Pandemic? Bird Flu? Still waiting

I'm still waiting for the dreaded bird flu to appear and strike us all down dead. :sarcasm:

Rumsfeld made some dough on it. The military was going bat ape shit crazy with pandemic planning.

And with flu season on the way, there is no doubt that many birds, particularly ducks and geese will sniffle their way into the US again.

Now unless you spend a LOT of time in confined spaces with ducks and poultry (less common in the US than in some Asian countries where people still sleep with the life stock in one house), the chances of you catching a case of the funky chicken are slim to none.

You can NOT get bird flu from eating cooked poultry or eggs.

There is no known case of infection from human to human. There is only a THEORY that eventually a strain of avian flu will occur that can thrive on humans too.

Now there are many different kinds of bird flu (just like regular flu). Out of all those there is only one (H5N1) that is actually dangerous to humans. As usual, the people most likely to die from an infection with this disease are the weak (the elderly and the infants). If you don't feed raw chicken to your grandma, you shouldn't have too much to worry about.

I travel a lot to countries where bird flu epidemics actually occur and I'm still standing. I worry more about shark attacks in Idaho.

Gilead holds the rights to Tamiflu. Rumsfeld is a former chairman of Gilead and holds much stock in it. "The rise in Gilead's share prices from USD$35 to USD$57 per share will have added between USD$2.5 million to USD$15.5 million to Rumsfeld's net worth."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseltamivir#U.S._Government_policy_and_oseltamivir

Our tax dollars spent to enrich Rumsfeld (bird flu vaccine).
Our tax dollars spent to enrich Neil Bush (Ignite! software for NCLB)
Our tax dollars spent to enrich Cheney (Halliburton)

Crooks, liars, thieves, criminals

We live in a fast moving, highly interconnected society that is ripe for a large scale pandemic of some sort. The activities which you see as 'fear mongering' are in fact preparations so that we are not caught flat-footed again like we were when HIV started making its grim rounds.

Just like any other natural disaster, we need to prepare ahead of time so that we can respond appropriately and in a manner that heads off as many deaths as possible. That means that we need to track likely candidates such as SARS and Avian Flu.

But, if that bothers you, you can pull the covers over your head and ignore it till it comes knocking on your front door. Personally, I'm paying attention and not reading into it more than is there.

I read that Rumsfailed needs more money. He is out of a job, ya know & he only has about $80 Million left to spend.

to give us a truly large scale pandemic.

It is absolutely true that an infected individual can travel from anywhere in the world to any other place within the time it takes to go from initial infection to shedding virus or bacteria. But humans have had sufficient movement and interconnectedness to do this for a long time and have made possible extraordinarily vast and deadly pandemics (think about the introduction of measles into indigenous American populations).

The speed of movement of migratory birds has been sufficient to make them effective mechanisms in pandemics since before the dawn of civilization. But something else has changed greatly in the past 7000 years.

What has changed and is still changing at exponential rates is human population growth. The rate that disease spreads in the human population is a non-linear function dependent upon the probability of transmission supporting interactions between uninfected susceptible members of the population and individuals (same species or different species and their body exudates) that are contagious. The greater the population density the higher the rate.

I don't say this lightly as it's the one area in my life where I've tried to maintain some credibility (the population dynamics of parasitic disease was the focus of my doctoral studies). Mutation rates and recombinations of diseases such as influenza (thus bird flu) seem likely to be not very different from what they have ever been on a per capita basis. But increasing host populations multiply that per capita rate.

Increased contact between susceptible and and infected individuals (human or otherwise) with higher and higher population densities has raised the probability of the risk of novel diseases going from local events to emergence on the global scene. This is a widespread concept held by most epidemiologists and it is one of the reasons why epidemiologists cringe at the sight of traditional practices of living among livestock and selling live (including sick) animals in densely populated urban areas.

This isn't to say that other things aren't changing and contributing to contemporary risks of pandemics.

Long time delays, as in the 80+ years since the pandemic swine flu, reduce herd immunity represented by the presence of survivors of previous epidemic outbreaks of any particular disease leaving a larger proportion of the population unprotected by natural immunity and susceptible.

It is fair to say, as Garret did, that the press of human activity into areas previously not densely populated by humans will result in exposures of the human population to previously un-encountered/rarely encountered diseases (ebola seems to be one of these).

It is also fair to say that changing climate will result in more favorable conditions for the survival and transmission of some disease agents. It is clear that for wildlife, particularly wild waterfowl that are attracted to naturally limited water resources, that a single weather event such as a drought can force together birds (sick and well) to a single stop over point on their migratory path and thereby create a point focus for disease transmission that can kill a significant fraction of a migrating population (consider the Lake Andes duck plague-DVE' duck viral enteritis, outbreak).

But the thing that has REALLY changed in the past century is the size of the human population and all the implications that imposes on transmission opportunities.

Telling us to read a book about the 1918 pandemic to get everyones fear levels up. Some people here at DU were pushing the same book, I have noticed that they haven't been around here for a while.

I wonder where they go?

Don

When all of the fear-mongering was going on, I gave rational, scientific-based information about the virus. Nice to see you. :hi:

Viruses are living organisms and even with our best predictions, avian influenza A will do what it wants in it's own good time. If you take a look at the trends in influenza pandemics through history, it's accurate to say one emerges every hundred years or so. With the scientific data we know, it is expected avian flu will "go viral" eventually - could be next year, could be 10 years from now. It's something called nature, evolution.

Another thing - even when a pandemic does occur, there's no way of knowing the mortality rate; current extrapolations show it may be weaker than at first predicted.

Bush and others used the possibility of a pandemic to scare the public. Don't get that confused with a virus that is constantly mutating and will most likely become transmittable from human to human in the near future.

I never pushed fear but since DUers are some of the smartest people I know, I did try to get them to look at the situation in a neutral manner. Every so often a pandemic does appear and according to scientists, on NPR, it is not a matter of if but when. This does not have to be bird flu but any deadly contagious disease. With so much overcrowding in the world, it will spread faster than past ones have.

Does this mean we all have to stop living life? Of course not. But I would point out that with the idiot in office we are all on our own if something happens. Whether it is the bird flu, some other contagious disease, a hurricane or another natural disaster, it is nice to be aware of our lack of governmental support and at least all be prepared enough to keep certain emergency supplies on hand. As smart people I think we can all agree with that.

Nothing is certain, in this world, except for the idiot's lack of intelligence.