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Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Guest on June 23, 2005, 05:29:33 PM

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: Guest on June 23, 2005, 05:29:33 PM

Just curious- I feel about this exactly the way I felt about the stock market collapse. All the experts are saying it is a matter of when not if. The left and right are both in concurance on the subject, and historically it is a 50 year overdue inevitability.

  If you are unaware about the potential, search around for " flu pandemic 1918."

  Most people do not know  we lost six hundred thousand people in this country in 1918 and 1919 due to a horrific flu pandemic- estimated losses worldwide were 40 to 100 million . NYC lost 30,000. The mortality rate was about .6%, the population of the US was 105 million.
 
  The avian flu that has killed millions of chickens and other fowl in asia, and has resulted in the culling of millions more, has been actively recombining genes and mutating since the mid 1990's. The trend has been from a virus that is very hard to transmit to humans (you basicly had to handle or eat diseased fowl) and was about 100% fatal, to a virus that is much less lethal (10 % and up) but with efficient transmissability. The situation in Vietnam and China with regards to monitoring this is pathetic. For interesting terrifiying reading go to www.recombinomics.com and click on whats new.
  This small buried story has the potential to be the defining event of the century. Can you imagine the US losing 10% of it's population in a few months? That's thirty million people. I think this country would crack uip up emotionally.

  Perhaps I am just a doomsayer, certainly I have been accused of pessimism on enough occasions. BUT- ALL the infectious disease experts say it is on the way- The event is a historical cycle, and we are way overdue. What do you think?

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: jefnvk on June 23, 2005, 05:55:50 PM

I think I'll just stop eating birds.

Trying to think the last time I had any bird was, anyways.  Certainly not in the last few weeks.

But yeah, it would be bad.

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: Antibubba on June 23, 2005, 07:04:37 PM

I'm just about to start a new job, which will allow me start stocking up on Tamiflu-because it sure won't be available when the pandemic hits.

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: Nathaniel Firethorn on June 25, 2005, 01:04:55 AM

Resistant strains have already been reported Prolly because of Chinese chicken farmers trying to protect their livestock.

BTW, I ain't so sure about Henry L. Niman. He's picking bits out of the news to support his position, and appears pretty argumentative and defensive on some other fora. Neither of which is good science.  He does have some pubs listed on PubMed, but none very recent.

- NF

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: Guest on June 25, 2005, 06:27:32 AM

Yeah, I wouldn't consider Niman the last word either. But there doe's seem to universal concurrance among the experts that the avian flu is coming. The question is how bad it is going to be. If it has a 1% or above lethality it is going to put our social structures to the test big time.

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: Nathaniel Firethorn on June 25, 2005, 10:32:58 AM

Quote

f it has a 1% or above lethality it is going to put our social structures to the test big time.

It's also got to spread easily to be a bad problem. There's a thing called a "basic reproduction number" that determines this - it's the number of people that a single infected person is likely to also infect.

- NF

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: Waitone on June 26, 2005, 05:10:14 AM

Waaaay back when Jerry Ford was president we had an outbreak of Swine Flu in NJ IIRC.  The reaction was hysterical.  Vaccinations, breathless reports, reports of doom, lots of people in the media complaining that we reacted just too slowly to stop the epidemic and we need national healthcare . . . . . . All this for 8, count'em 8, cases.

Point is all the nonsense about potential of pandemic is directed to building a case for .  I spend more time concerned with what shade tree geneticists are creating of which no one is aware.

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: K Frame on June 26, 2005, 05:40:59 AM

Remember, too, that the vaccination against swine flu killed more people than the disease. It was a big fiasco.

It's not hard to understand the panic, though, as there was a pandemic in 1957 that killed nearly 70,000 in the United States, and another in 1968 that killed about 34,000. Both killed over 1 million worldwide. Small beans compared to 1918-1919.

President Ford was told that the coming pandemic would kill millions unless everyone was innoculated. Since the previous two pandemics had been from swine virus, it seemed as if it would be the real deal.

Here's an interesting look at the mechanisms that went into the scare: http://www.capitalcentury.com/1976.html

It was, however, far more than 8 cases. What triggered the dire warnings among health professionals was the rapidity with which it killed one person, and the spread of the virus through the local population. Many were infected, but not all showed signs of flu. Apparently that's another huge concern.

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: Fly320s on June 26, 2005, 09:31:01 AM

This reminds me of the killer bees warning of the '70s.  And the Y2K nonsense.

I'll try to make sure I have some tissue on hand, but otherwise all will be normal.

Title: anybody following the bird flu soon to be pandemic?
Post by: toro on June 26, 2005, 12:07:54 PM

My mother lost a brother to the flu in 1917.  She said ALL households were effected.  As you walked down the street there were black drapes on the doors to show that someone in that household had died.  She remembered that All the doors had the black drapes.  Now, that is scary.  They didn't have any medicine to treat the flu in those days.



                                       Mrs. Toro


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