Scary New H7N9 Bird Flu Strain Leaps From China To Taiwan; Human Transmission Already Achieved?

Wednesday, April 24, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) The H7N9 bird flu strain is on the rise, having already killed 22 people in China while infecting 108. That’s a kill rate of 20% — among the highest ever witnessed in a bird flu strain. It has also spread outside of China, infecting a Taiwan national who brought the infection back to Taiwan and now rests in critical condition in a Taiwan hospital.

Health authorities in the region haven’t yet said this strain of bird flu has achieved human-to-human transmission, but it seems increasingly likely that such a trait either already exists or will develop very quickly. That’s because the virus has been spreading among chickens without any symptoms showing. It doesn’t make the chickens sick, in other words, allowing chickens to be “stealth carriers” of a virus that can easily leap to unsuspecting humans.

H7N9 is a “triple reassortment” virus that combines genetic code from three different flu virus strains. This makes it “…one of the most lethal influenza viruses that we’ve seen so far,” said Keiji Fukuda, the assistant director-general for health security with the World Health Organization. “This is an unusually dangerous virus for humans.”

Because the virus can quietly spread among non-symptomatic chickens, hundreds more people have almost certainly already been infected with it. In the coming weeks, we will likely see yet more victims hospitalized and killed by H7N9.

Human-to-human transmission already achieved?

As Yahoo News reports, WHO’s China representative Michael O’Leary has released figures showing that half the people infected with H7N9 had no contact with poultry.

If true, this would be strong evidence that H7N9 has already achieved “human-to-human transmission,” turning it into a “nightmare influenza” that might already be spreading across the population. That status is not proven yet, however, and more observation is needed before such a conclusion could be substantiated.

“If H7N9 were to stably adapt to humans, it would probably meet with little or no human immunity,” writes Peter Horby from Nature.com. “Detecting and tracking a partially human-adapted H7N9 virus in a city as vast as Shanghai or Beijing would be difficult; tracking a fully adapted virus would be impossible. And it could easily spread nationally and internationally. Eastern China is now one of the most ‘connected’ population centers in the world. Seventy per cent of the global population outside China lives within two hours of an airport linked to the outbreak regions by a direct flight or a single connection (see go.nature.com/tvfev8). Travel restrictions or border screening will not contain pandemic influenza for long.”
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