at a market near Beijing.
vaccine in boys and young men,
. The HPV vaccine protects against
.
Even in a bad Read the rest of this entry »

Antiviral drugs used to treat the human flu aren’t likely to hold off a pandemic outbreak of bird flu because of the virus’ ability to mutate, new research suggests.
University of Colorado at Boulder scientists analyzed nearly 700 avian flu genome sequences from bird, cat and human hosts, discovering about one-third of them had mutations to resist the effects of popular flu drugs.
The research was focused on a class of antiviral drugs no longer Read the rest of this entry »

Stuff the bird, not yourself
02:41 PM CST on Sunday, November 23, 2008
Every Thanksgiving, you head to the table with the best intentions not to overeat.
And every Thanksgiving, you leave the table feeling more bloated than a puffed-up turkey.
We talked to Lona Sandon, assistant professor of clinical nutrition at UT Southwestern Medical Center, about how to right-size your plate for a Thanksgiving feast that won’t Read the rest of this entry »

By Kevin Myrick, Rome News-Tribune Staff Writer
made its way to Rome today.
Owen Kinney, along with 20 other volunteers, were out in a 15-mile radius, the center of which is Floyd Medical Center, trying to find everything from a common cardinal to a yellow bellied sapsucker.
Kinney, a science teacher at the Darlington School, brought along a couple of his students and volunteers to the mountain campus at Berry College to see what they could Read the rest of this entry »

H5N1 already has been a disaster for poultry farmers in Asia. Public health officials estimate that as many as half a billion fowl have been killed by the virus or culled to contain its spread, causing enormous economic strain and food shortages. But the bigger fear has always been that H5N1 would give rise to a human pandemic like the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
It was in Hong Kong in Read the rest of this entry »

JAKARTA (AFP) — Two Indonesians living near the capital Jakarta have died of bird flu, the health ministry said on its website Wednesday.
Separately, both went to a market, fell sick in December with high fever, a cough and breathing difficulties and were sent to hospital, according to a statement on the website.
A five-year-old girl named Nad from Bekasi district east of Jakarta died on January 2, and a 29-year-old woman named Sut from Read the rest of this entry »

TAIYUAN, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) — A two-year-old girl who was confirmed Saturday to be infected with bird flu in north China’s Shanxi Province is still in critical condition, local health authorities said Monday.
The girl surnamed Peng is being treated at the Fourth People’s Hospital in the provincial capital of Taiyuan. “The patient is in critical condition, but her vital signs are normal,” said a Shanxi Provincial Health Department spokesman.
The Read the rest of this entry »

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — An FDA advisory panel has agreed that H5N1 avian flu vaccine should continue to be tested in pediatric populations to prepare for a pandemic.
In 2007, the FDA approved the vaccine from manufacturer sanofi pasteur solely to stockpile it in case of a pandemic. (See:
As part of that approval, the agency directed sanofi-pasteur to conduct a trial in children.
The Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, Read the rest of this entry »

BEIJING (AP) — A 21-year-old woman in central China has been infected by the H5N1 strain of bird flu in the country’s eighth reported case of the disease this year, the Health Ministry said, as Hong Kong reported three birds had died of bird flu.
The woman, a farmer surnamed Shu in the central province of Hunan, fell ill Jan. 23 after handling poultry that died from virus, the ministry said on its Web site late Saturday without giving more Read the rest of this entry »

, it’s time to think of how best to be safe, even if this latest case of the virus doesn’t spark the long-feared global pandemic.
“We shouldn’t be complacent,” says Kathy Neuzil, an infectious-disease expert who specializes in flu through her work with the PATH global initiative and as a member of the pandemic flu task force for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. While there haven’t been many human cases in the past two years, Neuzil says, Read the rest of this entry »