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10/08/2005:

"Quarantine call after Romania detects first bird flu cases"

Romanian authorities called for all farm birds in the southeastern Danube delta to be kept indoors after the country's first three cases of bird flu were detected in the region.

"The virus has been identified in three ducks in the village of Ceanurlia de Jos (southeastern Romania)," Agriculture Minister Gheorghe Flutur said.

"We have already imposed quarantine measures in the village and the health authorities in the Danube delta have been put on alert," he told a press conference.

"The virus was probably carried into Romania by migrating birds from Russia," Flutur said.

The Romanian test results were to be sent to a European Union-approved laboratory in Britain for further analysis.
breitbart.com.news

1918 Killer Flu Was From Birds, Shares H5N1 Gene Mutations
From Patricia Doyle, PhD BBC News
The Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918-19 was probably a strain that originated in birds, research has shown. US scientists have found the 1918 virus shares genetic mutations with the bird flu virus now circulating in Asia.

Writing in Nature, they say their work underlines the threat the current strain poses to humans worldwide. A second paper in Science reveals another US team has successfully recreated the 1918 virus in mice. The virus is contained at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] under stringent safety conditions. It is hoped to carry out experiments to further understand the biological properties that made the virus so virulent.
www.nature.com

Plane Carrying Viruses Crashes in Canada

Bush Plan Shows U.S. Is Not Ready for Deadly Flu
A plan developed by the Bush administration to deal with any possible outbreak of pandemic flu shows that the United States is woefully unprepared for what could become the worst disaster in the nation's history.

A draft of the final plan, which has been years in the making and is expected to be released later this month, says a large outbreak that began in Asia would be likely, because of modern travel patterns, to reach the United States within "a few months or even weeks."

If such an outbreak occurred, hospitals would become overwhelmed, riots would engulf vaccination clinics, and even power and food would be in short supply, according to the plan, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The 381-page plan calls for quarantine and travel restrictions but concedes that such measures "are unlikely to delay introduction of pandemic disease into the U.S. by more than a month or two."