August, 2007 : Bird Flu-Infected Chickens Fed To Pigs In Bali

Is This Where HumanBirdPig Flu Began?

By Darryl Mason

The World Health Organisation rejected a hopeless campaign by The Orstrahyun to have the new swine flu virus officially titled Pork Throat. Instead, the WHO has gone with Influenza A H1N1 as its official reference term for the new influenza virus, which contains the genes of human, bird and pig flu strains.

This retitling has led to an immediate downturn of interest amongst the public in the pandemic potential of the virus, which may have been part of the intention of giving this bizarre influenza such an academic, book lurnin' name.

But, to shift into serious news mode, how did strains of pig, human and bird flu first meet up, and start swapping genes in order to mutate into Influenza A H1N1?

There are theories, but nothing solid. Yet.

A possible source, or at least a scenario where such an unlikely blending of influenza viruses could have taken place, can be found in this report on two human deaths from the H5N1 (bird flu) virus back in September, 2007 :

Suyono said there had been sick chickens around the woman's house and many had died suddenly in recent weeks.

"The villagers didn't burn the carcasses. Instead they buried them or fed them to pigs," Suyono added.

Contact with sick fowl is the most common way for humans to contract the H5N1 virus.

Human to human transmission of the bird flu virus was believed to be occuring in Bali, by August 2007, though it did not prove to be highly transmissible, and further infections were usually contained within Balinese families living amongst bird-flu infected poultry, or those caring for bird-flu infected relatives.

You'll probably see this story in next week's Sunday Telegraph as well.

Study : 1 In 3 Doctors Would Abandon Patients During Bird Flu Pandemic

It's a fascinating question of ethics in a debate that has barely begun : You're a GP, there's a bird flu pandemic unfolding, the deadly virus is as easy to catch as normal flu and the dead are piling up. Would you stay and continue to treat the sick and the dying, or would you do a runner to save yourself, and your family from infection?

According to this story, 1/3 of doctors surveyed answered they would place their own health and safety above that of their patients in the event of a bird flu pandemic :

While health experts continue to warn the world remains ill-prepared for a global outbreak, mass absenteeism of doctors has emerged as the latest threat that might exacerbate a crisis.

Researchers who interviewed GPs about how they would cope with a global outbreak were surprised to find nearly one-third "felt that their responsibility to themselves to stay healthy and to protect their families outweighed their responsibility to continue working".

Independent ethics expert Paul Komesaroff, director of the Monash Centre for the Study of Ethics in Medicine and Society, and ethics convenor for the Royal Australian College of Physicians, says there is no ethical obligation on doctors to put themselves in harm's way while doing their job.

"However, it's also part of the tradition of medicine that people in fact do that," Professor Komesaroff said.

How doctors and hospital staff react, and act, during a bird flu pandemic is a subject I'm planning to explore in some of the short stories I'm writing that will form the prequel to ED Day : Dead Sydney novel, the online novel I finished a few months ago about a bird flu pandemic that kills millions of Australians.

Doctors may have ethics, but they're still human, and many have families. The flight response to get the hell away from an infected city as quickly as possible would be all but impossible to resist.

Indonesia : 13 Adults, Children Hospitalised, Quarantined With Suspected Bird Flu Symptoms

UPDATE : 13 Indonesian Villagers Cleared Of Bird Flu Virus Infection

Freedom Or A Return To Prison Colony Days?

In the latest chapter of my serialized online novel, ED Day (about life in Sydney after a bird flu pandemic kills millions) some of the survivors are finding themselves in growing conflict with the man who has appointed himself their leader. Entire streets of Sydney are now burning, with no way for the survivors to fight the fires, after an act of arson.

The narrator, Paul, is now close to deciding whether he will stay and help the survivors he has come think of as family, or if he will leave the city and make his way to the Blue Mountains, where he knows his girlfriend waits for him.

From ED Day, Chapter Sixteen :

All the time we were talking, and arguing, Greenfingers had said nothing. He'd sat with us for a while when we were drinking harbour-cooled beers and then he’d gone back to his work. Outside the greenhouse, he was re-potting a huge variety of vegetable seedlings. Mostly salad greens, but also more varieties of tomatoes, beans and root vegetables. The huge garden beds of the Botanic Gardens, now mostly stripped clean of all those foreign decorative flowers and shrubs was filling up with Greenfingers' food crops. The soil was magnificent, rich, fertile (or so he told me). The ashes and crushed bones from the thousands of corpses that had gone through the funeral pyres were now feeding the fruit and vegetables that would soon be supplying enough food to help keep a few hundred people alive.

But as I watched Greenfingers working away tonight, almost oblivious to the towers of smoke and flame rising above the city, I wondered what sort of society would be living here in a year’s time, when most of the crops would be turning out a steady supply of fresh food.

Would this society twelve months from now be the small enclave of mostly free survivors that we’d had for the past two months, or would it be more like a return to the prison colony that gave birth to this nation more than 200 years ago, on the very same harbour foreshore where we now live?

Go Here To Read The Latest Chapter Of ED Day

Go Here To Read ED Day From The Beginning

Note : Thanks to all the readers of my blogs who have sent me e-mails of support, criticism and encouragement in the past four months that I've been publishing the chapters of ED Day
online. I will be able to make the finished dead tree novel available for sale through this and my other blog sites, and I hope to get the price for a copy down to around $20. The finished novel will, however, always be available online to read for free.

Right now I expect to have the last chapter finished and online by late February. The first print run should get underway by mid-March.

Thanks again.

The Lambs Of Temptation

The second chapter of the online novel, ED Day, is now up. It's free to read and download and new chapters will be published three to four times a week :

ED Day : Chapter Two


ED Day is the story of how 300 survivors of a massive bird flu pandemic, that kills millions in Sydney alone, rebuild their lives and society in the city centre. They clean up the streets, stockpile food and water, but they are 'trapped'. Outside of the city, something terrible is happening, but so far the survivors only have glimpses of what is going on.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter Two :

...nearly everyone is hanging for fresh meat. A big fat juicy steak smothered with fried onions and sauce is only the stuff of fantasies now. Lots of fantasies.

Nobody yet has snuck into the pen where we keep the sheep and lambs we rescued from the petting zoos in Darling Harbour. Butt some of the survivors get this weird look in their eyes when they’re standing around watching the sheep and lambs crop the grass in Hyde Park.

I probably do, too. There's about sixty legs of lamb walking around the park most afternoons, with Preacher as their shepherd. Trader was drooling over those lambs one day last week, and he pointed out that some of the lambs were snacking on the wild mint that's popping up all over the park.

"Look!" he said. "They're just asking for it!"

Go Here To Read Chapter One Of ED Day

Dead Sydney

By Darryl Mason

This will either be one hell of an adventure, or an absolute disaster. But it's too late to back out now.

From today I will be publishing three or four short chapters a week from my new novel 'ED Day' on a dedicated blog. That is, I'll be posting chapters from the new novel I'm still writing.

The chapters are free for you to read, download and even comment on, if you're motivated or inspired to do so by what you read. And I hope that you are. If you've ever wanted to be a book critic, before the book is finished, here's your chance. Go for it.

I'll be posting chapter two over the weekend. Another two chapters will go up during the next week.

The novel, written in the form of a journal, tells the story of how 300 people survive a massive bird flu pandemic that wipes out millions of people in Sydney. Some of the survivors are convinced there was nothing natural, or accidental, about the pandemic that has killed everyone they knew and everyone they loved.

As the story unfolds, you will learn more about how the pandemic came about, how the survivors met, and how they go about rebuilding their lives and society.

A quiet, still Sydney where humanity has all but disappeared is a scary place, but I like, and believe in, the idea that that survivors of such a near completely fatal pandemic as portrayed in ED Day really would help each other, and take care of each other, and get on with rebuilding their lives and society, as best they can.

As Paul, the leader character of ED Day, says in Chapter Two (or maybe Chapter Three), you can only sit around in your commandeered penthouse getting hammered on free 40 year old whiskey for so long before you want to get back to work and get busy doing something worthwhile. Get busy helping people.

But the world of ED Day is not going to be full of kindness and caring and sharing.

Far from it.

There's something going on outside of Sydney that none of them are even remotely aware of, but I think they're going to find out about it before we get too far into the story.

There are dark forces at work amongst the ruins of a once bustling Sydney society. And for many of those who survived the pandemic, the worst is a long way from over.


Writing the novel this way may prove to be a good idea, or an extremely bad one. Whatever. It will be a writing adventure and that's what I'm most interested in right now.

You can read more about why I'm doing this, and how it came about over at Your New Reality.

Or you can just go straight to the first chapter and start reading :

ED Day - Chapter One : The Silence In The City

Enjoy.

Is This How The Flu Pandemic Begins?

Virulent Flu Epidemic Fills Australian Hospitals


UPDATE : ABC News Australia has reported this evening that a 29 year old woman and her five year old child have died from suspected bird flu in Bali in the past week. A two year old girl, from the same small Balinese village, has been hospitalised with bird flu symptoms.

A two year old Sydney boy is believed to be the latest victim of the deadly Influenza A virus.

Below is one of the absolute nightmare scenarios for the hundreds of doctors, scientists and medical specialists in Australia who've spent the past three years preparing for an influenza pandemic in Australia :

An Indonesian travels to Bali for holidays, or business. They feel a bit under the weather on the short flight to Bali, but not enough to visit a doctor, or a hospital, when they arrive in Denpasar.

Within days of arriving in Bali, they fall seriously ill, high fever, lungs rapidly filling with fluid. By the time they get to a hospital, it's too late. The next morning, the person is dead. Tests confirm that the person died from the bird flu virus, and the media carries stories about huge numbers of chickens dying from the virus in the dead Indonesian's hometown.

In the three or four days before the person died in Bali, they moved through dense, tourist packed beachside suburbs, like Kuta, coming into contact with people from all over the world.
One of those tourists was a young Australian from Queensland.

Before he left for his holiday, the Australian had been feeling terrible, like many of his friends and co-workers, he had been struck down by a particularly virulent influenza virus. Not wanting to cancel his holiday, and miss all the fun, he loaded up on Codrals and made his flight. In Kuta, still feeling rundown and bone sore from the influenza, the Australia walks past the H5N1-infected Indonesian, who sneezes in the Australian's vicinity.

The Australian tourist inhales some of the sneeze cloud of H5N1-dusted moisture from the Indonesian. Inside the Australian's lungs, or in his throat, the H5N1 virus meets Influenza A. They breed, they mutate, they swap genes, becoming an easily transmissible version of the bird flu virus.

On the flight home, after a week's holiday in Bali, the Australian is feeling really, really sick. He just wants to get home and get to bed. He sneezes on the plane, into his hands, then staggers to the toilet, touching seats and surfaces along the way, looking for privacy to give his nose a good blow.

Other passengers heading to Australia breathe in his bird flu-infected sneeze droplets, or touch the same chairs and surfaces that he touched, leaving behind the virulent virus which can now survive outside the human body for hours, perhaps even days.

Other passengers rub their tired eyes, after touching the seats the sick tourist touched, and the bird flu virus infects them, too.

When the plane from Bali arrives back in Sydney, the passengers split up for flights on to Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, the United States, England, Germany. Dozens of people on the flight picked up the H5N1-Influenza A hybrid virus and will be sick, and close to death, within days. But before they are sick enough to require isolation, or treatment with anti-virals, they will each come into vicinity or personal contact with hundreds of people. The now easily transmissible bird flu virus spreads across the world.

Back in Australia, the human bird flu pandemic is already underway. Within 10 days, a few dozen will have died from the virus. Within a month, the fatalities will top a few hundred. Within two months, a few thousand. By the time, the deadly viral spread is called a pandemic, tens of thousands of Australians have become infected, if not hundreds of thousands.

That's the kind of realistic 'what if?' scenarios that helped to shape the planned response by federal and state government and health agencies to potential human bird flu infections in Australia, and what steps would be taken to contain the spread of H5N1, and to disable as much as possible the growth of a bird flu pandemic.

Here's a round-up of news relating to the above, from today's headlines :

Australian health officials are on the alert amid fears a fatal strain of bird flu may have spread to Bali, after the deaths of a woman and her daughter on the holiday island.

Doctors are awaiting results of tests on a woman and her daughter, who are believed to have been killed by the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus on the Indonesian resort island.

In Australia, a spokeswoman for the Federal Department of Health and Ageing said the "situation is being closely monitored".

From Reuters :

Samples from an Indonesian woman who died on Sunday on the resort island of Bali have tested positive for bird flu after an initial test, officials said on Monday.

A second laboratory test, which is now being conducted, is necessary to confirm the initial findings, Joko Suyono of the health ministry's bird flu centre said.

The woman, 29, from a village in the district of Jembrana in western Bali, was suffering from a high fever before dying of multiple organ failure, said Ken Wirasandi, a doctor at the Sanglah hospital in the Balinese capital Denpasar.

Suyono said there had been sick chickens around the woman's house and many had died suddenly in recent weeks.

"The villagers didn't burn the carcasses. Instead they buried them or fed them to pigs," Suyono added.

Contact with sick fowl is the most common way for humans to contract the H5N1 virus.

The woman had started showing symptoms more than a week ago, but was only admitted to hospital six days later.

From the Courier Mail, under the headline 'Killer Flu Claims Another Two Lives' :

Another two adults, both in their 30s and both from Queensland, have died after developing flu-like symptoms.

Queensland's Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young will hold a news conference at 3.30pm.

The deaths follow those of a four-year-old boy and 37-year-old father-of-three Glen Kindness in Queensland in the past two weeks after they developed influenza A.

Premier Peter Beattie said today the Queensland Government would make its stockpile of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu available to ensure everyone who needed the drug would have access to it.

The Premier said he would be asking Prime Minister John Howard to follow Queensland's lead to provide stocks of Tamiflu from the national stockpile to residents of aged homes.

Releasing Tamiflu to cope with an Influenza A epidemic is not unusual, but because the threat of a bird flu pandemic is so real, and so possibly devastating, there is a reluctance to use limited stocks of anti-virals to fight the yearly outbreaks of influenza.

Mr Beattie may be acting with caution, fearing further deaths, or he may be aware of information not yet made public, from which he shaped his decision to dig into the Tamiflu stockpile and to ask the prime minister to do the same.

While the latest deaths of children and people under 40 years old from Influenza A are making headlines, the media has dropped all references to the already high death toll the influenza epidemic has clocked up so far, as this report from July 22, in Sydney's Daily Telegraph details :

AT least 150 elderly Sydneysiders have died from the most serious flu outbreak to hit the city in four years. The victims have all died this month after suffering complications, mainly pneumonia, caused by the influenza A virus, a Health Department report reveals.

Babies and young children have also been hard hit. Hundreds have required specialist treatment in hospitals.

Although the elderly are particularly at risk in winter, he said the full extent of cases was not known as many people did not seek medical treatment for the influenza A virus.

At Sydney Children's Hospital at Randwick, the number of youngsters at the emergency department with viral infections has soared by 200 per cent compared to last year.

Respiratory illnesses have risen by 70 per cent.

Doctors in Sydney held an urgent teleconference with West Australian colleagues last week following the death of a fourth child there.

So severe and prevalent are the cases of influenza A and bronchiolitis that babies such as seriously ill Liam Wolthers had to be placed in an adolescent ward until a bed became available at the Randwick hospital.

What began as a runny nose quickly escalated to breathing difficulties. He was rushed to hospital where he required oxygen for six days.

Dr Adam Jaffe, head of the respiratory department at Sydney Children's Hospital, said there had been a peak in cases of bronchiolitis and viral pneumonias compared to previous years.

In WA, doctors are desperately trying to discover the reasons behind the four child deaths.

The media is now focusing primarily on the deaths of children from Influenza A. Why have they dropped all references to the figure cited above of more than the 150 elderly people who have died in the past few months?

MORE TO COME...


Balinese Believed To Have Fed H5N1 Infected Chickens To Pigs - Bird Flu Experts Horrified

Go Here For The Latest News From The Bird Flu Blog

Government Estimates 148,000 Australians Could Be Hospitalised During Bird Flu Pandemic

Study : Severe Shortage Of Protective Masks Will Increase Spread Of Pandemic Bird Flu

(this post originally appeared on 'The Bird Flu Blog')

A new study has concluded that Australia faces a more severe threat of a wider bird flu pandemic due to a severe lack of the most basic protection wear for the hospital and medical staff who will have to care for its victims.

From the ABC :

Stockpiles of special masks for hospital staff to wear while treating bird flu patients are likely to be inadequate and quickly run out in a pandemic, an Australian study suggests.

Insufficient stocks of protective wear will lead to more people becoming infected, depleting stockpiles of antiviral drugs sooner, it concludes.

"Until now all the fuss has been about drugs but the crucial thing is if there's an epidemic, masks will protect the drug stockpile," says society president and senior investigator Professor Lindsay Grayson.

"The study shows if we run out of masks, a lot more people are going to need drugs," adds Grayson, who is the director of infectious diseases at Austin Health.

Guidelines recommend high-filtration masks for healthcare workers in close contact with infected patients.

The Federal Government's national stockpile has at least two million of the masks, plus at least 40 million standard surgical masks for the projected 1-7.5 million people who will attend GPs, clinics and outpatients.

The Government projects a maximum 148,000 infected people may be hospitalised.

The Australian government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars stockpiling anti-viral medications that are expected to expire shortly. Unlike anti-virals, the report points out, protective wear like high-filtration masks do not have a use-by date.

Go To 'The Bird Flu Blog' For The Latest News

Bird Flu Scare At Sydney Airport

Emergency Response Plan Goes Into Action

UPDATE : BIRD FLU SCARE OVER

The man taken to a Sydney hospital with a suspected case of bird flu is instead feeling the effects of a burst bag of drugs in his stomach, reports Yahoo7News.

The 36-year-old arrived from Vietnam this morning and remained in isolation while he underwent tests which revealed he had swallowed heroin.

The passenger was allegedly a drug mule, carrying a stomach full of heroin-filled condoms which burst mid-flight.

It is understood he was unconscious for several hours during the flight before being taken to St. George Hospital, in Sydney's south.

The man's wife claimed her husband had recently visited a farm in Vietnam and eaten chicken.

Fellow passengers were initially quarantined but have now been allowed to leave.

That the other passengers on the flight were "initially quarantined" is a fact not revealed in any of the media reports earlier today, as I highlighted at the bottom of the original story below.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Earlier....

As a major centre of international travel, Sydney has one of the most comprehensive response plans to the arrival of bird flu in the world. Today, the Bird Flu Response Plan got a full workout.

A man travelling from Vietnam to Sydney was already ill before he boarded the plane. Passengers have told ABC news that he was unconscious for most of the trip. The pilot, as required by law, radioed ahead to say there was an extremely ill person on board. He was taken off the flight at Sydney International Airport, by bio-suited medical staff, and taken to St George Hospital, which has a quarantine facility specifically set up, last year, to deal with international travellers who might be sick with bird flu.

The man is reported to have admitted he and his wife had visited a poultry farm in Vietnam, shortly before travelling to Australia, and they had eaten chicken at the farm.

All the passengers on the flight in question have had their personal details collected, but have not been tested for bird flu, or isolated, as the Bird Flu Response plan would require were any of them also showing signs of infection. It appears none were.

It is highly unlikely that the man, under quarantine for the time being, is carrying an infectious form of bird flu. That he is sick with the bird flu virus has not yet been ruled out, but the health authorities are not concerned enough to have quarantined all passengers and flight crew, as per the response plan.

The man is currently being tested for the H5N1 virus at St George's Hospital.

From smh.com.au :

Jeremy McAnulty, director of communicable diseases at NSW Health, said the man was in his 30s and is being assessed by clinicians in an isolation ward at a Sydney hospital.

"We understand that the person was relatively well but had some flu-like symptoms potentially in the last few days - the history is a little bit vague," Dr McAnulty told a media conference.

"[He] was on the plane and then was difficult to rouse in waking up in the morning time as [the plane] was about to land in Sydney.

"For that reason and the reason of a history of flu-like illness and being in Vietnam, in a place particularly around chickens, we wanted to exclude the possibility of avian influenza."

He said further information since then suggested it was "very unlikely to be avian influenza".

Under Australian quarantine laws all airlines are required to report ill passengers to the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service prior to landing.

But then there's this from a news.com.au story :

"This person has a recent history of being in an area with chickens in Vietnam and of having a previous influenza-like illness," the spokeswoman said.

The avian influenza virus is expected to have the highest chance of mutating into a pandemic-ready form when a person already suffering from flu-virus infection comes into contact with the H5N1 virus (most likely from infected birds) and then the two viruses merge.

Bird Flu Diagnosis Unlikely, Says NSW Health

We Must Remain Vigilant On Bird Flu, Say Experts

Go To The 'Bird Flu Blog' For More