United Nations has agreed to help PA fight bird flu [palestinian authority]

Concerns rise that human infection in Gaza a possibility as Gazan farmers refuse to cull flocks, fearing financial losses.

Hours after Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni appealed to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday for international assistance to help the Palestinians fight the recent outbreak of the deadly bird flu, Palestinian officials confirmed an outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu at a second farm in the Gaza Strip on Friday.

In response, Annan told Livni in their phone conversation that he would call on the World Health Organization to lend support to Palestinian agriculture and health officials in their fight against the flu, the Foreign Ministry statement said.

The appeal for aid came a day after Livni called World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz to express Israel's concern over the ability of the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority to stop the spread of the flu. Israel feared that without international involvement, the Palestinian Authority would not take the immediate steps needed to limit the flu's spread, Livni told Wolfowitz.

In all, bird flu has been detected at two farms in the Gaza Strip, one near Gaza City and one near the southern town of Rafah on the border with Egypt, said Deputy Agriculture Minister Azzam Tubaili.

Gaza chicken farmers planned a protest later Friday, after government officials told them they would not be compensated for culled birds. The two affected farms have a total of 80,000 chickens.

"They (the farmers) are preventing the culling because they want compensation before they let us do this," Tubaili said. "This is causing confusion. Any second of delay will really make a difference."

The outbreak of avian flu was disclosed in Gaza on Wednesday. The initial outbreak in Israel occurred in the western Negev, less than five kilometers from the border with Gaza.

The Ministry of Health announced Friday that the process of culling flocks in affected areas in Israel will be completed by the weekend. 1.2 million birds in over 20 communities, mostly in the south, were slated for culling by the beginning of next week.

Following the completion of the culling operation, the Health Ministry will be able to devote resources to the epidemiological investigation of how the disease entered Israel. Some sources have already begun to let accusations fly, with the finger-pointing focusing on the Palestinian Authority as the culprit.

Brig. Gen. (res.) Zvika Fogel, the former OC Southern Command who recently convened a task force to combat the spread of the deadly disease, said that the most disturbing aspect of the outbreak was the question of whether or not residents of the Palestinian Authority had already been infected with the disease.

"I don't know how the disease came to Israel, but I have no doubts that in the course of our relationship with the Palestinians, the information we received from them with regard to the spread of the disease in Gaza did not reach us in time. The less disturbing aspect of the issue is the virus itself- the thing that bothers me more is whether or not people in Gaza have been infected. If that is the case, then this outbreak has completely different implications."

Every year, the scare mongers come out and report that: "this is gong to be the worst flu season ever." They are just as alarmist as the global warming crowd. This is all about bureaucratic power, money, and control. DON'T BUY THE SCARE!

A counter point of view about the avian bird flu scare, by a conservative doctor:

ELIMINATING BIRD FLU FEARS

1. The death rate from H5N1 infection is highly overstated.
Between Dec. 26, 2003 and Oct. 24, 2005, there were 121 confirmed H5N1 infections and, of those, 62 have reportedly died. That makes the “apparent” death rate just over 51 percent, ranking this infection among the most deadly on record.

However, thousands of mild and asymptomatic cases are going undetected as detailed by Dick Thompson, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO). In an interview granted to CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy) News on March 9, 2005, Thompson said that the case-fatality rate had been overstated. Documented cases were those where the patients were sick enough to seek medical care in a hospital and, predictably, they had very poor outcomes. He concluded, “Surely others were infected and either not getting sick or not getting sick enough to seek treatment at a hospital. Factoring those into the CFR [case-fatality rate] has been impossible. We simply don't know the denominator.”[2]

To illustrate, if 62 people died, but 10,000 had actually been infected, the death rate would be 0.62 percent, essentially insignificant. Therefore, without knowing how many are infected, the death rate is being highly inflated

2. The virus has barely infected humans; significantly, there has been no sustained person-to-person transmission of the infection.

Very few cases of severe human infection by H5N1 have occurred. An intensified surveillance of patients in Southeast Asia has led to the discovery of mild cases, more infections in older adults, and an increased number of “clusters cases” among family members, suggesting that “the local virus strains may be adapting to humans.” In other words, humans are developing their own innate resistance to the virus.[3]

In addition, all cases have occurred via animal-to-human transmission, and there is documentation of only one confirmed case of human-to-human transmission. Without sustained transmission between humans — meaning one person spreads it to another and another, and so on — there can be no pandemic. The “hype” that, sooner or later, the H5N1 strain will mutate into a strain that can be easily passed between humans is completely unsubstantiated. Whether this will happen is nothing more than a guess because:

3. We have had “potential pandemics” before.

In February 2003, Thompson of the WHO revealed that “there have been a half dozen pandemic ‘false alarms’ in the last 30 years.” A false alarm is an outbreak where a virus has jumped the species barrier, but has been confined to one or two people and has not been lethal...."[4]

{snip}
9. Who has the most to lose? The citizens of the world, particularly U.S. citizens.

The Global Pandemic Preparedness Plan is nothing more than a power grab for the government, the United Nations (UN) and the WHO. Buried deep within the WHO’s plan, here is a glimpse of the ominous plans in preparation for “affected countries:”

Activate procedures to obtain additional resources; consider invoking emergency powers.

Activate overarching national command and control of response activities, either by formal means or de facto (close oversight of district and local activities).

Deploy operational response teams across all relevant sectors.[14]

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