An avian H5N1 influenza A virus (A/Hong Kong/156/97) was isolated from a tracheal aspirate obtained from a 3-year-old child in Hong Kong with a fatal illness consistent with influenza. Serologic analysis indicated the presence of an H5 hemagglutinin. All eight RNA segments were derived from an avian influenza A virus. The hemagglutinin contained multiple basic amino acids adjacent to the cleava...

In early March 2012, animal health and quarantine officials culled and then destroyed more than 54,000 chickens and sterilized a farm in Changhua (in central Taiwan) due to an outbreak of the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza (HPAI) H5N2. Because all of the news that has any connection to avian influenza remains of great interest to the public, this event caught the attention of the m...

Vaccination of poultry is an important control measure for avian influenza employed in the countries where the disease is endemic. We have formulated a coupled ODE-PDE model of avian influenza in domestic birds with imperfect vaccination and age-since-vaccination structure, which includes distinct features of vaccine-induced partial protection. Interestingly, our results show that vaccination c...

H5N1 avian influenza outbreak detection is a significant issue for early warning of epidemics. This paper proposes domain knowledge-based joint one class classification model for avian influenza outbreak. Instead of focusing on manipulations of the one class classification models, we delve into the one class avian influenza data-set, divide it into sub-classes by domain knowledge, train the sub...

Growing concerns about avian influenza, and its effect on agriculture and human health, have highlighted the need to understand the role of wildlife in maintaining and spreading the virus. We surveyed the wildlife inhabiting a poultry farm with recent H3N6 and H4N6 avian influenza virus exposure in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. One raccoon (Procyon lotor) tested positive for H4N6 antibodies. This is the...

Avian influenza A, a highly pathogenic avian influenza, is a lethal infection in certain species of wild birds, including some endangered species. Raptors are susceptible to avian influenza, and spatial risk assessment of such species may be valuable for conservation planning. We used the maximum entropy approach to generate potential distribution models of three raptor species from presence-on...

The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) prescribes standards for the diagnosis and control of avian influenza, as well as health measures for safe trade in birds and avian products, which are based on up-to-date scientific information and risk management principles, consistent with the role of the OIE as a reference standard-setting body for the World Trade Organization (WTO). These stan...

BACKGROUND Pandemic influenza virus strains originate in avian species. We examined veterinarians in the United States for evidence of previous avian influenza virus infection. METHODS We performed a controlled, cross-sectional seroprevalence study among 42 veterinarians and 66 healthy control subjects using serum samples collected from 2002 through 2004. Serum samples were tested using a mic...

Avian influenza is a viral disease that primarily infects wild and domestic birds, but it also can be transmitted to a variety of mammals. In 2006, the United States of America Departments of Agriculture and Interior designed a large-scale, interagency surveillance effort that sought to determine if highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses were present in wild bird populations within the Unite...

Infection of poultry with diverse lineages of H5N2 avian influenza viruses has been documented for over three decades in different parts of the world, with limited outbreaks caused by this highly pathogenic avian influenza virus. In the present study, three avian H5N2 influenza viruses, A/chicken/Shijiazhuang/1209/2013, A/chicken/Chiping/0321/2014, and A/chicken/Laiwu/0313/2014, were isolated f...