- Hello, Jeff - Here we go again! I applaud Promed for
reporting this story and also for their BSE articles in whch they publicized
colleagues apprehensions about the US food supply as it relates to BSE.
-
- Perhaps, they realize the threat to the US by both BSE
and also Biolabs that put the country and the world at risk for the sake
of greed.
-
- I hope that more will come to light about this incident
below and other biological labs that employ similar practices.
-
- Patricia Doyle
-
- From ProMED-mail
-
- Dangers Cited In Alleged Scheme
- By Meredith Goad
- Portland Press Herald
- 1-4-4
-
- Agricultural experts say the recent indictment of former
executives at a Maine biological laboratory for allegedly mislabeling and
smuggling poultry viruses into the United States highlights illegal practices
that could have caused disaster for the poultry industry. And the practices
may be more widespread than anyone knows, because they are not easily uncovered
by authorities.
-
- "I would speculate that there is more of this going
on than we know about," said Dr. Don Hoenig, Maine's state veterinarian.
-
- Three former executives from Maine Biological Laboratories
in Winslow face federal charges, including conspiracy and mail fraud, for
allegedly smuggling the virus that causes avian influenza into the country
from Saudi Arabia. A Saudi customer wanted the lab to use the virus to
secretly manufacture a vaccine so that Saudi authorities would not find
out about an outbreak of the potentially devastating disease in one of
its flocks, authorities allege.
-
- In addition to the smuggling allegations, the executives
are accused of altering expiration dates on vaccine labels and mislabeling
batches of vaccine for overseas customers to help them avoid import costs.
In some cases, batches were mislabeled because the customers did not have
the proper licenses and permits. In other cases, customers asked that multiple
batches of vaccine be labeled as a single batch.
-
- "They had to pay a fee for each batch, and if they
call it all one batch then they only have to pay the fee once," said
Assistant U.S. Attorney Toby Dilworth.
-
- More worrisome, agricultural experts say, are charges
that the laboratory sometimes sent a different vaccine to a customer than
the one that was ordered -- without changing the label -- "to increase
sales and profits." Customers had no idea they were not getting the
product they paid for, according to the indictment.
-
- Substituting even a similar vaccine for the one actually
purchased could have terrible repercussions on poultry farms because immunity
to disease is so specific, said Dr. John A. Smith of the United States
Animal Health Association. Smith is a Georgia veterinarian who chairs the
association's Committee on Transmissible Diseases of Poultry and Other
Avian Species. He is also on the poultry health committee of the National
Chicken Council. "If somebody pulled a switch like that on me, it
could have serious consequences for my birds, and I would be very disturbed,"
Smith said.
-
- The alleged smuggling scheme dates to 1998 and resulted
in USD 895 704 in sales for Maine Biological Laboratories, according to
the indictments.
-
- "The customer in Saudi Arabia believed that this
virus was causing them significant economic losses," Dilworth said,
"and they were willing to pay a premium for a vaccine to combat this
disease."
-
- The introduction of foreign viruses and other animal
diseases into the United States is something agricultural producers worry
about all the time, said Hoenig, the state veterinarian. In 1983, Hoenig
worked the landmark outbreak of avian influenza in Pennsylvania that killed
hundreds of thousands of birds and led to the destruction of 17 million
other birds. In 2001, he spent a month in England helping to control an
outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.
-
- "You see first-hand how much devastation a disease
can cause, not only to an animal population but to a human population,"
he said. "Just the psychological impact on a community is devastating.
I don't think anybody thought about that when they decided to illegally
smuggle something in here."
-
- Concerns have grown since the terrorist attacks on 11
Sep 2001 and the still-unsolved anthrax mailings that followed. With the
recent discovery of mad cow disease in Washington state, Americans are
coming to appreciate the dire economic impact an animal disease can have.
-
- The alleged smuggling by the Maine laboratory occurred
before 11 Sep 2001, and security has tightened since then. But Hoenig said
it's probably still comparatively easy to smuggle something like an animal
virus into the country because it isn't made of metal or connected with
explosives.
-
- Luckily, the strain of avian flu used in the alleged
smuggling scheme was a milder subtype known as H9, experts said, and was
not likely to cause major problems for Maine's USD 50-60 million poultry
and egg industry if it escaped.
-
- The story might have been different, however, if the
smuggled material were made up of the more deadly H5 and H7 subtypes. The
Pennsylvania outbreak was caused by H5, as is a current outbreak in South
Korea that has so far spread to 14 farms and resulted in the slaughter
of 1.2 million chickens and ducks.
-
- "I'm awfully glad that they discovered what was
happening" with the alleged smuggling scheme in Maine, Hoenig said.
"The highly pathogenic form could be devastating to the poultry industry
here. It has an extremely high mortality and acts very quickly, and spreads
through a flock in a matter of days."
-
- An outbreak of H5 or H7 also has import-export ramifications,
said Smith, the Georgia veterinarian. "People find out you have it,
they shut your trade off," he said.
-
- Avian influenza is similar to the human flu and is one
of the diseases most feared by poultry farmers. In milder cases, birds
have nasal discharge, their food and water consumption drops, and they
may stop producing eggs. In more serious cases, there may be severe nasal
discharge, swelling of the comb and wattles, swollen eyes, diarrhea --
even sudden death.
-
- The disease is worse in turkeys than in chickens, Smith
said. "If you get one of these really hot H5 or H7 strains, it will
get into a house of turkeys and let's say there are 10 000 turkeys in there.
It will kill 9500 of them," he said.
-
- After the Pennsylvania outbreak in the early 1980s, the
disease cropped up in milder forms across the Northeast, particularly in
association with live bird markets in New York City, New Jersey, and Boston.
After a bird tested positive in a Boston market in 2002, the disease was
traced to ducks at a Warren, Maine, farm. It was the first time avian flu
was detected in commercial poultry in Maine.
-
- Smith and Hoenig both said they have never heard of a
similar case of smuggling avian flu.
-
- "Vaccine companies will occasionally bend the rules
and get in a little trouble with the regulator, but you don't often hear
about outright malfeasance like this," Smith said.
-
- Maine Biological Laboratories received the flu virus
from its Saudi customer in July 1998. Details of exactly how the virus
was allegedly smuggled into the country have not been made public. The
company produced the illegal vaccine from May to September 1999, according
to the indictments. Federal investigators 1st heard about the scheme from
a tipster.
-
- "This has been a long investigation," Dilworth
said. "It started with a complaint brought to our office by the Commerce
Department regarding shipments that really had nothing to do with Saudi
Arabia. They were shipments that were unrelated. But as a result of that
investigation, we uncovered other violations."
-
- A sample of the same avian flu virus was also sent to
a scientist at an academic laboratory somewhere in the United States. Dilworth
would not identify the lab, but said it is not in Maine. "I can tell
you we are investigating and we anticipate additional charges will be brought,"
he said.
-
- The indictments charge that when the Maine laboratory
executives learned the government was on to them, they tried to cover their
tracks by deleting computer files, destroying records, and getting rid
of vaccine still on site.
-
- Smith said the false labeling charges are particularly
troubling. "USDA, in my opinion, does a pretty good job of regulating
our veterinary vaccines so that I as a practitioner can generally have
pretty good confidence in what I'm buying without worrying that it's dirty
or adulterated, or it's been cut and it's cheap or not going to work,"
he said.
-
- "I don't have to do a lot of testing myself because
I've got confidence in the system," Smith said. "And when you
hear about this kind of thing, it shakes your confidence in the system
a little bit."
-
- http://www.pressherald.com/news/state/040104virus.shtml#top
-
- ProMED-mail
-
- [An H9N2 avian influenza virus is known to be present
for the past several years in various Middle-Eastern countries. Though
not an HPAI (Highly pathogenic avian influenza) virus strain, losses at
times may be considerable. The main worry regarding this strain is its
documented potential to infect humans, as reported in Hong Kong in 1999
and 2003. It has been postulated that shared gene constellations in avian
influenza viruses H9N2 and H5N1 may confer the ability to cause infection
and disease in humans (see ProMED-mail posting 20020106.3179).
-
- Besides the legal aspects, the epidemiological hazards
of unauthorised introduction of the virus into a country seem to be mainly
related to the risk of virus escape; the vaccines are inactivated. - Mod.AS]
-
- Patricia A. Doyle, PhD
- Please visit my "Emerging Diseases" message
board at:
- http://www.clickitnews.com/ubbthreads/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=emergi
ngdiseases
- Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa
- Go with God and in Good Health
|
