H5N1 is not only making people in Egypt sick, it’s also destroying their food supply.  Bird flu, along with foot & mouth disease, is taking down precious livestock.  It’s becoming not only a health issue, but an economic one as well.

According to a 14 May report in the Atlantic, H5N1 is also threatening livestock in “…Sudan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jordan.” But the article says everyone should blame the U.S./NATO backed war in Libya!

The Atlantic says that the U.S./European created war in Libya is responsible for more than 10% of livestock deaths, as a result of disease, making Libya “ground zero” of a public health emergency.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is “…warning that the epidemic in Egypt was threatening human food supplies for all of the Middle East and North Africa.”

The Atlantic also explains that six years of efforts to control H5N1 in Egypt are not working. That’s because the current vaccine is no longer valid against the new strain of H5N1.  It’s estimated that millions of chickens (a main protein source in Egypt) have died, or been culled because of H5N1 infection.

Now ducks are showing up with a new version of H5N1.  The UN World Health Organization says Egypt is number two for human cases of H5N1, Indonesia is number one!

On 7 May 2012, another dead wild bird in Hong Kong tested positive for H5N1.

At the beginning of May the controversial H5N1 study was made public. This was the study that shows how to make H5N1 transmissible between humans. As a result the U.S. National Institutes for Health (NIH) wants new rules regarding dual-use research of concern (DURC).

DURC refers to studies which look at the possibility of current diseases becoming more deadly, so that the medical community could be better prepared.  The problem is that those studies could also serve as instructions for making biological warfare agents.

The NIH is considering advise from local health organizations before coming up with the new DURC rules.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Sinovac Biotech, a Chinese company, is the “…only supplier of the H5N1 pandemic influenza vaccine to the [Chinese] government-stockpiling program.”

The vaccine is called Panflu, and they are working on a new version called Panflu 1.