Rabbit season. Duck Season. Ducks season, duck season, duck season. fire fire fire!Today our food and water supplies are 1000 times better than they were in 1918, not to mention sanitation, medical care and prevention.
In summary, wash your hands frequently (get some of that needs-no-water bacteria killing lotion) and don't step in bird crap!
The first one, I can do.
I cannot do the second: I sleep up to my neck in bird guano.
It may sound gross, but it keeps my skin lusterous and vital!
Fortunately, I don't have any birds, so no need to stock up on supplies for them.
Here's an inexpensive disinfecting product that is widely available in the US and very effective:
http://www.evansvanodine.co.uk/news.htm
My concern is that they are killing millions of chickens, rather than letting the survivors live. Unless the chicken death rate is 100%, the result of letting the survivors live would be to have chickens that would be immune to the flu.
If you had tuna and milk under your bed, wouldn't it attract every cat in town? Is that the whole strategy, keeping birds away?
Rabbit season. Duck Season. Ducks season, duck season, duck season. fire fire fire!Commentary: Remote threat
Fears are not justified for Washington's preparations against the spread of `killer' influenza to humans
By Al Zelicoff
Tribune Columnist
November 15, 2005
The sky is falling and millions of us are going to die.
That's the message one takes from the headlines, including in generally staid journals, like Nature, Science and Foreign Affairs - where entire issues have been devoted to fears of a coming pandemic due to a new subtype of bird flu called H5N1.
It was first identified in 1996 in Southeast Asia and is now circulating widely among birds - both migratory and agricultural - in China, Russia and most countries of east Asia. So, are the fears justified for Washington's preparations against the spread of this new "killer" influenza to humans? The short answer is no. The threat is extremely remote.
Which is why the $7 billion plan proposed by President Bush is vastly overpriced. It ignores the one relatively inexpensive thing that might truly make a difference if this or similar threats were every realized.
That is establishing a real-time national health monitoring system, which I will address in a second article to be published here Wednesday. But, first, a review of basic biology is in order.
The influenza virus is primarily a bird disease; humans appear to be an unnecessary host. The virus types circulating at any given moment are characterized by two chemicals on their surface: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). Both are necessary for the virus to invade cells in birds or other species and multiply. So the annual vaccine contains the H and N proteins of the currently circulating strains which induce antibodies in the recipient that then block the ability of the proteins to allow viral spread among host cells. At least 16 H types have been identified in birds and 9 distinct N types, but only about half a dozen combinations of various H and N proteins result in viruses that are known to cause disease in humans.
The flu fear-mongers advance the following rationale for worry:
The "pandemic" flu (that is influenza that is truly global in spread and high in incidence) comes in more or less regular cycles.
We are overdue for a new subtype of flu because it has been nearly 40 years since the last flu pandemic.
Because some humans (about 100 to date) have clearly acquired H5N1 influenza, most probably from birds, it appears that this new subtype does not seem to require an intermediate species (typically pigs) on its way to human adaptation.
Half of the 120 people known to have become infected with H5N1 have died.
And lastly, they say since H5N1 is carried by migratory birds, it is only a matter of time that highly lethal influenza (for humans) is spread around the globe.
Each of these arguments is scientifically specious. Take the belief in periodicity of influenza. There is no evidence that pandemic influenza comes at regular intervals. There have been three only in the 20th century (1918, 1957, 1968) and any high school math student will tell you that 3 points in time don't define a periodic cycle.
Rather, pandemics occur from random mutations in influenza genes (most of which result in viruses that infect no species, so they die out). Just like flipping a coin, pandemics are thus random. We are not overdue, just simply no more due this year than we have been in any year.
Second, of the hundreds of billions of interactions between humans and infected birds in Asia, there have resulted but 120 cases of H5N1 disease. Nature magazine reports that tens of millions of rural Chinese already carry antibodies to some varieties of H5N1, indicating they have become infected in the past seven years and their immune systems eliminated the virus without resulting illness.
Third, staff at a hospital in Thailand treating all H5N1 patients were tested to see if they developed antibodies to the virus. Not a single health care worker did, indicating no spread from patients.
Fourth, since dead birds don't fly, it is impossible for migratory fowl to spread a lethal virus (lethal to them, at least) over large distances. Just two months ago, geese and ducks were dying by the thousands in Asia. They no longer are, as other less lethal strains developed.
Fifth, just about everyone in the United States is already carrying antibodies to the N1 component of the virus and studies with immunized mice later exposed showed full protection against death.
Finally, the conditions of crowding in 1918 that spread the flu - troops in trenches and massive hospital wards, people living in tenements - simply aren't prevalent today.
All of which is why the president's current scheme spends far too much to get too little of what we really need - preparation for pandemics in general, with the priority on much improved routine disease surveillance, which I address in Wednesday's article.
TODAY'S BYLINE
Zelicoff, president of Scientific Medical and Legal Review, is an Albuquerque physician, physicist and consultant. He is a former distinguished scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.
This is the first of two articles he has written on the threat of bird flu. The second will appear Wednesday on the SYRIS disease reporting system, which he helped create and develop.
Commentary: The real threat
The avian flu hype is misplaced as animal diseases like Hantavirus and garden-variety strains of influenza already infect humans and are left unmonitored and misunderstood
By Al Zelicoff
Tribune Columnist
November 16, 2005
You wouldn't know it from the hype, but the conditions that caused the 1918 worldwide flu disaster simply do not exist today, making it very unlikely that even modest numbers of humans will get infected with H5N1, become symptomatic or die.
Indeed, we already know that some large number of Chinese chicken farmers have picked up the virus, but the overwhelming majority didn't develop so much as a sniffle because their immune systems rapidly eradicated the virus from their bodies.
In short, we have many more important things to worry about in public health - particularly the near complete collapse of disease reporting by physicians, veterinarians and other health care providers. This is due in no small way to complacency induced in the 1960s when the very success of public health interventions and vaccinations eliminated the vast majority of human scourges that were killing or debilitating millions of Americans every year.
Here's the real threat: We now are faced with the arrival of an entirely new set of novel diseases - almost all of which are primarily animal diseases that by chance get into the human population, such as monkey pox, Hantavirus and West Nile fever. You can add to this the threat of bioterrorism. Almost without exception, the "terror diseases" also are animal diseases that are highly lethal if they get into humans, such as plague and anthrax.
Our continued reliance on an antiquated, paper-based disease reporting system - that incidentally has nearly zero compliance in the medical community - rather than implementing a proven, inexpensive, real-time surveillance system for humans and animals is a deep failure of modern public health in virtually every state in the country.
None of this is to say that some variety of H5N1 will not enter the United States. I would be surprised if it didn't. Nor are chickens safe in tightly packed, filthy conditions in the chicken houses of high-volume, egg-laying or meat-production facilities. An outbreak in domestic fowl is probable.
There even remains a very distant possibility that avian H5N1 could adapt to humans, could be lethal and could spread from person to person. But it isn't anywhere near the probability of threat of other infectious diseases (including garden-variety influenza strains already well suited for human infection).
To understand the real problem and respond rationally, we must advance our understanding of the dynamics of influenza in animals and humans, which in turn requires a real-time surveillance disease monitoring system.
Fortunately, of the $7 billion of new funding requested in the president's recently released National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, some $500 million is earmarked for research and development of a robust real-time surveillance system. But it already exists.
The Syndrome Reporting Information System (SYRIS) has proved its extraordinary cost effectiveness for human AND animal disease surveillance in extensive testing in parts of Texas and California. It has been tested during the past two years and is ready for national use.
Physicians, veterinarians, rescue personnel and even wildlife rehabilitators share data in true real time, unlike the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's decade-old failed electronic reporting system. The cost of implementing SYRIS is 15 cents per capita, or about $50 million for the entire country.
I've testified four times on Capitol Hill about it, including before Sen. Bill Frist, president of the Senate and its only physician. He applauded its use and numerous successes. As Frist himself has noted in his book, "Every Moment Counts," should a bioterrorism attack occur or another novel disease reach our shores, we are hopelessly hamstrung by our lack of situational awareness of disease patterns in animals and humans.
By failing to read the thoroughly documented record, the danger is that the Bush administration's new funding may actually delay implementation of nationwide disease surveillance, largely because the CDC and countless vendors will scuffle at the federal trough. Doubtless they'll claim they can do better than what my colleagues in west Texas have already accomplished: full participation of the clinical community and a continuous monitoring system that physicians use daily, and which was also instituted in just minutes in the clinics that cared for Katrina evacuees in the area.
Because an unexpected variety of novel infectious diseases have already appeared with frightening frequency in the past 20 years in the United States, a proven surveillance system today beats the "promise" of a better one tomorrow. Let's get started.
Microbe: Are We Ready for the Next Plague? (Alan P. Zelicoff and Michael Bellomo)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1594187/posts