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Talk:Influenza A virus subtype H5N1/Archive 1

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This page covers discussion on H5N1 until October 25, 2005, when discussion about cleanup temporarily moved to the cleanup taskforce page.



I took nearly all this article and merged the information into the avian influenza article. It has since been reverted, so if you're thinking about integrating the two, foregt it. Her Pegship 17:39, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

>"resulting in fifty five deaths outside of China"

What about inside of China? Why does this sentence specifically exclude China? Kaldari 00:02, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

It may be that statistics were not immediately available from within China.

I suggest that the article's statistics be updated both in terms of a time line and country by country.

I've added some information, including a subsection, but the article's information, I suggests, needs to be streamlined and the various sections regrouped and some headings edited.

If no one else works at it I'll give it a try in the next little while.

CBorges 19:38, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

Update: I juggled text around and updated some figures. I would suggest once more information is added that a section showing country-by-country figures be placed between the history and transmission sections.

Every part of the article needs updating, expanding, and refining, but I would suggest in particular more information on farming practices and how they could be changed.

CBorges 21:19, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

Effects of a Pandemic

The information in this section is taken from a report by an finance company with strong links to the pharmaceutical industry and cannot be considered NPOV. It should be removed and a more credible summary from the WHO report be added instead.

Cleanup of this and Avian Influenza article

It appears most of this text was originally taken from the Avian influenza article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_influenza#H5N1

Unfortunately the main article was largely left as is so still contained way too much text. As such, people have been modifying the main article and not this in some cases. Someone needs to go through the work of cleaning up the Avian influenza article to summarise & remove unnecessary stuff on H5N1 and move anything new here (sorry too busy).Nil Einne 13:40, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

In response to Kaldari's question about the sentence that excludes China from the death count:

The Chinese government (as it previously did with SARS, and before that AIDS) continues to deny that there have been any human deaths caused by cases of H5N1. Thus we can only go on "unofficial" numbers as far as China is concerned.

Throughout the article, different deathtolls are confirmed "as of July" 20 or 21, 2005. The death toll and date need to be confirmed and made consistent. While the first two iterations are appropriate, the other repetitions should be deleted.

Trying to clean this up (and failing, really) made me think it's probably better to start again from scratch. Selectively copy useful material across, and whatever's left can be dumped in a Timeline-type article. Rd232 23:45, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

  • Agreed. This page is a complete disaster. Half of it is redundant, there are copyvios all over the place, and it reads like a timeline instead of an article. Maybe I'll blank everything out and replace it with a cleanup notice - that'll draw attention to things, if it doesn't just get reverted immediately. --Quintin3265 15:57, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
I took a crack at this. See the avian influenza article for the result. Her Pegship 17:39, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
BanyanTree reverted my edits almost immediately, so if you want to merge the two articles, you should try a different approach, as s/he apparently feels this should still be a separate article.Her Pegship 18:01, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
This page is the result of BanyanTree cleaning up a very long and straggly avian influenza article. I also believe the pages should be kept separate, if only to keep the page size manageable on this very important topic. Duplication means that people do not know which article to edit. Wizzy…☎ 18:46, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

To those who are so zealous about protecting wikipedia from copyright lawsuits, please read the following:

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.-unsigned

Fair use says "Fair use makes copyrighted work available to the public as raw material without the need for permission or clearance, so long as such free usage serves the purpose of copyright law, which the U.S. Constitution defines as the promotion of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (I.1.8), better than the legal enforcement of claims of infringement."

See [1] for further information.

"RULES OF THUMB FOR COURSEPACKS

The Classroom Guidelines that were negotiated in 1976 can provide helpful guidance and we recommend that you read them. 1. Limit coursepack materials to

  • single chapters
  • single articles from a journal issue
  • several charts, graphs or illustrations
  • other similarly small parts of a work. "

from [2] illustrates the principle of extracting part of a work being covered by fair use.

The New York Times itself quotes others.

"Copyright protects the particular way an author has expressed himself; it does not extend to any ideas, systems, or factual information conveyed in the work." [3] therefore a quote that essentially lists facts isn't even covered by copywrite in the first place.

Wikipedia primary servers are in the US.

While it would be nice to have no legal complications, the rich in this world are seeking to own everything including math equations (which is what software patents are).

Don't help memes that block the free flow of information. Help memes that promote freedom. Fair use is one such doctrine, law and meme. WAS 4.250 00:25, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

The entirety of the work

Well, I think the key issue here is that it wasn't just part of the work that was copied - it was all of it. Most judges would uphold that copying the entire work consitutes a violation. --Quintin3265 05:12, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

The important thing is to both stay legal and to not throw away data. Copying the whole for educational purposes is within what has been held as "fair" in America. We must strive to be legal EVERYWHERE - but not at the cost of throwing away data. Changes have been made that improve the situation.

  1. We MUST cite sources; whether we copy or paraphrase or glean numbers. This has been done.
  2. Copying the WHOLE, while POSSIBLY legal, is certainly not best practice. So I have deleted the part of the quoted section that simply reproduces data we already have (in the prior section), joined it to the prior section, and reformated to make more clear that it is a referenced quote, not just referenced data. WAS 4.250 07:47, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Provide sources, not opinions

I wrote the following under 'prevention' a little while ago:

Tamiflu, an antiviral agent, may help prevent the development of a human strain. The reason for using this is not to suppress the bird flu but possible other infections, which, if present in an individual, might combine with the bird flu, creating a strain that would be more infectious to humans.

The explanation has since been removed. I myself had some doubts about writing this, because it might stop people from using it because it's just for the good of mankind, not for themselves particularly. Is that the reason for the removal? DirkvdM 09:08, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I removed it because I don't believe it is true and you provided no source backing it up. If you have a reputable source, quote the source or at least provide the reference so the assertion can be verified. In contested cases, references stating something is so and references staing it is not so are provided, quoted or summarized and we let the reader draw his own conclusions. What wikipedia is not about tho is us throwing in our opinions. WAS 4.250 11:11, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

The mechanism by which drugs like Tamiflu works involves reducing the amount of infectious virus produced by cells and reducing the spread of viruses. I assume that "a human strain" means a strain that would more easily infect humans or more easily pass from human to human. Each time a new cell is infected, there is a chance for virus mutation. Anything that reduces virus infections will reduce the chances of evolutionary change. It is also true that one way avian flu could evolve would be through genetic recombination with another flu virus inside of an infected cell. Tamiflu can limit the spread of many flu strains and reduce the opportunity for avian flu to genetically recombine with other strains. However, I think it is important to put these effects of Tamiflu into perspective. Under what circumstances might Tamiflu use produce a significant change in the rate of evolution of avian flu? It would have to be the case that a significant fraction of the viral evolution would be blocked, which would require that a significant fraction of avian flu infections be blocked by Tamiflu. It is not clear to me that this is possible. Rather than the vague "may help prevent" that was in the article, it would be better to explain all of the steps that can be taken to limit the evolution of avian flu and which ones are most likely to be the most important. For example, teaching people to limit contact with infected animals and animal waste is more important than selling Tamiflu to people who are not in contact with the virus. --JWSchmidt 13:34, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

It certainly isn't an opinion (it doesn't even look like one, it's a statement of fact - whether the 'fact' is correct is a different matter). I heard this on Nieuwslicht, a Dutch tv show with scientific background to the news. It specifically mentioned that the inoculations of people in Romania, as shown on tv, were not meant to fight the bird flu infection in people (or was that 'not just'?), but (also?) to prevent infected people from getting another virus infection, which might then combine with the bird flu to produce a mix that is as dangerous as the bird flu but is as infectious to humans as the other virus. It was something to do with the new virus getting the inside of the one virus and the outside of the other virus. I agree that a better source is needed, but I'm not going to do this because I simply don't know enough about this sort of thing. I merely added it so someone more knowledgeable could pick it up.

Here's a phrase from the French wikipedia (search for 'tamiflu' - first hit):

... a possible bird flu pandemic after recombination of H5N1 with another human flu virus.

Which leaves the question whether we should give this info. I suppose we should because that's what an encyclopedia is supposed to do and only the more interested will read this. Hell, it was even on tv. Although that's no excuse, really - we shouldn't base our moral standards on tv shows. DirkvdM 07:36, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Hold on, that phrase on the French wikiopedia was added after I edited this article, so it may very well have been copied form here. DirkvdM 07:42, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
In the online version of the Dutch newpaper NRC Handelsblad (paid-for login required) I just read something similar. Except that it says that vaccination is meant just to prevent people from getting infected with the bird flu and an existing human human flu virus (during the coming flu season) because that might lead to the creation of a mixed virus tha combines the qualities qualities of both the bird flu (potentially lethal) and the human flu (easy infection). So that's not about tamiflu, but I'm fairly sure I didn't misunderstand Nieuwslicht. And in the same newspaper it says that tamiflu doesn't offer any protection against bird flu. DirkvdM 10:36, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
"tamiflu doesn't offer any protection against bird flu" - Previously, bird flu isolates have been shown to be sensitive to tamiflu (oseltamivir), for example: (Comparison of Efficacies of RWJ-270201, Zanamivir, and Oseltamivir against H5N1, H9N2, and Other Avian Influenza Viruses). This is why countries are using it on people who are exposed to avian flu. It has been "big news" when tamiflu-resistant strains of avian flu have been isolated: Avian flu: isolation of drug-resistant H5N1 virus. (download file [PDF]). Monitoring is on-going to see if tamiflu-resistant strains become common. As of now, they are not. --JWSchmidt 18:29, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
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