Bird flu likely to appear in Europe, other places, expert says

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  A janitor sprays disinfectant at empty chicken cages in a traditional market in New Taipei city April 29, 2013.Reuters

Human cases of a deadly new strain of bird flu that has killed 27 people in China are likely to crop up in Europe and around the world but that should not cause undue alarm, Europe's leading flu expert said on Thursday.

In his first media interview since returning from an international scientific mission to China last week, Professor Angus Nicoll said the H7N9 flu outbreak in humans was one that should be taken extremely seriously and watched closely.

"We are at the start of a very long haul with H7N9," Nicoll told Reuters in a telephone interview from the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), where he is head of the influenza and respiratory viruses program.

He said there were many scientific questions to be answered about the new flu strain, which was first detected in patients in China in March having been previously unknown in humans.

The flu has so far infected at least 127 people in China and killed 27 of them, according to latest data from Chinese health authorities and the World Health Organization.

Scientific studies of the virus have established it is being transmitted from birds - probably mostly chickens - to people, making it a so-called zoonotic disease that humans catch from animals rather than from other humans.

Nicoll, who visited Beijing and Shanghai last week with a team of international scientific experts, confirmed what the WHO has repeatedly said - that there is no evidence yet of the virus efficiently passing from person to person - a factor that would make H7N9 a serious pandemic flu threat if it were to evolve.

Nicoll said the "most pressing public health question" for now was to identify the source of the circulating virus - the so-called "reservoir" - that is leading to chickens contracting it and sporadically passing it on to humans. This is likely to take time, with any results unlikely for several months.

"IMPORTED CASES"

In the meantime, Nicoll said the ECDC, which monitors disease in the European Union, and health authorities around the world should expect that "imported cases" of H7N9 flu may well begin to crop up elsewhere.

Just as Taiwan reported its first case on April 24, other countries should expect that business travelers and tourists may occasionally return from China having picked up the infection, he said.

"I'm not sure when that will happen. But the case in Taiwan shows that it can. If that person had got on a different flight and ended up in Paris, then we would have had a scenario that we would expect people to be alarmed at," he said.

"But again we should stress that this thing doesn't seem to be transmissible from human to human, so if we get some sporadic cases appearing in Europe, that doesn't change anything."

Nicoll noted that genetic analysis studies of H7N9 samples taken from patients in China showed the virus had already acquired two genetic mutations that made it more likely to be able to become transmissible between people.

Flu experts speaking at a briefing in London on Wednesday said those mutations, together with evidence that H7N9 is still mutating rapidly and probably spreading almost invisibly among birds because it does not make them obviously sick, meant this new flu was a "serious threat" to world health.

"You can never predict anything about flu, but it is concerning to see those mutations there, Nicoll said. "That's why it's important Europe should take this very seriously."

Nicoll added that he thought the Chinese were doing an "impressive job" handling, reporting, investigating and seeking to contain the outbreak.

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TECH SUPPORT NEEDED:Ex-Attorney General Says Bombers Likely Had Help

Published April 28, 2013

FoxNews.com

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A former U.S. attorney general says the two men police say are behind the deadly Boston Marathon bombings likely had help in the attack.

“I don’t believe they couldn’t have done what they did without technical assistance building the bomb and without…spiritual encouragement,” Michael Mukasey, the former U.S. attorney general under George W. Bush, told Fox News.

Mukasey added that he thinks the belief that the bombers only followed a rulebook from the Internet “doesn’t do it” for him.

Mukasey joins a growing number of officials who say Boston Marathon bombing suspects Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a shootout with police, likely had assistance in the bombing that killed three people and injured more than 200.

He also said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev could possibly still be questioned for national intelligence purposes for information that could be kept separate from the criminal case.

Mukasey said if those interviews occurred, Tsarnaev wouldn’t have any right to have a lawyer present during the questioning. If Tsarneav filed a habeas corpus petition against such interviews, the challenge could reach the Supreme Court, Mukasey explained, but he thinks the ability to question Tsarnaev separately for intelligence purposes would be upheld.

“The only thing the Fifth Amendment protects you against is being a witness against yourself. That means in a criminal trial,” Mukasey said. “It doesn’t protect you against disclosing national intelligence information.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev stopped speaking to FBI interrogators after he was read his Miranda rights and got an attorney.

But Mukasey told Fox News authorities still have “ample evidence” of the attack without Tsarnaev’s statements, citing photographs of the bombing scene and Tsarnaev’s confession to a carjacking after the bombings.

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Scientists: China bird virus likely silent threat

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  Workers unload chickens from a container at a wholesale market in Shanghai, China. Scientists taking a first look at the genetics of the bird flu strain that recently killed two men in China said it might be able to spread silently among poultry without notice.AP2013

Scientists taking a first look at the genetics of a bird flu strain that has killed three people in China said Wednesday that the virus could be harder to track than its better-known cousin H5N1 because it might be able to spread among poultry without showing any signs.

The scientists, at several research institutes around the world, urged Chinese veterinary authorities to widely test animals and birds in affected regions to quickly detect and eliminate the H7N9 virus before it becomes widespread.

They said the virus is troubling because it can infect poultry without producing any symptoms, while seriously sickening humans. The virus, previously known to have infected only birds, appears to have mutated, enabling it to more easily infect other animals, including pigs, which could serve as hosts and spread the virus more widely among humans, they said.

The findings are preliminary and need further testing.

China over the weekend reported two deaths in Shanghai in the strain's first known infections of humans. On Wednesday it announced an additional fatality - a 38-year-old cook working in Jiangsu province, where other cases also have been reported.

The cook went home to Hangzhou in Zhejiang province for treatment after falling ill in early March, and died March 27.

One other person in Hangzhou, a 67-year-old retiree, was in critical condition, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, bringing the number of seriously ill H7N9 patients in three eastern provinces to six. Those regions stepped up measures this week to guard against the spread of the disease, calling on hospitals to report severe pneumonia cases with unknown causes and schools to monitor for fevers.

In the wake of the outbreak, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention shared the genetic sequence of the new virus with the global health community. The data allow scientists to make preliminary interpretations of how the virus might behave in different animals and situations. Such hypotheses, while not conclusive, can help provide important early warnings to authorities dealing with the disease.

The scientists said that based on information from the genetic data and Chinese lab testing, the H7N9 virus appears to infect some birds without causing any noticeable symptoms. Without obvious outbreaks of dying chickens or birds to focus efforts on, authorities could face a challenge in trying to trace the source of the infection and stop the spread.

"We speculate that when this virus is maintained in poultry the disease will not appear, and similar in pigs, if they are infected, so nobody recognizes the infection in animals around them, then the transmission from animal to human may occur," said Dr. Masato Tashiro, director of the World Health Organization's influenza research center in Tokyo and one of the specialists who studied the genetic data. "In terms of this phenomenon, it's more problematic."

This behavior is unlike the virus's more established relative, the virulent H5N1 strain, which set off warnings when it began ravaging poultry across Asia in 2003. H5N1 has since killed 360 people worldwide, mostly after close contact with infected birds.

"In that sense, if this continues to spread throughout China and beyond China, it would be an even bigger problem than with H5N1 in some sense, because with H5N1 you can see evidence of poultry dying, but here you can see this would be more or less a silent virus in poultry species that will occasionally infect humans," said University of Hong Kong microbiologist Malik Peiris, who also examined the information.

Scientists closely monitor bird flu viruses, fearing they may change and become easier to spread among humans, possibly sparking a pandemic. There's no evidence of that happening in China.

Peiris praised Chinese health authorities for being forthcoming with data and information, but said animal health agencies needed to act quickly. He urged China to widely test healthy birds in live animal markets in the parts of the country where the human infections have been reported to find out what bird species might be hosting the virus and stop the spread.

"If you don't stamp it out earlier now, there won't be any chance of stamping it out in the future," Peiris said. "It already may be too late, but this is the small window of opportunity that really one has to grasp, as quickly as possible."

The Agriculture Ministry's propaganda office could not be reached by phone and did not immediately respond to a faxed list of questions.

Other information gleaned from the genetic data was that the H7N9 virus was what scientists call a "gene re-assortant" - in which three bird viruses swapped genes among themselves - undergoing changes that allowed it to adapt more easily, though not fully, to human hosts, WHO's Tashiro said. One change has allowed it to lodge on the surfaces of cells of mammals, making it easier to infect humans.

"The tentative assessment of this virus is that it may cause human infection or epidemic. It is still not yet adapted to humans completely, but important factors have already changed," Tashiro said.

In China, the public is highly sensitized to news of infectious disease outbreaks, with many still recalling the SARS pneumonia scare a decade ago, when the government stayed silent while rumors circulated for weeks of an unidentified disease in southern Guangdong province. The cover-up contributed to the spread of the virus to many parts of China and to two dozen other countries, killing hundreds of people.

While many foreign health experts say China is being far more forthcoming this time than during the SARS scare, the government still faces credibility questions at home as it tries to juggle the need to respond to calls by the public for more information and the need to prevent unnecessary panic.

"The H7N9 bird flu is currently approaching. Ten years ago, the lesson learned in fighting SARS was: The greatest enemy is not the virus, but covering up the truth; the best medicine is not steroids, but transparency and trust," Yang Yu, a commentator with state broadcaster CCTV, said in a post on his microblog. "No matter what H7N9 is, now, the time to test the progress of Chinese society over the past 10 years has come."

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'America's Most Wanted' likely ending a quarter-century run

Published March 29, 2013

Associated Press

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  This March 12, 2009 file photo shows John Walsh, host of the television show "America's Most Wanted," in New York. "America's Most Wanted" may have come to an end after 25 years. Lifetime network has confirmed it won't be picking up the crime-fighting series for another season.AP

NEW YORK –  "America's Most Wanted' may have come to an end after 25 years.

Lifetime network has confirmed it won't be picking up the crime-fighting series for another season.

But the network says it's developing a pilot for a new project with John Walsh, who created "America's Most Wanted" in 1988.

Hosted by Walsh, the series was a fixture on the Fox network until its abrupt cancellation in June 2011. During that run, the show helped bring almost 1,200 fugitives to justice.

Lifetime revived the series in December 2011, ultimately airing 44 episodes. It most recently aired on the network last October.

Walsh originally launched his crime-busting crusade in 1981, in the aftermath of the abduction and murder of his 6-year-old son, Adam.

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Older fathers more likely to have autistic grandchildren

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Men who have children when they are older are more likely to have grandchildren with autism, according to a study which shows for the first time that risk factors for autism may build up over generations.

Men who had a daughter when they were 50 or older were 1.79 times more likely to have a grandchild with autism than men between 20 and 24, and with sons the likelihood was 1.67 times.

Avi Reichenberg of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London, who co-led the study, said the work showed for the first time "that your father's and grandfather's lifestyle choices can affect you.

"This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have children if your father was old when he had you, because whilst the risk is increased, it is still small," he said.

Autism disorders, caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors, can range from severe mental retardation with a profound inability to communicate, to relatively mild symptoms combined with some high levels of function such as those seen in people with Asperger's syndrome.

Among core features of the disorders are poor communication skills and difficulties with social engagement. In the United States, an estimated 1 in 88 children have autism, while in Europe the rate is thought to be about in 100.

Research published in August last year showing that a father's age when a baby is conceived is the single largest factor in the risk of passing on new gene mutations may help explain why childhood autism rates are rising.

The study published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Psychiatry, used Swedish national registers and analyzed data from 5,936 people with autism and 30,923 healthy controls born in Sweden since 1932.

The researchers from Britain, Sweden and Australia factored in each person's maternal and paternal grandfathers' age of reproduction and details of any psychiatric diagnosis.

"We know from previous studies that older paternal age is a risk factor for autism," said Emma Frans from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who co-led the research with Reichenberg.

"This study goes beyond that and suggests that older grand-paternal age is also a risk factor for autism, suggesting that risk factors for autism can build up through generations."

The researchers said that while the mechanism behind the link to older fathers and grandfathers is not clear, it may be explained by mutations occurring in sperm cells over time.

Each time sperm cells divide new mutations can be introduced into a person's genome.

While most genetic mutations do not result in a child developing autism, the researchers said their findings suggest some 'silent' mutations pass on through healthy children and may influence the risk of future generations developing autism.

They also said genetic risk could accumulate over generations, or could interact with other risk factors, until it reaches a particular threshold and prompts autism in a child.

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