Talk:Influenza A virus/Archive 2

Neuraminidase surface proteins

I'm sorry, but you'll have to give a brief explanation within the article of what neuraminidase surface proteins are for us uneducated folk. Mr. Billion 06:12, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Problem language

The text "[[minnan:Khîm-liû-kám]]" I guess is for some language, but the text isn't fitting right for some reason. What's wrong? Mr. Billion 06:21, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Request for data to support efficacy of "respiratory etiquette"

In the section "Strategies to slow down a pandemic", in regard to "Respiratory etiquette. Placing one's hand in front of the mouth when coughing or sneezing can somewhat limit the dispersal of droplets" an editor has commented (in an edit to the article, which I've moved here) that:

"There seem to be no published data in support of this common and intuitively logical advice. If any reader can find a peer-reviewed article that supports or refutes "placing one's hand in front of the mouth" to reduce disease spread, it would be a helpful addition to this data-base." Paul August ☎ June 29, 2005 14:53 (UTC)

Improvement Drive

The article H5N1 has been listed to be improved on Wikipedia:This week's improvement drive. You can add your vote there if you would like to support the article.--Fenice 19:48, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

H5N1

Hey guys! H5N1 has its own page, why do we have an amazing amount of information about it here, when we should be having most of it there?? I think it is only making the article too long and the consitency between the two articles very hard to maintain! --Msoos 17:17, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

H7N2 - one patient or 44?

The article says

Following an outbreak of H7N2 among poultry in 2002 44 persons have been found infected in Virginia, United States.

but CDC's page at [1] says

one person was found to have serologic evidence of infection

Where does the "44 persons" come from? Could someone check the article for other mistakes? --Card 11:19, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Initially someone wrote about 1 infected patient. On September 19, 2005 a user 192.91.173.36 changed it from 1 to 44 [2]. In my opinion, we have to stay with confirmed facts and correct it back from 44 to 1. According to CDC and also WHO (page 26 of [3]) there was 1 confirmed case in Virginia (2002). In addition, there was 1 confirmed case in New York (2003). -- 7:05, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Page structure

There is a lot of repetition of information on this page. I agree that H5N1 info should be summarised, and effort put to its own page. Wizzy…☎ 20:19, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

This page desperately needs more structure and headings. 3rd level headings by country would help these rambling paras. Wizzy…☎ 13:29, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Vaccines

If I'm not mistaken, one of the hopes is that by producing a effective vaccine against the current H5N1 for humans, this MIGHT still work when the virus starts spreading among humans. Of course, this is just a hope and no one will known until it happens. But this doesn't seem to be mentioned in the article, for example, it talks about the lead time needed to produce a vaccine but doesn't mention this hope. Also, if I'm not mistaken, at least one lab is controversially trying (or planning to try) to produce H5N1 variants that are capable of creating the dreaded pandemic in a hope to learn more about them and create vaccines. Again this doesn't seem to be mentioned. 60.234.141.76 12:56, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Cleanup

As others have said, H5N1 has it's own page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H5N1. It appears most of this text was originally taken from this article #H5N1 section. However whoever made the new page largely left this article as is so there is a lot of redundant info and people have been changing this page but not the main H5N1 article. Someone needs to go through the work of cleaning up this article to summarise & remove unnecessary stuff on H5N1 and move anything new to the H5N1 article etc (sorry too busy) Nil Einne 13:42, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I finally got so annoyed by the duplication that I decided to be "someone", and merged the information under the H5N1 section here back into H5N1 and replaced it with a "main" notice and a three sentence summary. That was the most egregious case, but a knowledgeable editor should see what info here is specific to H5N1 and move it, and vice versa. It also seems that some of this info is general enough to be put into the pandemic or epidemic article to clean up the clutter. - BanyanTree 17:26, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

some ambiguities clarified

I was reading the network of articles avian influenza, influenza, H5N1, and Orthomyxoviridae and found myself getting very confused by their relationships. After doing some offsite research I think I figured out was wrong and fixed it. There was substantial confusion about how Type A, genus A and avian influenza relate to each other, with at least one article pipelinking both "Influenzavirus A" and "example of A" to H5N1, in one line.

To clarify, Orthomyxoviridae consists of influenza and other viruses. The flu virus has three genuses - A, B and C. These are the three "types" that are referred to in many articles. B and C affect only humans, but A is carried by birds and is also known as avian influenza. Just to repeat - Influenzavirus A, Type A, Genus A, avian influenza, etc all refer to the exact same thing. A is in turn divided into the types described in the article according to H and N. This is why much of the literature will write a virus as "A (H5N1)" or "A (H1N1)" - it is giving the genus and then subtype.

Besides going through the various articles and trying to make this clearer, I was inspired by some comments above and moved the quite general information on flu pandemics to a new article, influenza pandemic and linked it from the obvious pages. Quite a lot of information here needs to be shuffled either up to influenza or down to H5N1, but the article is a bit more focused now. - BanyanTree 04:51, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Life span?

Please add to the text how long the virus survives on different surfaces, in spite of and supported by external elements 85.76.0.219 13:38, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

I believe its been said that the Virus can live up to ten days on any surface. I might be wrong though and got it mixed up with something else.

This site [4] quotes WHO as saying "The virus can survive, at cool temperatures, in contaminated manure for at least three months. In water, the virus can survive for up to four days at 22 degrees C and more than 30 days at 0 degrees C. For the highly pathogenic form, studies have shown that a single gram of contaminated manure can contain enough virus to infect 1 million birds." but I couldn't find that information on the link they provided. --Lee Hunter 19:11, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Hi! And what about "the control environment" that is dry, general and common surfaces such as car tires, door knops, asphalt, rollerstaircase, bottom of a shoe, human skin, air. Would this info by any change be gathered to the page H5N1? You do understand that the info about the dynamics of the virus spread is the key to people's independent hygienia through individual understanding of the risks? 85.76.0.219 13:38, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Notes for upgrading

When you clean up and synchronize these two pages of avian flu and H5N1 note that the former is in gategory "Poultry diseases | Virology | Influenza" and the latter in "Pandemics | Epidemiology | Influenza". This justifies certain combinations.85.76.0.219 13:39, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Reverted pasting from H5N1

I have reverted the wholesale pasting of sections from H5N1 into this article. These are not identical subjects and should not have identical content. See the conversation above in which people were complaining about a data dump from H5N1, which I recently managed to extricate from this article. - BanyanTree 17:38, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Rather than "wholesale pasting", I read each article carefully and tried to integrate the H5N1 information into the larger article. I didn't assume identical subjects or content and hoped that my editing might make it easier for readers to get an overview of avian flu in one article, rather than having to skip about in the hypertext. My profuse apologies for trying to help.Her Pegship 17:56, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

I do not mean to be rude, but this article is already heavily skewed toward H5N1. Previously, confusion over the distinction between H5N1, avian influenza and Influenzavirus A resulted in a whole web of Wikipedia articles propagating false definitions. It has been a chore trying to keep the distinctions clear, as users continually add H5N1-specific information here, rather than the relevant sub-page, thereby creating more ambiguity. The massive expansion of this page with information imported from a subpage basically reverted several days worth of effort towards making the technical distinctions clear through the article structure. Given the confusing structure of H5N1 right now, good structural edits to it would be more fruitful than inserting its structure into a higher-level article. - BanyanTree 19:17, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm a bit sensitive as another user categorized my edits as vandalism. Grr. I bow to your greater experience and will be more circumspect in future. (no sarcasm meant) Her Pegship 19:23, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

None taken. These articles are gradually shaping up now that people are paying more attention to how they fit together and are structured, though progress is sometimes obscured by the heavy editing traffic. Thanks for your efforts. Cheers, BanyanTree 20:44, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Contracting through meat

The text says that well-cooked meat poses no danger; however, at least one or two cases (I believe in China's Hunan province) have been documented of individuals (apparently children, here), contracting and dying from the avian flu after eating the meat of infected birds. What, therefore, is the risk when eating chicken or other bird meats--in scientifically controlled, well-cooked meat, the risk may be low, but in practice, is the risk high? Can we indicate this (one way or the other) in the text?--Dpr

From what I've read, you're fine if you're cooking poultry or eggs in your home and are making sure that it's well cooked, but eating duck in a restaurant in Hanoi (for example) is just being silly as you can't tell what's going on in the kitchen. - BanyanTree 14:02, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Duck blood soup... is not cooked. Not something I'd be eating.

Me either. One can get parasites doing that, not just the bird flu.Martial Law 00:06, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism

The page is currently under vandal attack by what is clearly a 13 year old. -14:47, Nov 10, 2005. UTC

The vandal is blocked. - BanyanTree 14:49, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I think this is cool stuff.

Update

The autor or someone else should update this page as the second death has just occured, and according to BBC, it was the H5N1 virus. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.174.135.251 (talk • contribs) 15:30, 24 November 2005.

Bird Flu Apperrant now...............

The Bird Flu bug is now appearrantly transferred from human to human now. See this link:

[http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47720 Bird Flu now transmitted from Human to Human]

This looks like a sensationalist newspaper article designed to sell newspapers. WAS 4.250 23:41, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Hope you're correct. IF this mess does act as these docs claim, the equivalent populations of NYC,NY. and LA.,CA. are predicted to die of this bug. Examined the above link myself.Martial Law 00:03, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

See [5]. Prior POSSIBLE human to human H5N1 cases exist. If the equivelent of WWIII breaks out we need better confirmation than the source provided. WAS 4.250 01:01, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Last thing we all need is a lot of scuttlebutt. Is it true that VA has a case of bird flu ?66.112.105.18 08:57, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

BIG IF...

I've heard rumors myself that IF this bug is being transmitted between people, that national borders WILL be shut down, Martial Law be declared to keep order, all to keep this plague out of the unaffected nations. This is why scuttlebutt like this should be discouraged AFTER it is investigated. Jeff Rense has extensive material about this matter. Go to Jeff Rense's Homepage and Archives for more about this matter, related matters.Martial Law 09:12, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Here's some of what I've personally seen:

Jeff Rense: Human to Human transfer of bird flu

WorldNutDaily and Jeff Rense aren't exactly the most credible sources of information about anything. --Lee Hunter 21:49, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Tamiflu, drug of choice.....

The anti-flu drug Tamiflu is no good against the bird flu. See this link: [http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47725 Tamiflu ineffective against the bird flu] Martial Law 21:38, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Other perspectives of AI

Think about adding links for perspectives on Avian Influenza from other expertise arenas? Wildlife Health?

place of origin

The ending of the "Avian influenza was initially identified in..." sentence is oscillating wildly between Serbia Montenegro, Italy and Asia. Can somebody shed some light on where it was first identified? Thanks, BanyanTree 23:13, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Where was avian influenza first identified?

For well over a month, this article said that it was discovered in Serbia Montenegro. Actually, it was first seen in Italy ([6]), as the article said before it was vandalized by User:135.196.103.130 on November 23. I'm surprised and a little disappointed that mistake wasn't caught until just now. --Mr. Billion 05:18, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't even notice that BanyanTree had noticed it too just a while earlier. Heh. User:213.198.229.149 changed it back to Italy, which is apparently what brought it to both our attentions. --Mr. Billion 05:20, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

birdfluspeech

Text found at article birdfluspeech which got speedy-deleted, copied here in case there is any useful content for this article.

Right I had to do a speech for school about bird flu and i thought you may find it interesting. Bird flu speech 5 mins This speech, is about bird flu, how we can catch it, and what we can do about it. Bird flu, or avian influenza, is a viral disease that causes illness in many species of birds. It has been around for more than 100 years, and there are 15 known types. At the moment H5N1 is the strain of bird flu that is currently in the news and is causing worldwide concern, it is lethal to poultry but worse than that there has been some cases of the disease jumping from bird to human. What’s the problem with this? Well, humans are not immune to animal viruses. Now I’m going to tell you about some of the statistics that make the idea of a bird flu pandemic even scarier. • 130 human cases of bird flu of which there were 67 deaths were reported in November, that’s more than 50% of the infected dying. The number of cases has increased since that time. • More than 120 million birds have died or been culled across Asia in an effort to stem bird flu. • But even scarier than that is the estimation that up to 100 million people could die worldwide if the virus mutates with an existing human influenza virus. This is a lot more than the tens of millions of deaths that occurred because of the massive Spanish flu pandemic in 1918. 3rd minute how can you catch it? These are the dangers of mutating. The current virus is fairly weak and it may be able to change itself or adapt (this is mutating) to a more powerful virus that can jump from human to human which at the moment it can’t, however there has been some information that cats can catch H5N1 and can pass it on to each other. There has also been a recent report which suggests that the bird flu virus may be adapting so much that it can now resist the anti-viral drug Tamiflu. So, how does it spread? The virus lives in the saliva, nasal secretions and droppings of the bird (nice). Water birds may catch the disease from other birds droppings, feathers, etc. in the water. Most of the people who have contracted the disease have done so because they have been in close contact with birds (mainly chickens or ducks). Bird flu may reach England because all kinds of waterfowl and other birds migrate from the east into the UK over the winter months. This will be a serious problem for free-range poultry farmers and for those who run bird reserves. There are also lots of rumours that you can get bird flu from food, this is wrong unless the bird is raw so eating cooked poultry is fine because both heat and light kill the virus, eggs are safe to eat as well. 4th minute the symptoms Now I’ll tell you about the symptoms of bird flu. A raging fever, a cough that leaves you feeling exhausted, a sore throat, conjunctivitis and sore muscles are the first symptoms of bird flu, just like any very nasty flu but within a few days the infected person’s breathing becomes difficult and they start to become seriously ill. But don’t think that everyone suffers from all of these horrible symptoms, for most people bird flu won’t be more than a nasty bout of flu but for those more seriously affected it could be life threatening. 5th minute What can we do about it? There are many things we can do to stop the flu spreading and to make us feel better if it reaches the U.K. From very small yet important things such as avoiding coughing or sneezing over those around you, staying in one room as much as possible and taking hot water with lemon and honey (honestly it does say that on a professional medical website!) To bigger things such as having a vaccination ( Britain has ordered 2 million doses of a vaccine to be made using the H5N1 strain, and 120 million doses of a vaccine to be made if the virus becomes humanised.) or you can take tamiflu the anti-viral drug that many people in Asia are already taking. Conclusion Bird flu is definitely going to be a big problem, but all the estimates could be faulty. So my advice to you would be to listen to everything you hear about bird flu and take it seriously but don’t get worried about it because anything could happen really.

(Not sure who wrote the above. Only an admin can check now. Certainly wasn't me.) TerraGreen 22:34, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

It appears to be a nice 6th grade summary of H5N1. Whoever wrote it may wish to contribute it to the simple English Wikipedia. WAS 4.250 22:51, 4 January 2006 (UTC)