From The Wilderness Publications

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Experts on a strep germ that's sickening people and pigs in China are baffled by reports of 37 farmers suddenly falling ill, bleeding under the skin and dying — all previously unheard of with the disease.

While not uncommon in pigs, Streptococcus suis is seldom seen in people and never dozens of cases all at once — raising bigger questions about whether the germ has mixed with some other bacteria or virus.

"Something is different," Marcelo Gottschalk, one of the world's leading experts on the disease, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

"We are worried and we wonder what's happening. We would like to have the strain to identify."

Gottschalk works in the world's only reference laboratory for Streptococcus suis at the University of Montreal in Canada and says no one in China has contacted him for help since the outbreak was reported last month.

So few people have studied this disease, he's unsure how the Chinese have been able to identify it and what type of vaccine they plan to use since immunizations typically are not effective. Chinese state media have reported that enough vaccine for 350,000 pigs has already been sent to Sichuan province from a company in southern Guangdong province and that enough doses for 10 million swine will be shipped later.

Gottschalk said Streptococcus suis usually takes a while to develop in people and often causes meningitis followed by partial or permanent hearing loss. Most people also survive after being treated with antibiotics and cases are typically few and far between — Thailand, for example, usually has less than 20 known cases a year, he said. China has reported more than 200 confirmed or suspected human cases since June.

The infected farmers who handled or butchered sick pigs have experienced nausea, fever, vomiting and bleeding under the skin.

The World Health Organization and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization have questioned whether Streptococcus suis could possibly have combined with some other disease or bacteria in China. One case has also been reported in Guangdong province, hundreds of miles southeast of Sichuan. Hong Kong has reported two infections since the latest outbreak, but Chinese health officials have not announced whether those are connected to the Sichuan cases.

"Why is it behaving differently all of a sudden?" said Juan Lubroth, an animal health official at FAO in Rome. "One explanation is you have additional problems and it's not just Streptococcus suis that's causing it."

Thomas Alexander, retired deputy director of the University of Cambridge's School of Veterinary Medicine, was a pioneer in studying this particular strep germ. He said the bacteria is commonly found in the tonsils of healthy swine in different parts of the world. However, it sometimes becomes pathogenic when too many pigs are crammed together in unsanitary conditions.

"In my experience, it's much more chronic. They're describing death within 24 hours," he said by telephone from England. "What they're describing doesn't fit the picture."

The disease is typically spread from pigs to people through cuts or wounds on the hands. Pork that has been thoroughly cooked is not a problem, but eating undercooked or raw meat can infect humans.

Asia has been particularly aware of cross-species infection since 2003 when it fought SARS, which is believed to have first jumped from animals to people in southern China; it eventually killed nearly 800 people worldwide. The region is also currently battling bird flu in which poultry has infected humans, killing at least 60 people since 2003.

China was accused of withholding information about SARS, and WHO has recently said health officials are not sharing enough information about bird flu.

Based on his limited information, Gottschalk said he's not overly concerned about the pig disease spreading across borders since bacterial diseases tend to change more slowly than viruses like flu. There have been no cases of Streptococcus suis spreading from person to person.

He would, however, like the Chinese to send samples so he can try to identify the strain.

"It's extremely difficult for us get the real information for Chinese agriculture," he said. "I'm not really sure if they have all the background necessary to study this bacteria or infection. Few labs in the world are capable of studying this."

[It is too early to say whether these tea leaves are accurate. But I keep coming back to what my overriding assessment has been for two years now: Geography is King, and geographic proximity, more than anything else, will determine what the world looks like in ten or fifteen years in terms of alliances and trade. Latin America may well be asking itself, "Why should we trade one 800 pound gorilla for another?" That is especially true since Latin America may well be the first region to actually unify under healthy and mutually beneficial principles. It's been moving in that direction since at least 1992, and the pace of unification there is accelerating.

The South American continent may even set a model for the rest of the world as it starts scrambling to decide what to do as Peak Oil morphs from occasional bad dream to daily experience. Still to be answered: whither Mexico? – MCR]

The high point came last November, when Hu Jintao, China's president, arrived in Latin America to sign a series of trade and investment deals that heralded a new relationship between a rising superpower and a continent eager for economic growth. Nowhere was he greeted more warmly than in Brazil. Its left-leaning president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, sees China as the country's most promising business partner and an ally in boosting Brazil's global influence.

Toasting their “strategic partnership”, Lula predicted that trade with China would more than double to $20 billion in three years. China promised to invest $10 billion in Brazil, mostly in infrastructure. Brazil, along with Argentina and Chile, recognised China as a “market economy”, thereby constraining their ability to retaliate against imports. Brazil hoped for Chinese backing for its bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

But the euphoria has already given way to a rising fear of Chinese imports, disappointment at the pace of investment and Brazilian anger that their government has weakened the country's trade defences without getting much in return. China is “not a strategic partner”, says Roberto Giannetti da Fonseca, head of trade issues at FIESP, which represents industry in the state of São Paulo: it merely “wants to buy raw materials with no value added and to export consumer goods.” As for infrastructure investment, Paulo Fleury, a specialist in the subject, detects “lots of smoke and little fire”. Meanwhile, on the diplomatic front, China is opposing Brazil's joint bid (along with Japan, German and India) for permanent membership of the Security Council, though this is to block Japan, its arch rival, rather than Brazil.

If the euphoria was overdone, so is the despair. China is likely to remain an engine of Brazil's economy, though more as a customer than as an investor. The threat from imports is certainly growing, but so are export opportunities. China, like the United States, is becoming an indispensable partner, to be handled with care.

The two countries are often described as “complementary economies”. Therein lies much of the terror and promise of their relationship. China's breakneck pace of development requires commodities that Brazil is well placed to supply. It also gives China an incentive to invest in Brazil's infrastructure, opening bottlenecks that hinder growth. Yet no big developing country is content merely to complement China, which seems unbeatable in the sort of manufacturing that generates lots of jobs. And the synergy that looks good on paper is proving hard to put into practice.

For an economy vulnerable to financial panics, trade with China has been a boon. According to government figures, Brazil's exports to China jumped from $676m in 1999 to $5.4 billion in 2004. Although imports surged too, Brazil ran a surplus of $1.7 billion with China last year. But, as FIESP points out, such trade mainly involves swapping commodities for more sophisticated products. Nearly 60% of Brazil's exports to China are primary goods, largely soya and iron ore. Imports from China are higher-tech and more varied, with electronics, machines and chemicals in the lead. Now China is making inroads into such labour-intensive sectors as textiles, shoes and toys, too.

Judging by official data, the Chinese threat looks small. In shoes, for example, total imports account for about 1% of Brazilian production. In other cases, China appears often simply to be replacing traditional suppliers. But such statistics omit goods that are smuggled into Brazil or are “under-invoiced” to dodge taxes. Some two-thirds of Brazil's pirated products are produced in China. More than a newly paved motorway, the symbol of Sino-Brazilian relations is a cache of 66,000 Brazilian army uniforms, which tax authorities recently discovered being smuggled into the country. Though labelled “Made in Brazil”, they were actually made in China.

Even where Brazil is competitive, it faces obstacles. Brazilian farmers still seethe over last year's rejection by China of soya shipments costing hundreds of millions of dollars. China claims they were contaminated; Brazilians spy a ruse to back out of costly contracts. Embraer, a Brazilian aircraft manufacturer, recently set up a joint venture to build short-haul jets in China, but sales have not measured up to expectations.

Blame for the slow pace of Chinese investment in Brazil lies with both countries. Brazil has yet to publish rules that would activate public-private investments in infrastructure. China imagined that it could build Brazilian railroads with Chinese labour in exchange for long-term contracts to buy commodities at fixed prices—two delusions in one.

From all this, a new realism is likely to emerge, including tougher diplomacy on both sides. In conceding market-economy status to China, Brazil “could have driven a harder bargain” than it did—for example, by securing an expansion of meat exports, says Renato Amorim of the Brazil-China Business Council. Under pressure from textile manufacturers and others, Brazil's government has now drafted rules for “safeguards” directed specifically at China, which has threatened to retaliate.

But realism does not ignore opportunities. With China set to expand its textile exports, Brazil could increase its 1% share of the cotton market dramatically, says Marcos Jank of ICONE, a think-tank. China's urbanising population will soon be demanding more Brazilian pork and poultry, too. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, China's trade barriers are generally in line with those of other developing countries and are gradually being lowered.

The result is likely to be a reshaping of Brazilian industry, not its destruction, says José Roberto Mendonça de Barros of MB Associados, a consultancy. He reckons that Brazil will retain its edge in a wide range of industries, including small cars, T-shirts, bathing suits and machinery for energy and mining. The country's remoteness and high transport costs will protect other industries, he adds.

Brazil will get its $10 billion of investment eventually, if investors are confident of turning a profit. Chinese companies do not want to become “the World Bank” of Brazil, says Charles Tang, president of the Brazil-China Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Both countries are better off without such illusions.

An outbreak of flu in rural south-east Asia could spread around the globe in three months and infect half the world's population within a year, unless strict measures to contain it are introduced, scientists said yesterday.

The warning comes from researchers who used computer models to investigate what would happen if the avian flu virus, which is currently rife among poultry in areas of China, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, mutated into a form that spread easily among humans.

Scientists believe it is only a matter of time before the virus, known as H5N1, mutates to become more infectious to humans, possibly by swapping genes with the human flu virus.

"This is the event we're all scared might happen at any time," said Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London and the leading author of the study. "We'd be faced with an event worse than the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic."

The avian flu virus has killed more than 50 people in Asia, more than half of those who have been infected. Almost every death was traced back to the person coming into contact with infected poultry in the countryside. The Spanish pandemic of 1918 is believed to have claimed up to 40 million lives worldwide.

Professor Ferguson's team modelled the spread of a mutated avian flu virus among 85 million people living in Thailand and a strip of neighbouring countries. After watching how quickly the virus spread around the globe, they tested various strategies for containing an outbreak. "Until now, the idea of stopping an outbreak hadn't been investigated," he said.

If an outbreak was detected in its infancy, with less than 50 people infected, models show it could be contained by administering antiviral drugs to the 20,000 people closest to those infected, the researchers report in the journal Nature today. Combined with other measures, such as shutting schools and workplaces, it would take around 60 days to contain the outbreak, with the number of cases totalling no more than around 200.

To deal with the worst case scenario of an avian flu outbreak, the scientists called for an international stockpile of 3m courses of antiviral drugs to be set up, ready to be deployed anywhere in the world within a few days of an outbreak being detected.

A spokeswoman for Roche, which manufactures the antiviral drug Tamiflu, confirmed that the company is in talks with the World Health Organisation about building a stockpile of the drug, but refused to give further details. The WHO already has 120,000 courses of Tamiflu, but with Britain and France each waiting for orders of 15m courses from Roche, the company will have to decide which takes priority.

Prof Ferguson's research is reported alongside a second study published online today by the US journal Science, which modelled an outbreak of flu among half a million people living in Thailand.

Ira Longini and his team at Emory University in Atlanta also found that antiviral drugs could be used to contain an outbreak by giving them to healthy people closest to those infected. Flu vaccines, even relatively poor ones, would also help quash a nascent outbreak, he said.

According to Professor Longini's model, 100,000 courses of Tamiflu would be enough to prevent a flu outbreak becoming a pandemic as long as the virus had a "reproductive number" - the average number of people each infected person goes on to infect - of no more than 1.6. Measles, one of the most infectious diseases has a reproductive number of around 15. Typically, each person infected with flu infects two others.

Prof Longini said the creation of an international stockpile of drugs should take precedence over orders from individual countries. "The WHO should get priority ... and the richer nations should chip in, because it's in their interests to stop it before it reaches their shores," he said.