Re: China: H5N1 infected poultry -- symptomless

Thus spake Jill <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

"Charles Francis" <charles@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message >

It seems quite unlikely that the scientists did not know what they were
doing, more likely that they may have been misreported. Mostly these
things do not seem too well understood. New strains are just as likely
to be old strains previously undetected.

These viruses have a serious economic effect whereever they occur - even in
the Low PAthogenic form
They are not "undetected" for long!
They are extensively and intensely studied

All of that is accepted

They are not likely to do tests
or make accurate individual diagnoses unless people get ill,

This is entirely incorrect - the economic effect in the poultry industry
means that there is a great deal of attention paid to these strains of
viruses at all time
Its true that outside of the commercial poultry world and beyond the area of
impact each outbreak has, there is no media or public attention ever given
to them. Just like thousands of other animal diseases that occur at any one
time

Did you ever get tests done on your own birds? We did, in the early
days. It was clear that you can only expect a limited amount of
information back. You only pay for what actually helps you reduce the
economic impact. So long as the research is commercially driven, the
main thing of interest is how to control a particular outbreak. It just
isn't worth running every test in every instance. Even with what is
studied, stacks of stuff is bound to go unobserved.

I do not see how 1% infected birds showing no symptoms is consistent
with a disease which causes 90% mortality within days.

It is possible when the bird was tested at a market so due to be killed
within a few hours

Not really. Not 1% of 50,000 birds taken over a wide area and time span.
If this was the disease in anything like the form it is described in the
media, there would have to be a serious number of outbreaks to explain
that. Not none, as seems to be the case. Except for a few humans, of
course, which was suspicious in itself in an area where they weren't
having outbreaks.

It seems to me
there are three options: explain how this can be consistent, discredit
the study, or to take on board the possibility that previous data has
been misinterpreted or misunderstood. According to a general
understanding of how science works, I would say the third is by far the
most likely.

It may well be that there are further strains in China -- their actions in
the past few years would not discount this at all

If you really want to say the Chinese are to blame, you are onto as much
of a dead horse as slagging off the SVS in my view.

However considering how many people have studied the many different strains
and mutations in laboratories, farms of all sizes, in countries around the
world it is unlikely that this study [which seems crude at best] discredits
the work of several ceturies

You can't count several centuries. Not even one. Viruses were only by
the Russian biologist Dmitry Ivanovsky in 1892. Serious study of this
kind of virus is no more than about 50 yrs. It is an immensely obscure
and complicated area of science, in its infancy. Journals pick up on
scientists saying, from a perspective of scientific objectivity, "we
can't exclude this possibility" and blow it up out of all proportion,
ignoring all the other much more mundane and likely possibilities which
scientists also can't exclude.

Quite frankly, the more I find out about this virus the more boring and
less threatening I find it. People living in unhygienic conditions with
birds may be vulnerable. Intensive poultry farms in asia where hygiene
standards don't match our own are vulnerable. This is suddenly going to
wipe out much of the western world, or even just our chicken
populations. No more, I suspect, than some other virus we haven't even
identified yet.



Regards

--
Charles Francis
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