Posted on 04/25/2009 6:03:28 PM PDT by truthandlife
The bird flu news isn't encouraging, the head of the CDC said today.
The comments by CDC Director Julie M. Gerberding, MD, MPH, came at the opening of the 2006 National Influenza Vaccine Summit meeting of public health officials and vaccine manufacturers.
Preparation for a flu pandemic is only a small part of the meeting. But in her opening remarks, Gerberding stressed how seriously the CDC is taking the threat of a bird flu pandemic.
"This is not media hype. This is a real situation," Gerberding said. "And at CDC we are very focused on the possibility of pandemic with this virus or some unexpected virus."
"The strategic national stockpile does not contain a crystal ball," Gerberding said. "What we are hearing is not encouraging. We know the virus is on the move. It has moved on from the Vietnam clade [virus group] we made vaccine against."
Front Lines of the Flu Battle
The CDC director promised that if bird flu does start spreading among humans — anywhere on earth — the U.S. will not sit on its heels.
"If pandemic influenza is a threat anywhere in the world, it is a threat here," Gerberding said. "If anywhere in the world there appears to be person-to-person transmission, we will do everything we can do to quench the initial outbreaks. We will engage on the front lines."
Could the CDC and its international partners really succeed? Gerberding is cautiously optimistic.
"We believe if the virus is found in a small rural area, we would have a chance to quench it," she said. "But of course if it happened in a city, the chance of quenching it is pretty small."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
how much billions was wasted in the last media scare?
Also from 2006
http://doctoranonymous.blogspot.com/2006/08/pandemic-hype.html
Pandemic hype
Yesterday, I started seeing the first articles saying that the bird flu may not turn into the global pandemic that was once thought. According to this CNN article, the US CDC is now stating that the change from the bird flu virus to a human-bird flu virus may not be that easy.
“We were not able to see efficient transmission from an infected animal to a healthy animal, “ according to Dr. Jacqueline Katz, one of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers working on the ferret experiments.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not minimizing the 134 worldwide deaths confirmed by the World Health Organization — most of them in Indonesia and Vietnam.
But, is the tide turning on how worried the press is about this? Remember Y2K? This was supposed to have a worldwide effect that literally crippled the planet Earth. Did it happen? I don’t think so. It can certainly be debated why. Maybe the world was prepared for it? Or, maybe it was just hype to scare everybody.
Is that what’s happening now with this bird flu thing? Worldwide, there are literally millions and millions of dollars being spent for planning for a pandemic flu that may never happen. I’m definitely all for prevention whenever and wherever possible, but did a worldwide media fire storm put us down this path before the real facts were known?
SARS and rumors of SARS.
government policies by media hype
Flu pandemics are real and we're overdue - long overdue if you look at the history of flu pandemics the last 300 years. The last pandemic, 1918 had a mortality rate for the human population somewhere around 4% - that would equal 12,000,000 in today's US population. Incidentally, contrary to popular lore, it wasn't the weak or the very young or the very old that had the highest mortality rates, it was the 20-30 YOs that were the strongest and the healthiest.
Besides the human toll, the economic damage of a pandemic even half has destructive as the last would have economic consequences that would take years to recover from.
This current flu outbreak seems to be very treatable with today's anti-virals - but, it's only because of the "scare" in 2006 that the US now has adequate anti-viral stockpiles to deal with such a flu outbreak.
Are you aware that the chief medical doctor of Egypt today publicly considered quarantining his entire nation because of the risk from their version of Avian flu? He pointed out that Egypt imports 80% of its food, and such a quarantine would likely cause widespread starvation in his country.
This is because the Egyptian variant is now easily spreading H2H among young children. It is a less lethal strain as well, which gives it every opportunity to adapt to humans. Then when it has opened the door to full adaptation to H2H transfer, it regains its lethality.
While this Mexican swine flu, in its worst case scenario, could potentially kill a hundred thousand Americans, the H5N1 shows every prospect of killing as many as 30 million Americans, and as many as one billion people worldwide.
The Bird Flu circus is not to be confused with the Ice Age we were entering in the 1970s, with Y2K, with Global Warming (now Global Climate Change), with SARS, or with any of a thousand other emergencies that were media hype.
“how much billions was wasted in the last media scare?”
Just because it didn’t cause great devastation, doesn’t mean there was not a threat.
Dodging a bullet doesn’t mean the bullet was harmless.
People need to do some reading and look at the facts. These things are a very big threat.
Ignoring science is foolish.
I see way too many comments here that seem to belittle the threat of this, and imply some conspiracy to divert our attention.
People with knowledge in this field seem to to see a great threat.
I find it very foolish not to listen to them.
Be vigilant..
For those that are interested, I recommend two very good books. One, Virus Alert by John M. Barry takes a long, detailed look at the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak. The book also does an wonderful job of illustrating what the practical problems were in the 1918 epidemic. It's very good.
Another book that is excellent is Hell on Wings by Mike Davis. Both books do a terrific job of detailing and explaining why flu pandemics are so deadly and why we're overdue. Of course, both books also are critical of western countries, especially the US and it's lack of preparedness for such flu outbreaks.
Both books were written before the big media flu hype of 2006.
I am astonished that so-called conservatives see a liberal/socialist/media plot behind efforts to anticipate, plan for and be ready to act against the impact of deadly contagion. I really don't get folks who express your degree of arrogant ignorance. I really don't get it at all.
You just perfectly summed up my thoughts.
Good one ... you nailed it. As of yesterday (Friday) there were something like 12 confirmed cases in CA. CA has a population well in excess of 35 million. Larger than the entire population of Canada.
Is the “flu”, actually a job application?
By leftist CDC types?
For a “bailout”?
Thank you for that post. This thread was a disturbing display of people wallowing in ignorance.
I'm skeptical that this will be any kind of pandemic. But, it's not because of the early infection rate, it's because this flu strain is responsive to anti-virals.
When the day comes that another great flu epidemic will be visited on us, and it will come, it will look exactly like this. In fact, it would be very likely that you'd see an initial spike of cases followed by a lull and then an infection bloom some 7 to 9 months later.
The available literature is very clear on this.
“I am astonished that so-called conservatives see a liberal/socialist/media plot behind efforts to anticipate, plan for and be ready to act against the impact of deadly contagion. I really don’t get folks who express your degree of arrogant ignorance. I really don’t get it at all. “
Andy, I don’t see that. But I suspect the administration is knocking heads right now to figure out how they can avoid “wasting this crisis.” What they come up with will not be good.
So the misuse of this crisis will be opportunistic—not preplanned. But regardless what the administration comes up with, America will be worse off at the end of this crisis than it started—and it will be worse off because of Barak Obama and his philosophy of governance.
Wow, 12 people got sick with the flu. How many of them have died?
Personally i think the CDC is underplaying this.
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