Bird Flu : Hype Or Yipes!

As an update to what could translate into a pandemic...

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Amid mounting international concern over a potential human flu pandemic, a flurry of outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 bird flu were reported this week from Taiwan to Europe. There is some confusion over whether the virus has reached the European Union. But more worrying is evidence that it is still spreading in China, and the possibility that it could also reach Africa.

Fears that an apparent outbreak of bird flu on the Greek island of Oinousa was H5N1 have not been borne out by initial tests at the UK’s Veterinary Laboratories Agency, the EU reference lab for flu, in Surrey. “Initial tests are negative,” VLA spokesman Matt Conway told New Scientist, although he cautions this will take several days to confirm.

Worries that the virus had reached Macedonia were eased when a die-off of poultry turned out to be due to another virus, called Newcastle disease. But in Romania the virus has spread to wild ducks and swans near the Ukrainian border, it has been confirmed.

Meanwhile Russian scientists confirmed H5N1 in chickens in the Tula region, 200 kilometres south of Moscow – the first known outbreak in European Russia west of the Urals. Outbreaks continue east of the Urals, with H5N1 confirmed this week in two villages in Kurgan province, and suspected H5N1 in Novosibirsk and Altai

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A parrot that was in quarentine, has just been confirmed as dead from the avian flu.
Which means that it's in the UK now.........

it was in the papers, so it MUST be true ..........:p

Turkey , Greece and Romania also confirmed as having the latest 'doomsday bug'.......

I don't know if this is real or not. It all sounds kinda fowl to me.

:)

I vote hype. There are many, MANY other virii out there which are fatal and near epidemic proportions. Let's see...hrm. Last summer they found over 50 birds in my immediate area which carried West Nile, but a very few of them actually made the news, and usually in the blank space right before the weather (where they put their old news). AIDS is rampant, as is Hep C, and for that matter both viral and bacterial Menengitis. Wow. CDC's having a banner effing year ain't they?

It all boils down to: The media ran out of things to scare us with after Katrina/Rita.

Hhhmm that Parrot bit sounds familiar, I thought there was a similiar story from Bolton just the other day,Dead Parrot everything is running afoul nowadays, here in Canada this past summer we had to worry about stupid crows with the West Nile Virus, pretty soon it will be your budgies :eek:

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There are many, MANY other virii out there which are fatal and near epidemic proportions

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all true ...........

but NOTHING spreads like the flu ..........
1918 after WWI, the flu pandemic then, killed more in a few months than was killed in the entire conflict, and that was before air travel, mass travel ................

Latest...

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Scientists try to identify bird flu strains found in Croatia, Sweden, Britain
08:40 PM EDT Oct 22

LONDON (AP) - Scientists were conducting tests Saturday to determine whether bird flu cases discovered in Britain, Sweden and Croatia are the lethal strain that has killed more than 60 people, as countries around the world scrambled to halt the spread of the virus.

Congo joined a growing list of African countries to ban imports of livestock and poultry from countries affected by bird flu and Russia recorded a new outbreak of the disease in a region of the Ural mountains.

In Croatia, the Agriculture Ministry said the country's first cases of avian flu were confirmed Friday in six swans found dead in a national park in the east of the country. British officials said a parrot from the South American country Suriname had died of the disease while in quarantine. It was Britain's first confirmed case of bird flu since 1992.

In both cases, tests were underway at a British lab to determine whether the birds had the deadly H5N1 strain, which has devastated poultry stocks across Asia and killed 61 people in the last two years. The strain has recently been found in birds in Russia, Turkey and Romania.

Sweden's National Veterinary Institute said late Saturday a case of bird flu had been confirmed in one of four ducks found dead on Friday in Eskilstuna, about 100 kilometres west of the capital Stockholm. Officials said it would take days to determine whether it was the H5N1 strain.

H5N1 is easily transmitted between birds but is hard for humans to contract. Experts are closely watching the disease, however, for fear it could mutate into a form easily transmitted between humans and cause a pandemic that could kill millions.

Fears of human-to-human transmission were allayed in Thailand, where health officials announced Saturday a father and son infected with bird flu did not transmit the virus to each other, as had been feared.

Dr. Thawat Suntrajarn, director-general of the Department of Communicable Disease Control, said the 48-year-old father and his seven-year-old son became ill after handling their neighbour's sick chickens. The father died; the son is recovering.

In Croatia, Minister of Agriculture Petar Cobankovic said "there is no room for panic" in the wake of the country confirming its first cases of bird flu, in wild migratory swans.

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http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/051022/w102278.html
Bird-Flu-World

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More than 30,000 people could die in the next influenza pandemic if it is as serious as the 1918 Spanish flu, the Ministry of Health says.

The figure is contained in planning documents published yesterday which also warn oil companies to beef up security to protect against social unrest during a pandemic and suggest the health sector will not be able to cope.

The grim forecast comes as Europe rushes to contain the bird flu virus, fearing it could mutate and trigger a pandemic. Scientists also are working on creating an urgent vaccine for humans.

The European Union has begun an exercise to test countries' readiness to deal with a health crisis which could arise if the disease mutates and spreads among humans.

The New Zealand Health Ministry figure for potential fatalities would make it the country's worst health crisis.

Previously published scenarios for a flu pandemic were based on the 1968 outbreak and suggested that between 1600 and 3700 could die.

Health officials were careful to say the new figure was not the ministry's projection or prediction. It was simply a mathematical model, in which New Zealand's experience of the 1918-1919 global outbreak was applied to the present population.

The 1918 pandemic infected 40 per cent of people in New Zealand, of whom 2 per cent died. More than 8000 died and about 40 million to 50 million worldwide.
Based on New Zealand's population of 4,107,159, the 1918 figures translate to 1.64 million becoming ill and 32,857 dying.

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http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/s...ectID=10351317
Ministry warns NZ of possible bird flu pandemic - 21 Oct 2005 - Health & Fitness

There was a thing about this in the news here in Aus, apparently some pigeons that were in quarantine, and one of them turned up positive for this virus, and now the Aus Government is planning on stopping all birds from being sent/recieved from other places.
So to me it's sounding really serious and i'm concerned because i work at a chicken farm so i'm debating on wether or not i should quit that job and gain employement somewhere else where i'm not dealing with bird products.. :(

{KS}

{KS} > Do they have large tallons?

Hype, considering that all our current strains I believe have derived from avian flu.

This bird flue has been around since 1997

118 people have caught it adn 61 have died. Thats about 15 infections a year and about 8 deaths.

In the year 2000 there were 320,000 injuries on UK roads resulting in 3,400 deaths.

I'm selling my car and going to work with chickens, it's much safer.

Bird flu sells newspapers and makes people watch the news it's hyped up.

hype- its a plot by the drug companies who make flu meds. They want us all to get scared and go out and buy their "cure" that will come out a few months after the pandemic hits :)

1918 Spanish flu was a strain of avian flu. When it morphs into another strain that can be passed through humans, we will see H5N100R prototype in action.

Rusty~

I think that you are spot on...............saw a TV programme about it a while back............apparently the 1918 epidemic started in some transit camp hospital?

:)

"The 1918 has gone: a year momentous as the termination of the most cruel war in the annals of the human race; a year which marked, the end at least for a time, of man's destruction of man; unfortunately a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease causing the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all--infectious disease," (12/28/1918).

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

Courtesy of 1918 Medical Camp Hospital

Half the soldiers in Europe died from this and not the enemy. :eek:

So it is something to be concerned about, I think the media though are running out of catastrophes to cover and so this will get leverage, well actually until Wilma passes then it's back to the birds.

some point for those calling this hype:

last time this mutated tens of millions of people died, it is highly mutagenic so it will jump to humans again.

FI the chinese strain mutates, well then most of the common flue medications wont work, the chinese have been useing them on their chicken population and the virus has allready mutated to deal with them. Yes that are new semiexperimental medications...but there are nowhere near enough...unless you are the top 1% of wealth in the US you wont get it.

thats it next time i've got a cold or any kind of sickness am going down to my nearest farm and sneezing on all their chickens. See how they bloody like it for a change!

Okay, allow me to bring some of my medical knowledge to this.

H5N1 is currently a bird influenze. Those people who have been infected have been in close contact with birds that have H5N1.

There have been no cases demonstarted of H5N1 being trasnmitted human to human.

In order to make a pandemic H5N1 needs to mutate into a form that can be transmitted human to human. This can be a spontaneous mutation or a person infected with both H5N1 and human influenza can make a new strain.

Most scientists close to H5N1 are of the opinion that it is a matter of when and not if H5N1 mutates so that it can be trasmitted human to human.

If/whene that occurs there will be a number of factors to take into account.

1) How infectious is the new strain and what is the incubation time that the strain is infectious, but shows no symptoms. If it is highly infectious and takes some time before sysmptoms show, a single infected person is likely to infect many others before realising they are ill and can be quarrantied and treated. These figures can be plugged into epidemiolocial models that model the spread of the pandemic. With high speed air travel and very lage city population densities global spread becomes more likely.
2) How deadly iwill the strain be? 50% of those infected with H5N1 have died. The 1918 influenze killed 1/6th of the global population. If its very deadly then I'm sure we can all do the math!
3) How effective are previous vaccines against the new strain? There are no guarantees that any stockpiled vaccines will work, although it is thought that many of those vaccinated with a generic H5 vaccine will at worst suffer much reduced sysmptoms. New vaccines will need to be made, but production must exceed the capability of the new strain to spread. Most scientists beleive that production will not be sufficient.
4) How many treatments are available. The only known treatment is Tamiflu, and that only limits the severity. Currently the UK has around 2 million doses with a population of 50+ million.

Most of this info is available in previous New Scientist Issues going back a few years. I'm providing the info from memory, sot the facts may not be 100%, but they won't be far wrong.

If this is highly infectious, spreads rapidly and kills a good percentage and government agancies are not in a position to help I reccomend going home, locking the door and not comming out until the preoblem has gone away.

Please note that if it kills 50% public services are likely to be affected severly - No gas/water/electric.

Hype or not?

Current media interest certainly, hype? Only if it all goes away without problem.

Steve <paranoid?>