In a shocking development to scientists attempting to find the origin of the H7N9 bird flu in China that has killed 36 people, one of the most well known of medicines to fight the disease is showing up ineffective.
Tamiflu, part of the only group of medicines that can treat bird flu, has been found to be ineffective in three of 14 patients in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Continue reading
The Centers for Disease Control has released a report showing an almost 20% mortality rate for the H7N9 bird flu breaking out across China.
The CDC says the virus appears to have struck older people, a majority of them male, and have admitted that while bird-to-people transmission seems the most common transmission some human-to-human has taken place. Continue reading
A U.S. report on cyber-terrorism and cyber-warfare says that China’s government and military have been behind multiple assaults on U.S. computer systems.
The attacks were on the diplomatic, economic and defense sectors. The targets all had some kind of benefit to China’s defense program. Continue reading
A report in the journal Science is exposing a research group in China that is creating hybrid super-viruses that could cause a mass pandemic should they be released into the world.
Professor Hualan Chen, director of China’s National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, lead the team that mixed highly lethal strains of flu with others that are more readily spread between humans.
For example, the scientists combined the highly lethal H5N1 bird flu, which does not transmit easily between humans, with the H1N1 virus which is highly contagious among humans. Of the 127 different strains of the hybrid created in the lab, five of them were confirmed to be transferred through the air between guinea pigs.
“Nobody can extrapolate to humans except to conclude that the five viruses would probably transmit reasonable well between humans,” Professor Simon Wain-Hobson, virologist with the Pasteur Institute in Paris said. “We don’t know the pathogenicity [lethality] in man and hopefully we will never know. But if the case fatality rate was between 0.1 and 20 per cent, and a pandemic affected 500 million people, you could estimate anything between 500,000 and 100 million deaths,” he said.
Despite the claims of the Chinese team that the research was done to create new vaccines should the virus ever organically mutate in nature, worldwide scientists said that the possibility was so remote that it was irresponsible of the Chinese to undertake the research.
ional Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute.
China’s President Xi Jinping and France’s President Francois Hollande pledged to push for a world free of domination by any superpower Thursday as the French leader visited the Chinese capital on a mission to boost trade amid his country’s worsening economic woes. Continue reading
A top Chinese general, who has repeatedly denied the Chinese military is behind multiple cyber-attacks against the United States, has admitted during a public event that cyber-attacks are as serious as nuclear weapons.
General Fang Fenghui made his comments after meeting with the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Continue reading
Rescue teams have finally reached remote parts of China’s Sichuan province after the massive Saturday earthquake that has been estimated to have killed over 200.
Chinese state media say 207 are dead or missing and that the 6.6 magnitude earthquake has injured over 11,500. More than 1,300 aftershocks have rocked the region since the main quake struck around 8 a.m. local time Saturday. Continue reading
With each passing hour, the casualty count continues to rise from a strong earthquake that struck the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan. By Sunday afternoon, authorities reported 181 deaths, 24 missing and more than 11,200 injuries. Continue reading
As the Chinese government openly begins to speculate about the possibility of human-to-human transmission of the H7N9 bird flu strain, an international team of experts, including some from the World Health Organization, have been deployed to investigate the disease in the country. Continue reading
Chinese health expert Zhong Nanshan has told China Central Television that the claims being made by the Chinese government and the World Health Organization that the H7N9 bird flu does not transmit human-to-human are based on “hardly conclusive” evidence. Continue reading