Category: Medical

Avian flu has reached new corners of the globe and become endemic for the first time in some wild birds that transmit the virus to poultry, according to veterinarians and disease experts, who warn it is now a year-round problem.

Reuters spoke to more than 20 experts and farmers on four continents who said the prevalence of the virus in the wild signals that record outbreaks will not abate soon on poultry farms, ramping up threats to the world’s food supply. They warned that farmers must view the disease as a serious risk all year, instead of focusing prevention efforts during spring migration seasons for wild birds.

Outbreaks of the virus have widened in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa, undefeated by summer heat or winter cold snaps, since a strain arrived in the United States in early 2022 that was genetically similar to cases in Europe and Asia.

On Wednesday, Argentina and Uruguay each declared national sanitary emergencies after officials confirmed the countries’ first infections. Argentina found the virus in wild birds, while dead swans in Uruguay tested positive.

Egg prices set records after the disease last year wiped out tens of millions of laying hens, putting a staple source of cheap protein out of reach to some of the world’s poorest at a time the global economy is reeling from high inflation.

Wild birds are primarily responsible for spreading the virus, according to experts. Waterfowl like ducks can carry the disease without dying and introduce it to poultry through contaminated feces, saliva and other means.

Farmers’ best efforts to protect flocks are falling short.

In the United States, Rose Acre Farms, the country’s second-largest egg producer, lost about 1.5 million hens at a Guthrie County, Iowa, production site last year, even though anyone who entered barns was required to shower first to remove any trace of the virus, Chief Executive Marcus Rust said.

A company farm in Weld County, Colorado, was infected twice within about six months, killing more than 3 million chickens, Rust said. He thinks wind blew the virus in from nearby fields where geese defecated.

“We got nailed,” Rust said. “You just pull your hair out.”

The United States, Britain, France and Japan are among countries that have suffered record losses of poultry over the past year, leaving some farmers feeling helpless.

“Avian flu is occurring even in a new poultry farm with modern equipment and no windows, so all we could do now is ask God to avoid an outbreak,” said Shigeo Inaba, who raises chickens for meat in Ibaraki prefecture near Tokyo.

Poultry in the Northern Hemisphere were previously considered to be most at risk when wild birds are active during spring migration. Soaring levels of the virus in a broad range of waterfowl and other wild birds mean poultry now face high risks year round, experts said.

“It’s a new war,” said Bret Marsh, the state veterinarian in the U.S. state of Indiana. “It’s basically a 12-month vigil.”

In a sign the threat is expected to persist, Marsh is seeking funds from Indiana’s lawmakers to hire an additional poultry veterinarian and poultry health-specialist. Indiana lost more than 200,000 turkeys and other birds over the past year, while total U.S. deaths top 58 million birds, according to U.S. government data, surpassing the previous 2015 record.

The virus is usually deadly to poultry, and entire flocks are culled when even one bird tests positive.

Vaccinations are not a simple solution: they may reduce but not eliminate the threat from the virus, making it harder to detect its presence among a flock. Still, Mexico and the EU are among those vaccinating or considering shots.

Global problem

Wild birds have spread the disease farther and wider around the world than ever before, likely carrying record amounts of the virus, said Gregorio Torres, the head of the science department at the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health, an intergovernmental group and global authority on animal diseases. The virus changed from previous outbreaks to a form that is probably more transmissible, he told Reuters.

“The disease is here to stay at least in the short term,” Torres said.

Torres could not confirm the virus is endemic in wild birds worldwide, though other experts said it is endemic in certain birds in places like the United States.

While the virus can infect people, usually those who have contact with infected birds, the World Health Organization says the risk to humans is low.

The form of the virus circulating is infecting a broader range of wild birds than previous versions, including those that do not migrate long distances, said David Suarez, acting laboratory director of the U.S. government’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Georgia.

Such infections of “resident” birds are helping the virus to persist throughout the year when it didn’t previously, he said.

Black vultures, which inhabit the southern United States and previously avoided infections, are now among the species suffering, said David Stallknecht, director of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study at the University of Georgia.

The virus has also infected mammals like foxes, bears and seals.

“We all have to believe in miracles,” Stallknecht said, “but I really can’t see a scenario where it’s going to disappear.”

Crossing borders

High virus levels in birds like blue-winged teal, ducks that migrate long distances, helped spread the virus to new parts of South America, Stallknecht said.

Countries including Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia in recent months reported their first cases.

Ecuador imposed a three-month animal-health emergency on Nov. 29, two days after its first case was detected, the country’s Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock said. So far, more than 1.1 million birds have died, the ministry said.

Infections in Uruguay and Bolivia put the disease close to top global chicken exporter Brazil, which has never confirmed a case. Brazilian Agriculture Minister Carlos Favaro said on Wednesday the country investigated three suspected cases, but test results came back negative.

“Everyone is focused on preventing the flu from reaching our country,” said Gian Carlos Zacchi, who raises chickens for processor Aurora in Chapecó in Brazil’s Santa Catarina state.

Some experts suspect climate change may be contributing to the global spread by altering wild birds’ habitats and migratory paths.

“The wild bird dynamics have shifted, and that’s allowed the viruses that live in them to shift as well,” said Carol Cardona, an avian flu expert and professor at the University of Minnesota.

Farmers are trying unusual tactics to protect poultry, with some using machines that make loud noises to scare off wild birds, experts said.

In Rhode Island, Eli Berkowitz, an egg producer and chief executive of Little Rhody Foods, sprayed the disinfectant Lysol on goose poop on a walkway of his farm in case it contained the virus. He also limits visitors to the farm, a more traditional precaution.

Berkowitz said he is bracing for March and April when migration season will pose an even greater risk to poultry.

“You’d better buckle up and hold on for your dear life,” he said.

Source: Voice of America

GENEVA— The World Health Organization will continue pushing until it finds an answer to how the COVID-19 pandemic started, the agency’s chief said following a report suggesting it had abandoned the search.

Solving the mystery of where the SARS CoV-2 virus came from and how it began spreading among humans is considered vital for averting future pandemics.

Yet an article on the Nature website Tuesday said faced with a lack of cooperation from China, where the outbreak began in late 2019, the WHO had given up on the search.

“We need to continue to push until we get the answer,” agency chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters, referring to the search for the origins of the virus.

“Knowing how this pandemic started is very, very important and very crucial,” he said.

He said he had recently sent a letter to a top official in China “asking for cooperation, because we need cooperation and transparency in the information … in order to know how this started”.

The two main theories that have been hotly debated have centred on the virus naturally spilling over from bats to an intermediary animal and into humans, or escaping due to a lab accident.

The WHO carried out a first phase of investigation by sending a team of international experts to Wuhan, China, in early 2021 to produce a first phase report, written in conjunction with their Chinese counterparts.

But that investigation faced criticism for lacking transparency and access, and for not sufficiently evaluating the lab-leak theory, which it deemed “extremely unlikely”.

The political rhetoric reached fever-pitch over that theory, which was favoured by the administration of former US president Donald Trump but always flatly rejected by China.

Tedros has meanwhile from the start insisted that all hypotheses remained on the table, and the WHO has repeatedly called on China to provide further access to investigate.

Tedros said there were two reasons for not abandoning the origins search.

The first was scientific, he said: “We need to know how this started in order to prevent the next one.”

“The second (is) moral: millions of people lost their lives, and many suffered, and the whole world was taken hostage by a virus.”

“It’s morally very important to know how we lost our loved ones.”

Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK

ROME – The United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP) is preparing to support 490,000 people in Burkina Faso, The Gambia and Mali who were impacted by drought in 2022. WFP has received US$15.4 million worth of insurance payouts from African Risk Capacity (ARC) Limited that will provide a cash transfer to affected people from March to May 2023, enabling them to recover from the impacts of drought, for example by buying food or supplementing incomes to avoid having to sell productive assets.

“Communities in Mali contribute very little to the climate crisis, yet the impacts are forcing them into a food crisis,” says Eric Perdison, WFP Country Director in Mali. “This funding will enable WFP to reach hundreds of thousands of food-insecure people affected by climate-induced negative impacts, with cash and nutrition assistance.”

Farmers in West Africa suffered losses and damages to their crops and livelihoods due to extensive drought impacting the 2022 agricultural season. This has knock-on effects throughout the region as food availability is reduced and prices soar. Climate insurance enables communities to recover from losses and damages, preventing them being pushed into hunger.

The insurance scheme is part of the ARC Group – a specialized agency of the African Union that helps Member States manage climate and disaster risk. WFP is receiving payouts of US$7.2 million for Burkina Faso, US$187,600 for The Gambia and US$8 million for Mali. Assistance will also include nutritional support for children aged 6-23 months and pregnant and nursing women.

“Thanks to support from Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, WFP has purchased insurance policies that enable us to work with local governments to minimise losses and damages caused by climate impacts” says Mathieu Dubreuil, WFP Head of Climate Risk Insurance. “We need to scale up such initiatives to protect more people on the frontlines of the climate crisis.”

Since 2019, WFP has protected 4.8 million people in six African countries with insurance policies from ARC. To date, WFP has received eight payouts totalling US$25.4 million for five countries, which provided cash and food assistance, nutrition support and emergency asset creation to more than 790,000 people.

“The cash transfer came at a moment when I had difficulty buying food. I live alone with the children and we needed to eat. So, I bought rice and millet”, said Aissé, a widow from Mali who received money from payouts for the drought in 2021.

Source: World Food Programme

To expedite the end-to-end integration of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 surveillance, the WHO Ethiopia Country Office and the WHO Regional Office for Africa organized a two-week on-site laboratory training course for staff of the National Influenza Centre, Ethiopia Public Health Institute, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The course provided hands-on training and an in-depth understanding of next-generation sequencing (NGS), data analysis, and sharing of genetic data to public-access databases. The training also significantly increased the SARS-CoV-2 sample throughput with improvement in data quality, bioinformatic analysis and the processing of information.

Held at the Ethiopia Public Health Institute (EPHI) in Addis Ababa from 5-16 December 2022, the training was part of WHO Global Influenza Programme (GIP) support to national influenza laboratories in the WHO African Region.

Over the past two years, the GIP has leveraged the capacities of Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) laboratories to incorporate SARS CoV-2 testing into influenza sentinel surveillance testing. SARS CoV-2 surveillance, as part of influenza surveillance, allows for the global respiratory disease surveillance system to monitor organisms with pandemic potential. In 2021, GIP selected influenza laboratories in nine countries in the WHO African Region (Algeria, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire Ghana, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Madagascar, and Mauritania) to participate in a project to expedite integration of SARS-CoV-2 into influenza surveillance.

A key aspect of this initiative is to support National Influenza Centres (NICs) to develop robust genomic surveillance capacities through sequencing influenza and SARS-CoV-2 isolates and sharing the information (genetic sequence data and metadata), to public-domain (Genbank) or public-access databases (GISAID). GISAID is a repository for sequence data which also provides analysis tools for genetic sequence and related clinical, epidemiological, geographical, and species-specific data.

In this context an expert from WHO Collaborating Centre (WHO CC) for Reference and Research on Influenza, Victorian Infectious Disease Reference Laboratory, Melbourne, Australia provided next-generation sequencing training to scientists from the National Influenza Centre at the Ethiopian Public Health Institute, Addis Ababa. NIC scientists were mentored to complete runs of next-generation sequencing and they successfully, obtained 37 whole genome sequences from SARS-CoV-2 positive samples. As mentioned, the course significantly improved their sample throughput and the quality of data was also improved with 100% genome coverage with no gaps. Based on the results obtained during the course, NIC scientists provided clade/lineage information of the most recent SARS-CoV-2 outbreak to the Ethiopian government.

To further establish their capacity, NIC Ethiopia staff were also supported by WHO to attend the International Influenza and SARS-CoV-2 Genetic Sequencing Course that was held in January 2023 in Ghana. This was organized by the WHO Regional Office for Africa and GIP in partnership with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Association of Public Health Laboratories and the Ghana NIC. WHO and the WHO Collaborating Centre in Melbourne will continue to provide training and mentoring support to the Ethiopia NIC. WHO will continue to strengthen respiratory disease surveillance across the African Region as part of pandemic preparedness and response efforts.

Source: World Health Organization

Points forts

Violence linked to militant Islamist groups in Africa has risen sharply by 22% over the last twelve months, with 6,859 events. This represents a new record of extremist violence and a doubling of such occurrences since 2019.

Militant Islamist violence in Africa continues to focus on five theaters, namely the Sahel, Somalia, the Lake Chad Basin, Mozambique and North Africa. Each of these theaters is defined by local actors and challenges specific to its context.

Violence by militant Islamists in the Sahel and Somalia accounts for 77% of violent events recorded in Africa in 2022.

Worryingly, deaths attributed to militant Islamist groups have increased by 48% this year.

The estimated 19,109 deaths attributable to militant Islamists surpass the last peak of 18,850 deaths reached in 2015 when Boko Haram was at its peak. It also represents a sharp turnaround from 2021 when a slight decrease in deaths, reaching 12,920, was recorded.

The escalation in deaths is entirely the result of increased violence in the Sahel and Somalia, where 74% of deaths have occurred. Indeed, deaths attributable to extremists have either plateaued or declined in the Lake Chad Basin, Mozambique and North Africa.

This spike in deaths linked to Islamist militants was characterized by a 68% increase in civilian deaths and violence from afar (the latter often targeting civilians). This highlights the heavy price paid by non-combatants.

Source: Africa Center for Strategic Studies