Avian Flu Fast Facts | CNN



CNN
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Here’s a look at avian flu.

Avian influenza, also called avian flu or bird flu, is an illness that usually affects only birds.

There are many different strains of avian flu: 16 H subtypes and 9 N subtypes. Only those labeled H5, H7 and H10 have caused deaths in humans.

The most commonly seen and most deadly form of the virus is called “Influenza A (H5N1),” or the “H5N1 virus.”

Most cases of human bird flu infections are due to contact with infected poultry or surfaces that are contaminated with infected bird excretions: saliva, nasal secretions or feces.

Symptoms of avian flu include fever, cough, sore throat and sometimes severe respiratory diseases and pneumonia.

The CDC recommends oral oseltamivir (brand name: Tamiflu), inhaled zanamivir (brand name: Relenza) and intravenous permavir (brand name: Rapivab) for the treatment of human illness associated with avian flu.

The mortality rate is close to 60% for infected humans.

Early 1900s –The avian flu is first identified in Italy.

1961 – The H5N1 strain is isolated in birds in South Africa.

December 1983 – Chickens in Pennsylvania and Virginia are exposed to the avian flu and more than five million birds are killed to stop the disease from spreading.

1997 – Eighteen people are infected by the H5N1 strain in Hong Kong, six die. These are the first documented cases of human infection. Hong Kong destroys its entire poultry population, 1.5 million birds.

1999 Two children in Hong Kong are infected by the H9N2 strain.

February 2003 – Eighty-four people in the Netherlands are affected by the H7N7 strain of the virus, one dies.

February 7, 2004 – Twelve thousand chickens are killed in Kent County, Delaware, after they are found to be infected with the H7 virus.

October 7, 2005The avian flu reaches Europe. Romanian officials quarantine a village of about 30 people after three dead ducks there test positive for bird flu.

November 12, 2005 – A one-year-old boy in Thailand tests positive for the H5N1 strain of avian influenza.

November 16, 2005 – The World Health Organization confirms two human cases of bird flu in China, including a female poultry worker who died from the H5N1 strain.

November 17, 2005 Two deaths are confirmed in Indonesia from the H5N1 strain of avian influenza.

January 1, 2006 – A Turkish teenager dies of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza in Istanbul, and later that week, two of his sisters die.

January 17, 2006 – A 15-year-old girl from northern Iraq dies after contracting bird flu.

February 20, 2006Vietnam becomes the first country to successfully contain the disease. A country is considered disease-free when no new cases are reported in 21 days.

March 12, 2006Officials in Cameroon confirm cases of the H5N1 strain. The avian flu has now reached four African countries.

March 13, 2006 – The avian flu is confirmed by officials in Myanmar.

May 11, 2006 Djibouti announces its first cases of H5N1 – several birds and one human.

December 20, 2011 – The US Department of Health and Human Services releases a statement saying that the government is urging scientific journals to omit details from research they intend to publish on the transfer of H5N1 among mammals. There is concern that the information could be misused by terrorists.

July 31, 2012Scientists announce that H3N8, a new strain of avian flu, caused the death of more than 160 baby seals in New England in 2011.

March 31, 2013 – Chinese authorities report the first human cases of infection of avian flu H7N9 to the World Health Organization. H7N9 has not previously been detected in humans.

December 6, 2013 – A 73-year-old woman infected with H10N8 dies in China, the first human fatality from this strain.

January 8, 2014 – Canadian health officials confirm that a resident from Alberta has died from H5N1 avian flu, the first case of the virus in North America. It is also the first case of H5N1 infection ever imported by a traveler into a country where the virus is not present in poultry.

April 20, 2015 – Officials say more than five million hens will be euthanized after bird flu was detected at a commercial laying facility in northwest Iowa. According to the US Department of Agriculture, close to eight million cases of bird flu have been detected in 13 states since December. Health officials say there is little to no risk for transmission to humans with respect to H5N2. No human infections with the virus have ever been detected.

January 15, 2016 – The US Department of Agriculture confirms that a commercial turkey farm in Dubois County, Indiana, has tested positive for the H7N8 strain of avian influenza.

January 24, 2017 – Britain’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs releases a statement confirming that a case of H5N8 avian flu has been detected in a flock of farmed breeding pheasants in Preston, UK. The flock is estimated to contain around 10,000 birds. The statement adds that a number of those birds have died, and the remaining live birds at the premises are being “humanely” killed because of the disease.

February 12, 2017 – A number of provinces in China have shut down their live poultry markets to prevent the spread of avian flu after a surge in the number of infections from the H7N9 strain. At least six provinces have reported human cases of H7N9 influenza this year, according to Chinese state media, Xinhua.

March 5-7, 2017 – The USDA confirms that a commercial chicken farm in Tennessee has tested positive for the H7N9 strain of avian flu, but says it is genetically different from the H7N9 lineage out of China. The 73,500-bird flock in Lincoln County will be euthanized, according to Tyson Foods.

February 14, 2018 – Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection announces that a 68-year-old woman has been treated for the H7N4 strain. This is the first case of this strain in a human.

June 5, 2019 – Since 2013 there have been 1,568 confirmed human cases and 616 deaths worldwide from the H7N9 strain of avian flu, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

December 2019 – The United Kingdom Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs confirms that a case of H5N1 avian flu has been detected at a poultry farm in Suffolk. 27,000 birds are humanely killed because of the disease.

April 9, 2020 – The USDA confirms that a commercial turkey flock in Chesterfield County, South Carolina has tested positive for the H7N3 strain of avian flu.

January 2021 – India culls tens of thousands of poultry birds after avian influenza is detected in ducks, crows and wild geese in at least a dozen locations across the country.

February 18, 2021 – Russian authorities notify WHO that they have detected H5N8 in humans. “If confirmed, this would be the first time H5N8 has infected people,” a WHO Europe spokesperson says in a statement.

June 1, 2021 – China’s National Health Commission announces the first human case of H10N3.

February 2022 – The USDA confirms that wild birds and domestic poultry in the United States have tested positive for the H5N1 strain of avian flu. By May 17, 2023, the CDC reports there are 47 states with poultry outbreaks.

April 26, 2022 – China’s National Health Commission announces the first human case of H3N8.

April 28, 2022 – The CDC announces a case of H5 bird flu has been confirmed in a man in Colorado.

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US government is testing avian flu vaccines for birds, but ending the historic outbreak isn’t that simple | CNN



CNN
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The United States is facing what some experts are calling “a new era for bird flu.”

Since January 2022, the country has been battling the biggest outbreak yet of highly pathogenic avian influenza in wildlife. The virus is a major threat to commercial and backyard flocks, and it has started to show up in hundreds of mammals, including a handful of pet cats.

The risk to humans is low; there has been only one human case of this virus in the US since the outbreak began, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and nine cases globally, mostly among people who work with birds. The CDC says there are trials underway of vaccines that could be used to protect humans in case the virus changes and becomes more of a threat.

Separately, the US Department of Agriculture, the US National Poultry Research Center and labs at a handful of American universities have been experimenting with vaccine candidates to be used in birds.

The USDA’s Agriculture Research Service started trials of four vaccine candidates for animals in April and expects to have initial data on a single-dose vaccine available this month. A two-dose vaccine challenge study – in which animals are exposed to the virus to see how well the vaccine works – should produce results in June.

If the animal vaccines look to be protective, the USDA’s next step would be to work with manufacturers on whether it would be feasible to use them.

One manufacturer, Zoetis, announced April 5 the development of a vaccine geared toward currently circulating virus strains. The company says it would take about a year to get to the distribution stage in the US.

Vaccines are already available in other countries, including China, Egypt, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico and Vietnam, and some nations are vaccinating their commercial flocks.

However, in the United States, not all poultry experts are ready to use a vaccine, even if one becomes available – at least, not yet. Instead, their focus remains on eradicating the virus.

As of April 26, the CDC says, nearly 58.8 million poultry have been affected by avian flu since January 2022. The virus has been detected in at least 6,737 wild birds, and the number is likely to be much higher. There have been poultry outbreaks in 47 states.

Although this is the worst outbreak in history, improved biosecurity measures have vastly reduced the number of cases in the commercial sector, according to the USDA. When the outbreak began in early 2022, there were 51 detections among commercial poultry. In March 2023, there were only seven.

The USDA says close surveillance work among its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and state and industry partners led to the reduction in cases.

Generally, there ares two ways of confronting this kind of highly infectious disease in poultry, according to Rodrigo Gallardo, a professor in poultry medicine and a specialist in avian virology at the University of California, Davis.

“One of them is through vaccination action. And then the other one is through eradication,” he said.

In the United States, the latter is the approach for now, Gallardo said.

If farmers detect even a single case in a flock, they will put down the birds right away.

“The virus keeps replicating and amplifying if the birds are alive, so the only way of stopping the replication and limiting the dissemination is by depopulation,” Gallardo said.

Tom Super, the senior vice president for communications for the National Chicken Council, the national trade association for the US broiler chicken industry, said in an email to CNN that although it supports the ongoing discussions about a vaccination program, “currently we support the eradication policy of APHIS and believe that right now this is the best approach at eliminating [bird flu] in the U.S.”

The US Poultry and Egg Association said it’s “certainly a topic of discussion,” but the organization doesn’t have a position on implementing a vaccination program.

A vaccination program comes with several complications, Gallardo said. Vaccinated birds would be protected, but with this highly infectious disease, they still could shed some virus that could infect unprotected birds.

“So vaccination, in that case, creates amplification if it is not done right,” Gallardo said.

Plus, it’s difficult to detect the disease in vaccinated birds. Birds that are vaccinated don’t always show signs if they’re sick, so it would be hard to know what birds to keep separate from the others. Tests also have a hard time telling the difference between antibodies generated by vaccination and antibodies from an infection.

“If you’re not able to diagnose it, it might spread more than what it would do if you are able to diagnose it and eradicate it,” Gallardo said.

Countries that have chosen the vaccination route see more endemic strains develop, meaning the virus is never really totally wiped out.

“This is a very variable virus, and if you don’t update the vaccine that you’re applying to meet the change in the virus, then you won’t be able to completely protect the birds. Partial protection means more birds will be spreading the virus,” Gallardo said.

A vaccine has never been used against highly pathogenic avian influenza in the US, according to the USDA. The agency created a vaccine after an outbreak in 2014 and 2015, but that involved a different strain, so it wouldn’t work on the latest version of the virus.

The logistics of a vaccine like this are difficult, said Dr. Yuko Sato, an associate professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State University.

“You have to make sure that the new vaccine will protect against this current virus and hope that it doesn’t mutate or change so that the vaccine will continue to be protective,” Sato said.

“The vaccine is not a silver bullet. This is not going to prevent infection of the birds, so in order to have an exit strategy as the country, you would have to make sure that if you vaccinate, if you still have positive birds, you have to be able to make sure that you could stamp out the virus. Otherwise, we’ll never be looking at eradicating the virus from the United States.”

Another concern: Birds are a big business in the US.

The US has the largest poultry industry in the world, with 294,000 poultry farms. The market size for chicken and turkey meat production alone for 2023 is projected to generate $57.8 billion, according to market analysis firm IbisWorld.

Bird flu has hurt business in the US, but it could do so in a bigger way if the nation vaccinates poultry, according to the National Chicken Council.

“The National Chicken Council does not support the use of a vaccine for [bird flu] for a variety of reasons – the primary one being trade. Most countries, including the US, do not recognize countries that vaccinate as free of [bird flu] due to concerns that vaccines can mask the presence of the disease. Therefore, they do not accept exports from countries that do vaccinate,” Super wrote in his email.

The US broiler industry is the second largest exporter of chicken in the world. It exports about 18% of the chicken meat produced in the United States, valued at more than $5 billion annually.

“If we start vaccinating for [bird flu] in the U.S., the broiler industry will lose our ability to export which will have a significant impact on the industry – while costing billions and billions of dollars to the U.S. economy every year,” Super said.

With the way the disease is spreading, scientists would also probably have to vaccinate wildlife – which is nearly impossible.

Of the birds affected in this outbreak, about 76% are commercial egg-laying hens, 17% are turkeys, and only 5% are broilers, the chickens used for meat, Super said. The rest of the cases have been among ducks, backyard chickens and game birds.

“So the U.S. poultry sector that least needs a vaccine would have the most to risk from using one,” he said.

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High-quality bone broth comes ready-made. Here’s why you should make it yourself | CNN

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CNN
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After everyone at your table has devoured the juiciest pieces of a roast chicken and you’ve treated your canine to the edible rejects, hold off on sliding that picked-over carcass into the trash. Your bird has another gift for you: broth.

Making homemade broth requires only a few minutes of your time, and the benefits extend far beyond sensory pleasure: to your health, wealth, and even the world around you.

For centuries, humans have been simmering otherwise inedible animal parts in water, sometimes for days, extracting maximum flavor and nutrients from those bones for nourishing meals to come. Thrifty grandmas and chefs the world over have refined that technique, adding vegetables and seasonings reflecting their cultures and customs. Traditional recipes earned reputations for purported healing powers.

Over the last few decades, followers of the Paleo diet have incorporated 24-hour broth-making into their everyday kitchen routines, often sipping on their extra-strength broth as a gluten-free pick-me-up in place of coffee and tea — both of which are off-limits on their regimen.

New York City chef and Food Network personality Marco Canora turned to bone broth — which was regularly available to him at his popular restaurant, Hearth — to help him combat the effects of years of poor lifestyle habits. In 2014, he opened a takeout window called Brodo (Italian for broth) to sell to-go cups of his chef-crafted potions as beverages. He went on to write a book about it and sell it prepackaged and frozen nationwide.

Breathless testimonies from celebrity influencers of bone broth’s purported magical powers — from easing joint pain to reducing wrinkles to improving gut health — flooded the internet. Products labeled “bone broth” popped up on supermarket shelves. The trend shows no sign of abating. When last checked, TikTok videos with the hashtag #bonebroth had received more than 158 million views.

Some dietitians and medical professionals agree that bone broth can be a worthy addition to a balanced diet — supplying collagen and other important nutrients. But given that every bone broth recipe and human body are different, specific health claims linked to bone broth should be taken with a grain of salt.

I had been skeptical of the hype all along, and uninterested in exploring it for myself, until I made a batch last fall by accident while cleaning up after Thanksgiving dinner. Unable to find room in the fridge for the half-eaten turkey, I sawed off the remaining sandwich-worthy slices and dumped the picked-off carcass and grisly parts into my slow cooker, along with half an onion and a few odds and ends from the crisper.

I set the cooker to low and left it alone for a full 24 hours, giving me time to recuperate from the previous festivities while basking in the tantalizing fragrances wafting from the kitchen.

The first taste of the finished broth blew me away — richer and more complex than any packaged product or broth I’d made from scratch on top of my stove in a fraction of the time. I could practically feel the nourishment coursing through my bones. I placed the strained broth in the fridge and was happy to find it congealed to a jiggly consistency the next day, a clear sign that those picked-off turkey parts had done their job. And now I had the foundation for restaurant-quality gumbo made almost entirely with remains of the feast: a win-win all the way around.

My curiosity was piqued. So what if bone broth wasn’t the cure-all it was cracked up to be. It was wholesome, grocery-stretching and most importantly to me, freaking delicious. I wanted to figure out how to reap the full spectrum of advantages bone broth had to offer. I turned to experts for guidance.

Linton Hopkins, a James Beard Award-winning chef who helms the newly reopened Holeman & Finch Public House in Atlanta along with other high-profile spots in the South, learned the craft the classic way at the Culinary Institute of America.

“As a chef and a cook, I don’t feel good without a stock going. It’s one of my things,” Hopkins said. “We make all our stocks at our restaurants. And I do it all the time at home for me and my wife, Gina. They’re the easiest thing in the world. I’ll roast a whole chicken, we’ll eat what we can, and the rest will go right into the Instant Pot. I did the same thing with the bones from a beef roast last night. I’m no doctor, but I know good food is good for your life.”

Besides taste and nutrition, broth-making  can be a sound economic decision for the budget-conscious.

The terms “stock” and “broth” are often used interchangeably, Hopkins noted. But stocks typically indicate a higher bone-to-meat ratio. Broths can even be made with just the meat. “But as a whole-animal, whole-vegetable cook, all my stocks and broths are essentially bone broth. I see stock as an ingredient I cook with. Broth to me is a finished word — meaning it’s ready to serve in a bowl as is.”

Aside from taste and nutrition, he views stock- and broth-making as both an economic decision and an ethical responsibility.

“In the restaurant business, the margins are very thin, so we have to strive for zero waste,” he said. “We ask a lot of an animal to give its life for our diets. If we’re going to bring these items into our kitchens and throw them away after a single use, then we’re part of the problem.”

Michelle Tam grew up in a traditional Cantonese American household in California’s Bay Area where her mother served multicourse meals that always ended with soup.

“And she would always throw a bone in there. I remember as a kid we would walk down to the neighborhood butcher, and he would step out of the freezer with this giant plastic bag of bones for 25 cents,” Tam said. “We would get a variety of different kinds of bones with some meat left on them that would flavor the soup, and it was really delicious.”

But it wasn’t until she and her husband began eliminating processed foods from their diets and replacing them with wholesome ones as part of a fitness regimen that she considered making broth from scratch herself. “I don’t know that it’s some magical elixir,” said Tam, a former clinical pharmacist who now creates recipes full time for her popular Nom Nom Paleo blog and spin-off cookbooks. “But it’s a great source of collagen, which most people don’t get enough of and is really important for joints and gut health and all that stuff.”

Chicken feet can be among the tasty bone broth ingredients, providing a great source of collagen.

Collagen is the main constituent of connective tissue fibrils and bones that releases gelatin into liquid as it cooks. It’s most abundant in skin, feet, joints, marrow and knuckles. Tam may mix parts from different animals — lamb, pork, beef, chicken. The results, she said, are inevitably tasty.

“I’m always collecting chicken thigh bones, and I buy chicken feet when I see them at the butcher,” she said. Chicken feet contain tons of collagen, she said. But she warned not to go overboard, or you may wind up with a rubber ball. “I tried that, and it wasn’t delicious. One or two should do the trick. I also like to include something meaty for flavor, like a chicken leg. And chicken wings are excellent.”

Because bone broth can be “a spectacular growth medium for bacteria,” Tam refrigerates hers as soon as it reaches room temperature, and whatever isn’t consumed within a few days goes into the freezer. She offers ways to store bone broth conveniently and safely in usable portion sizes (she’s tried muffin tins, ice cube trays and silicone baking molds) and recipes for her favorite ways of using broth in a super-simple egg drop soup and slow cooker Korean short ribs on her blog.

With her multi-cooker, Tam can now produce collagen-rich bone broth in as little as an hour. But she’s not above buying bone broth ready-made when time is short or personal bone supplies are low, now that she’s found several brands she can trust. Roli Roti, which began as a food truck in the Bay Area selling rotisserie chicken, contains only a couple of ingredients and is “super high quality and super gelatinous.” Bonafide Provisions, found in many supermarket freezer sections, has become another standby.

Cassy Joy Garcia, a certified holistic nutritionist and New York Times best-selling cookbook author, became a fan of bone broth more than a decade ago during her marathon-running days and writes about it regularly on her healthy lifestyle blog, Fed + Fit.

“I think bone broth is getting some new attention now with grocery prices on the rise and people wanting to do more with less,” Garcia said. “I feel like it’s an easy entry point for some good DIY kitchen basics. If you’ve already roasted a chicken, just go ahead and throw that carcass in your pot or pressure cooker along with that random onion in the pantry and scraggly carrot in the fridge, and lo and behold, you’re going to save yourself some money and have broth that tastes better and is better for you than anything you’d buy.”

Toss in vegetable scraps from your fridge such as carrots and celery when preparing a bone broth.

She collects leftover bones from roasted meats and chicken in silicone freezer bags and keeps a veggie bowl at the forefront of her fridge for tossing in vegetable scraps, peels and all that could go into a homemade broth.

Now with more mouths to feed as a mother of three preschoolers, she does allow herself to take a shortcut from time to time with a quality premade product. One of her favorites is Fond sipping broth made of grass-fed beef and pasture-raised chicken bones, which come in flavor combinations such as ginger and cayenne, and shiitake and sage.

“They’re definitely a luxury product,” she said. “But they’re really a cool way to show what a broth can be and can open our eyes to exploring different flavors we can play with at home.”

On her blog, Garcia offers a detailed guide to making beef and chicken bone broth, and a slightly more complex one boosted with turmeric and ginger, which she uses for making her favorite chicken soup.

She gives you the options for making the broth in various vessels but makes no bones about her preference for her high-speed pressure cooker.

As for myself, I’m sticking to my slow cooker for now, content to inhale those 24-hour aromatics all day and allow them to soothe me to sleep.

Since Thanksgiving, I’ve made several more batches of bone broth following advice from the experts and falling down many rabbit holes of online research along the way.

I’ve been patronizing the nearby international farmers market more often to seek out a variety of bones from animals that have been responsibly raised without harmful chemicals that could negate my broth’s potential health benefits.

Freeze whatever hasn't been consumed of your bone broth within a few days of making it.

Some purists only use bones and water, giving them more flexibility to add layers of flavor later. But I can’t resist throwing in a few extras to amp up the nutritional and flavor profile (roasted mushrooms and a splash of red wine for beef, fresh ginger and turmeric for chicken, and always extra cloves of garlic).

I’ve made a habit of stashing yogurt containers of my finished products, along with baggies of leftover bones and trimmings, so long as space permits in my freezer.

Serious chefs boil the bones first to rid them of some of the impurities and then caramelize them in a 400- to 450-degree oven to deepen their flavors before proceeding. One day maybe I’ll find the motivation to give that a try.

I have quickly learned that, as easy and satisfying as bone broth is to make, I’m lucky if I can produce 2 quarts at a time — barely enough for one batch of soup or gumbo. But I wasn’t planning to replace my morning coffee with steaming broth anyway. And if I’m really hankering for the real deal before I get around to making another batch, I’m happy to have discovered I can buy Roli Roti, the brand Tam recommended, in the meat department of my neighborhood Publix.

You don’t have to follow any recipe to make bone broth. But it does help to have some guidance until you get the hang of it. Here’s the basic formula I’ve been loosely going by based on several recipes I’ve studied. Feel free to deviate with what the local butcher needs to dispense of, or what’s soon to go south in your fridge. Mother Earth will be grateful.

Susan Puckett’s recipe for bone broth is highly flexible. If you have no leftover bones, chicken or turkey wings, drumsticks, necks and gizzards also work great. For extra collagen, a few chicken feet will do the trick. For beef broth, follow the same procedure as for chicken. Or feel free to use bones from other animals as well — lamb, pork, game. Larger bones will take longer to break down so you may want to allow more simmering time.

Makes roughly 2 quarts (or more, if you have a larger vessel)

2-3 pounds roasted or raw chicken or beef bones, or a combination

2 carrots, cut up

2 celery stalks, cut up

1 medium unpeeled onion, halved

5 unpeeled garlic cloves, smashed

2 bay leaves

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon peppercorns

2 tablespoons cider vinegar

Water

1. Place the bones, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, bay leaves, salt, peppercorns and vinegar in a slow cooker (mine holds 6 quarts) and add enough water so bones are submerged but not floating.

2. Cover with the lid and let simmer on low setting for 12 to 24 hours.

3. Skim off any scum that’s collected on the surface. Turn off the heat and let it cool slightly. Discard the solids (picking out edible meat bits for yourself or the dog.)

4. Set a large fine-mesh sieve over a large bowl, strain and let it cool to room temperature. Cover and refrigerate. Scrape off the fat that congeals on the surface.

5. Use within four to five days or transfer to jars or plastic containers, label and freeze for up to five months. (Or pour the broth into ice cube trays, muffin tins or silicone molds, and freeze and pop them out into freezer bags.)

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