Avian Flu hits edges of Europe

chcr said:
1. How many humans have actually died from it?

2. The end is neer...
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1) The overall human death toll from the virus confirmed by the WHO stands at 93. This from a virus which hasn't lept from human to human ...yet. The spread of the disease on the other hand should not be discounted... sure it is killing only birds thus far, but then again...AIDS used to only kill chimpanzees.

2. Neerer :D
 
I actually had a whole thing about AIDS written up & deleted it.

The potential for an AIDS pandemic is horrific.
 
The main difference between AIDS and the Bird flu is that, relativly speaking, AIDS is hard to get.

Think how easy it is to get the comman cold or flu...you don't have to have sex with someone to get their flu, or share needles with them, or get a blood transfusion from them. Hell...you don't even have to see them at all...just open the same door they did a few minutes earlier, or stand in the same elevator or ride in the same airplane.

It's also relativly close to any number of existing flus out there that most people...if they caught it, would go on business as usual and not see anyone about it until well into their contagion stage. In the meanwhile, they're spreading it about and containing it is a nightmare even in the best of circumstances.

I'm not about to go running in the streets with my snazzy new THE END IS NEER sign...but I'm not closing my eyes to the price of surgical masks. :p
 
My grandfather was a chicken doctor for the best part of his working life.
I think the chicken docs, scientist...in this country can come up with a fix
pretty quick if their interest are threatened.
It's not like finding a human fix, they can experiment more. :)
I think the people that CAN find a fix/cure just haven't had the incentive yet.

Hell we may already have a fix, but no-one has offered enough money for anyone
to come forth. We are Capitalist you know. :D
 
By MELISSA EDDY, Associated Press WriterTue Feb 28, 7:37 PM ET The deadly strain of bird flu has been found in a cat in Germany, officials said Tuesday, the first time the virus has been identified in an animal other than a bird in central Europe.

Health officials urged cat owners to keep pets indoors after the dead cat was discovered over the weekend on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen, where most of the more than 100 wild birds infected by the H5N1 strain have been found.

The cat is believed to have eaten an infected bird, said Thomas Mettenleiter, head of Germany's Friedrich Loeffler Institute. That is in keeping with a pattern of disease transmission seen in wild cats in Asia.

Mettenleiter insisted, however, there was no danger to humans as there have been no documented cases of a cat transmitting the virus to people.

However, Maria Cheng of the World Health Organization in Geneva said there was not enough information on how the disease is transmitted to be sure. She noted that tigers and snow leopards in a zoo in Thailand became infected after being fed chicken carcasses, dying from H5N1 in 2003 and 2004.

"But we don't know what this means for humans. We don't know if they would play a role in transmitting the disease. We don't know how much virus the cats would excrete, how much people would need to be exposed to before they would fall ill," Cheng said.

In addition to the large cats infected in Thailand, three house cats near Bangkok were infected with the virus in February 2004. Officials said one cat ate a dead chicken on a farm where there was a bird flu outbreak, and the virus apparently spread to the others.

WHO said tests on three civets that died in captivity last June in Vietnam also detected H5N1. The source of that infection was unknown.
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...more on the link, of course


Meeeeoooooo...
 
ATLANTA - Federal health officials announced plans Monday for a second vaccine to protect people from bird flu because the virus spreading among birds in Asia, Africa and Europe is changing.

The government has several million doses of an earlier bird flu vaccine, but it was based on a sample of virus taken from Vietnam in 2004. The germ is believed to have mutated enough since then that the form now circulating in Africa and Europe may be different, health officials said.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Monday he had authorized the National Institutes of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to begin working on a second vaccine for humans.

"In order to be prepared, we need to continue to develop new vaccines," Leavitt said at an immunization conference in Atlanta.

Government flu experts wouldn't speculate on whether the earlier vaccine would still protect most people. They said only that they believe it would be less effective than a new vaccine based on a more recent virus sample.

Calls for a second vaccine illustrate the challenge of coming up with an effective shot to protect humans from a strain of bird flu that might one day easily jump to humans. So far, that hasn't happened, but if it did, experts fear a worldwide, deadly flu epidemic. ...
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More..of course


The CDC


The WHO


Global_H5N1inAnimalConfirmedCUMULATIVE_20060306.png
 
In that case, let's stop all outsiders from entering our lands, until this blows over. Those all seem connected somehow.
 
Gonz said:
In that case, let's stop all outsiders from entering our lands, until this blows over. Those all seem connected somehow.
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I said the exact same thing when Aids first showed up.
Nope, no chance of stopping it if it want to invade.
 
There already is an import stoppage on farmed fowl for most countries not currently affected by H5N1. They're supopsedly checking people coming in with questions like "Have you visited a farm during your travels?" and "Are you planning on visiting a farm while in the <insert country name here>?"

It's not the imports that you have to worry about, so much as the migrating and wild fowl.

***

FYI - did you know that the Spanish Flu (H1N1) [40-50million deaths] and the current bird flu (H5N1) are related?

Follow the history
 
FLASH! Person to person transmittal??

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- The U.N. health agency described the deaths of six Indonesian family members from bird flu as the most important development in the spread of the virus since 2003, saying it is investigating whether the disease has spread from person to person.

"We have a team down there, they are examining what is going on and they can't find an animal source of this infection,'' said Peter Cordingley, spokesman for the Western Pacific region of the World Health Organization.

"This is the first time that we've been completely stumped'' by a source for the infection, he said.

Six of the seven people in an extended family in northern Sumatra who caught the disease have died, the most recent on Monday. WHO is investigating whether the H5N1 strain of bird flu was spread among family members, though it said Wednesday there was no evidence the virus had mutated to a form that will spread more easily between humans, possibly sparking a pandemic.

Steven Bjorge, the WHO team leader in the village of Kubu Sembelang, said none of the poultry in the area had tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus.

"We're not surprised that there is possible human-to-human transmission,'' Bjorge said. "The thing we're looking for is whether it's sustained beyond the immediate cluster.''

Isolated cases of very limited human-to-human transmission have been documented -- including one in Thailand involving a mother and child -- but such cases do not mean a pandemic flu strain has emerged. There was no indication the Sumatra infections had spread to anyone outside the family.

Still, the scenario worries scientists.

"No matter what's going on at this stage, it's a limited transmission between members of the same family,'' Cordingley said from Manila, Philippines.

"What we are looking out for is any sign of this virus going outside of this family cluster into the general community, that would be very worrying. We haven't seen any signs of that yet.''
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Source
 
Well, according to one conspiracy theorist I know, this means that Bush can now declare marshal law and order in the military. *peepwall*

In case I haven't mentioned it lately, the hysteria surrounding this "emergency" is far, far more dangerous than the disease.
 
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