Michael Perdue Quotes (7 Quotes)

They haven't cleaned up the animal problem yet. We depend upon our country office, which investigates all these, and so far they have not given us any indication there is human-to-human transmission. It's just more of the same animal-human exposure.

It could reduce the mutation level... you are less likely to have widespread mutation than if you had 20 strains hop-scotching across Asia. Surveillance and response of H5N1 in both animals and humans needs to be strengthened in all regions bordering countries where outbreaks have been identified.

We'd certainly hoped not to see it in Africa.

We don't have the genetic sequence yet but we hope to soon which should tell us if it is the same virus that we have seen in Turkey and in the region surrounding the Black Sea area, where we have seen a lot of outbreaks in the last six months.

We have a team arranged to go tomorrow (Saturday) or Sunday.

The evidence for widespread asymptomatic infections is just not there. The (more recent) studies that have been done, one of the reasons frankly that I think they haven't been followed up on, is they haven't found many positives. You don't get too excited about all negative serology (blood work).

It's very important to do this kind surveillance so that we know what's going on. And we're hopeful, since there are some clear differences, that these viruses will be made available to other investigators to do further analysis.