Bird Flu Threat

[starrwriter]

I was just thinking about the bird flu, and it dawned on me that we may all have come in contact with a little blue bird that flies nonstop and goes by the name of pensive. We should have pensive tested to set my mind at ease. Right whose with me....let's go!

To me it's amusing and revealing of human nature that many people have reacted to the bird flu threat in one of two ways. They either panic or pooh-pooh the threat as nonsense.

Both reactions are irrational. There is absolutely no reason to panic. The public health system is moving swiftly to deal with the possibility of a pandemic. All a person has to do is stay informed about preventive measures and where to go for treatment if they are infected.

Those who ridicule the threat as a conspiracy by the media, the government, the pharmaceutical industry etc. simply don't want to believe anything as horrendous as 1918 could happen again. This amounts to whistling while walking past the cemetery so one won't hear the ghosts. It would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerously naive.

[certus]

I've been reading the site http://www.birdfluinsider.com and came across an opinion piece that got me thinking. I recall how Toronto shut down with SARS, it really shook that town's economy. If this bird flu turns out to be legitimate and it hits my city, I'm wondering after having been shut down for a few months whether my employer will have a job for me to come back to.

[starrwriter]

I recall how Toronto shut down with SARS, it really shook that town's economy. If this bird flu turns out to be legitimate and it hits my city, I'm wondering after having been shut down for a few months whether my employer will have a job for me to come back to.

The potential economic impact of a bird flu pandemic is the wild card in the scenario. If government and public health officials let the medical situation get out of control, the entire world economy could suffer catastrophic damage comparable to the Great Depression. You should find out if your local officials have a workable plan in effect to deal with a bird flu epidemic. If they don't, a job is the last thing you might be worried about.

[starrwriter]

CHINA COVERUP?

BANGKOK (Reuters) - A Thai boy has become the 70th person to die of bird flu, representing a fatality rate of more than 50% for infected humans, authorities said on Friday.

Meanwhile, China has so far reported more than 30 outbreaks of bird flu among domestic fowl and five cases where the virus spread to humans. But Chinese officials were accused of concealing bird flu outbreaks in several provinces for many months this year, according to comments from a leading virologist in Hong Kong published in Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper on Friday.

Beijing has promised resources and openness in fighting bird flu after being widely criticized for an initial cover-up of the SARS virus in 2003.

Despite the promise, Guan Yi of the University of Hong Kong claimed bird flu was "out of control in China."

"I don't know if they are brave enough to admit that they have the virus in every corner of the country," he said. The Globe and Mail noted that Yi had analyzed nearly 100,000 bird flu virus samples from across China.

"Quite honestly, some provinces have the virus and they still haven't announced any outbreak," the newspaper quoted Yi. "I can show direct evidence, even though China is still trying very hard to block my research."

[starrwriter]

Latest maps showing world regions where avian virus has spread --

Bird infections:



Human infections:

[samercury]

OMW .....

[starrwriter]

Bold experiment in live-virus vaccine against bird flu:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051218/...ird_flu_sprays

[starrwriter]

FIRST DEATH OUTSIDE OF ASIA

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey said on Wednesday (Jan. 4) two people had been diagnosed with bird flu -- the first human cases outside Southeast Asia and China -- and a doctor said one of them, a 14-year-old boy, had died from the killer H5N1 strain of avian flu.

A top World Health Organization (WHO) official said the cases marked a dramatic shift westwards for the deadly disease to the threshold of Europe. It is the first death outside of Asia where more than 70 people have succumbed to bird flu.

"(The boy) died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu," Huseyin Avni Sahin, head doctor at the hospital in the town of Van in eastern Turkey, near the Iranian and Armenian borders, told a televised news conference. The boy's sister has also been diagnosed as having bird flu and remains seriously ill.

Turkey, on the path of migratory birds that are believed to spread the virus, has had two outbreaks of the highly contagious disease among poultry in the past three months. Veterinary experts across Europe have been on alert, culling birds and taking other precautionary measures since October outbreaks in Turkey and Romania.

JANUARY 5 DEVELOPMENTS

ERZURUM, Eastern Turkey (Reuters) - A second Turkish teenager died of bird flu on Thursday as a virus that has killed 74 people in east Asia claimed its first lives far to the west, on the fringes of Europe and the Middle East.

In a sign the disease may have infected people over a wide area of eastern Turkey, six people from a different province were taken to hospital with suspected bird flu. In all, doctors said 18 patients were under scrutiny and two of them very sick.

All the previously confirmed victims have been from Southeast Asia and China. H5N1 has killed around half of the people known to have been infected with the virus.

The Turkish teenagers who died were in remote, rural Agri province next to the Armenian border. People there live, as in the affected areas of the Far East, in close proximity with livestock and poultry, which they mostly raise for their own consumption.

The development could mean that the extent of the outbreak in poultry in Turkey had been underestimated or that the virus could jump more easily from birds to humans, said Professor John Oxford of Queen Mary's School of Medicine in London.

"It is surprising that there are two deaths and a number of people have been infected in what we thought to be a rather small outbreak," he said.

[starrwriter]

EPIDEMIC BREWING IN TURKEY?

DOGUBAYAZIT, Turkey (AP) -- Fears rose Sunday (Jan. 8) that a deadly strain of bird flu was spreading in Turkey after preliminary tests showed two children and an adult tested positive for the virus in Ankara -- the first known cases outside an eastern region of the country where three people have already died.

Russia's chief epidemiologist, Gennady Onishchenko, urged Russians not to travel to eastern parts of Turkey because of the bird flu outbreak, according to a statement released Sunday. Iran also has closed down its border to Turkish citizens.

The two young brothers and an adult who were hospitalized in the Turkish capital, Ankara, would be the first cases of H5N1 found outside the vicinity of Van in eastern Turkey.

Health officials have not yet determined if the infections in Turkey resulted from contact with sick birds or passed directly between humans. A pandemic that could kill millions worldwide is feared if the avian virus mutates to become easily transmittable from person to person.

Birds in Turkey, Romania, Russia and Croatia have recently tested positive for H5N1, which in recent months has killed 74 people in Asia and three more in Turkey.

If a pandemic occurs, a vaccine would take several months to develop and manufacture in sufficient quantity to affect the outcome. In the meantime, the anti-viral drug Tamiflu is the only treatment available. However, a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine reported how four of eight patients in Vietnam died despite using Tamiflu. It sparked concern as it suggested that certain strains of the H5N1 might have become resistant to the drug.

[starrwriter]

OMINOUS PROBLEMS

The ominous developments in Turkey show the problems that will be encountered in preventing a human pandemic of avian flu.

Peasants in remote villages in the eastern province where the first human deaths occurred were reluctant to surrender their chickens and other domestic fowl for destruction by government authorities. This despite assurances they would be financially compensated. Some hid their domestic fowl because they either didn't believe they actually would be compensated or because they doubted the existence of avian flu.

Within a few days human cases of avian flu spread 600 miles to Ankara in a country where peasants travel very little.

The same scenario is playing out in affected Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. If the virus continues to spread (as is very likely) every country in the world where peasants depend on domestic fowl for survival will face the same problem in confining an outbreak to rural areas. When human cases begin to erupt in big cities, it could only be a short time before infected people spread the virus worldwide via airline travel for business and tourism.

Meanwhile, migratory wild birds have already carried the virus from Indonesia 10,000 miles west to Europe. Culling domestic fowl is difficult but possible. Eliminating wild birds that may be infected is impossible.

It seems to me that the World Health Organization's first line of defense against a pandemic -- preventing the spread of avian virus from birds to people -- is not a plan that has much chance of success. Also, it will become moot if the virus mutates to become easily passable from human to human, as has happened in the past with avian flu viruses.

The second line of defense, the anti-viral drug Tamiflu, may not be effective against the H5N1 virus. That leaves a vaccine as the last line of defense. But that will take months AFTER a pandemic starts to develop/deliver and many millions could die in the interim.

My conclusion is that it will be pure luck if we avoid a huge death toll. The H5N1 virus may not mutate for easy transmission between people and it will be this random effect of genetics that prevents a pandemic. While it's unnerving to realize the survival of a substantial portion of the human population can depend on random events we can't even see with the naked eye, I wonder how many times in its 2-million-year history the human race has unknowingly escaped extinction as a species from pathogens that narrowly failed to evolve the right genes to finish us off. More than once in all likelihood.

Ignorance may be bliss, but now we know too much to be blissful. Man is the only animal that knows he is going to die -- for one reason or another.

[Nightshade]

Those who ridicule the threat as a conspiracy by the media, the government, the pharmaceutical industry etc. simply don't want to believe anything as horrendous as 1918 could happen again. This amounts to whistling while walking past the cemetery so one won't hear the ghosts. It would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerously naive.

Humm Star I havent read most of this but I was thionk 1918 medicine has come along in leaps and bounds since then hasnt it and was the reason it spread the way it then , the trenches and the general low imunity of the soilders who were in close contact, then they toojk it home to their families?
Andother thing Ive often wondered about -- and dont laugh Im genuine here-- how do they know it was bird flu that did it , or rather the same birdflu? I mean they couldnt see virus the way we can and know what they are under an electron microscope (or could they? when was that invented anyway??) so how do they know it wasnt somthhing else?
Id ask my sisters who did history of medicine at school but they tend to look at me like Im an idiot. But I really do want to know.

[starrwriter]

Humm Star I havent read most of this but I was thionk 1918 medicine has come along in leaps and bounds since then hasnt it and was the reason it spread the way it then, the trenches and the general low imunity of the soilders who were in close contact, then they took it home to their families? And another thing Ive often wondered about -- and dont laugh Im genuine here-- how do they know it was bird flu that did it , or rather the same bird flu? I mean they couldnt see virus the way we can and know what they are under an electron microscope (or could they? when was that invented anyway??) so how do they know it wasnt something else?

The 1918 pandemic didn't come from bird flu in Asia, as most ordinary human flu does. It actually originated in Kansas and the source could have been either bird flu or swine flu from domestic animals. So American soldiers spread it to Europe, not the other way around (although a later second and third wave of mutated flu virus did come from Europe to the U.S.)

You don't need an electron miscroscope to see flu virus. The optical microscopes available in 1918 could do that. There was no question that a flu virus caused the pandemic.

[joni1]

Studies at the genetic level further determined that the virus had jumped directly from birds to humans. An outbreak of highly pathogenic H7N7 avian influenza, which began in the Netherlands in February 2003, caused the death of lots of persons , and mild illness in 83 other humans. these are some information these are very important to be allert humans for more see- http://www.drugdelivery.ca/bird-flu.aspx you can collect more information.

[lil_prepper]

Sorry to burst all of your anti-hiding-in-caves bubbles but the bird flu IS very serious. It is up to a 62% death rate, meaning if you get it there is a 62% chance that you will die. I forget who said it, but it was along the lines of "the media makes things sound so much more serious than they are" which is almost laughable in this case. The media is hiding dramatic amounts of information and WILL wait to tell us all the actual truth until it is too late. This isn't my opinion either. It is hundreds and hundreds of people who are actually informed of the bird flu.

For those of you interested in prepping (preparing for the bird flu pandemic that WILL happen) you should definitely check out these links:
http://www.newfluwikie2.com
and
http://web.mac.com/monotreme1/iWeb/P.../PFI_Main.html

Good luck to all. I'll be over here proudly hiding in my own cave.

Okay I see now that the thread has turned around. I just read the first page when I posted that last message. Very cool to see it discussed by people who actually know stuff about it now.

To me it's amusing and revealing of human nature that many people have reacted to the bird flu threat in one of two ways. They either panic or pooh-pooh the threat as nonsense.

Both reactions are irrational. There is absolutely no reason to panic. The public health system is moving swiftly to deal with the possibility of a pandemic. All a person has to do is stay informed about preventive measures and where to go for treatment if they are infected.

Those who ridicule the threat as a conspiracy by the media, the government, the pharmaceutical industry etc. simply don't want to believe anything as horrendous as 1918 could happen again. This amounts to whistling while walking past the cemetery so one won't hear the ghosts. It would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerously naive.

I do agree with alot of this, especially the last paragraph. But the second paragraph is partially wrong. The WHO isn't gonna do anything. No organization can keep millions of people alive for months at a time when they all are screaming for food, shelter, light, etc.

Just look at Katrina. They didn't do **** to help all those people and this is gonna be ten THOUSAND times worse.