Don't step in the crap.
Posted on 01/03/2007 7:39:44 AM PST by rellimpank
As flu season arrives in North America, the media and their anointed health experts are squawking once again about how we could be blindsided by an avian flu pandemic that some have estimated could kill a billion persons worldwide. New books like The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic join last year's The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. A year ago I wrote in the Weekly Standard that it was time to stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Yet even as conservative commentator Mark Helprin has called for spending a massive 2.5 percent of the federal budget to stave off this will o' the wisp, the case against panic is clearer than ever.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
ping
Avian flu would've got us if it wasn't for that damn global warming.
Don't step in the crap.
When did Mark Helprin become conservative?
This is what I love about not having TV. The only time I ever read or hear anything about Avian flu is here on FR.
Right now, the IRS is more of a threat to me personally than any bird flu.
Having just read a book about the 1918 influenza epidemic which killed around 100 million worldwide, I can tell you that this is no joke at all. All influenza viruses begin in birds, and if they mutate, like happened with the Spanish Flu, they can kill more in one week than we have lost to AIDs in a decade. We need to take this threat very seriously.
>>We need to take this threat very seriously.<<
Not yet I don't. Life is too short to worry about every little thing. And based on the numbers so far, this is a LITTLE thing. Especially if you live in, say, the US.
It is a sirenity prayer thing.
I literally don't even think about this bird flu thing except when I see the headlines in Freerepublic. This has already given me a "happier" last two years than those who were worried about it.
Don't get me wrong. If my job was to find a cure or otherwise control it, I would take it VERY seriously.
Hello Rep Ext! We've posted on this before (deja vu?)The quote below from the article says exactly what I've thought from the beginning..follow the money
Yet even as conservative commentator Mark Helprin has called for spending a massive 2.5 percent of the federal budget to stave off this will o' the wisp. . .
And just where will the spending occur? Who is it going to? That is MY money they speak of and I'm not scared enough to spend it.
I'll take preventions for the flu, wash my hands, stay away from birds, keep out immigrants from affected countries But bird flu is not here yet, even though we've been obnoxiously warned about it for YEARS.
I totally agree with RE, even if for possibly different reasons.
Avian Influenza is ALWAYS a threat to the poultry industry. Even if were to never seriously threaten with a bird to human to human to human strain, a serious outbreak within the poultry industry could have devastating economic consequences.
Entire flocks of birds are destroyed if even one tests positive for AI on a farm. The average commercial chicken house holds 30,000 - 35,000 birds. the farm across from me has 5 houses. The owner of that farm also has another 2 locations for a total of 17 chicken houses. If just one bird in any of those 17 houses is found to have AI, every bird in ALL 17 houses will be destroyed and all 3 locations will we totally quarantined. If they are newly delivered baby birds, the cost per house is around $9,000, which goes up as the birds get older and are closer to market size.
That is just 1 farmer in this one county.......a county where the number 1 private employer is the poultry industry. Economically the threat of AI is taken very seriously in these parts.
**Having just read a book about the 1918 influenza epidemic**
Was that's John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza"? Excellent book, I would recommend it to anyone as long as they don't use it as the sole source for the 1918 Flu.
Barry's book seemed to be more alarmist than others I had read about the Flu. I also noticed he didn't talk about the swine flu epidemic that seemed to strike in 1917 that may of been related. I also noticed some biases that may not of been based on fact. I had just read Marilyn Chase's "The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco".
If you read that book and then Barry's book you can't help noticing the different treatment of Rupert Blue who was involved in both medical emergencies. Barry protrayed someone who had always been a dud while Chase's book show Blue as a very effective leader in that crisis. I thought it was strange that Barry praised San Franscisco's public health system for dealing with the flu even though it really didn't exist until Rupert Blue organized the city to fight the 1900's plague.
I found the same in Barry's other major work "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America". In it Isaac Cline as head of the Weather Service in New Orleans was describe as the hero of the Galveston disaster. In Eric Larson's "Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History" Cline is shown otherwise. Barry's book was published before Larson's so that is an excuse there but Chase published her book before Barry's so he didn't seem to read it.
I also think I read another different account of one of the scientists researching the flu in Barry's book in James D. Watson's "DNA, The Secret of Life".
Just wanted to point out some problems with Barry's book which is otherwise an excellent read.
Most of the spending is going to disaster preparedness, which is available for ANY disaster, not just public health. That would be stocpiling personal protective equipment for health care workers, more patient respirators (most of which, in this country, are already at use at any given time) extra poultry testing to monitor wild bird migration vectors for H5N1, coordination of various agencies which would be involved in response to public health event, stockpiling of anti-influenza drugs and monitoring of their effectiveness, response teams which go to outbreak areas to assess the transmissibility of the virus in each area, stuff like that.
Additionally, there are research dollars being spent on changes in the H5N1 viruses to determine if it is becoming more or less transmissible, etc.
You may not appreciate that, but it is vital. In addition to H5N1, readiness training and exercises are transferrable to other potential biowar threats.
Sorry man. It's a serenity prayer thing.
I will worry about things I can do something about.
Actually you are only partially correct. A bird to human strain of bird flu may not be here yet, but bird flu shows up on a fairly regular basis in the US. It is generally localized and rarely gets anything more than regional media coverage, but that doesn't mean it isn't here.
While you're in your serenity prayer mood, say a prayer of thanks to the people in the poultry industry here in the US that do worry about things they can do something about, and then do it when the need arises.
I can appreciate preparedness, but I don't think we need more billions to do it. Especially if those billions have any possibility of leaving this country and going to another country in a "stop it at the source" kind of thing.
We should have plenty of $ resources under Homeland Security.
We need to take the threat seriously, but not panic. A pandemic influenza virus has to meet three requirements.
First, it must be very different from the flu bugs that have gone around the past few years -- if it is not very different, then people who have had a similar virus will often have some immunity.
Second, the virus must be easily transmittable from human to human -- anthrax is very deadly, but unless you are caught in a biological warfare attack, or dismember the corpse of someone who dies from it, it is almost impossible to catch anthrax from another human being.
Third, the virus must be very deadly -- we catch cold viruses from one another all the time, but they don't kill anyone who is not at death's door already.
It is far from clear that Avian Flu, H5N1, meets any of these criteria. It has been around since, at least, 1959. There is some anecdotal evidence of person to person spread, but almost always among close family members in a third world country, where sanitation is sketchy and dwellings crowded. Finally, the death rate is unclear. It is admitably high among those who seek medical care in a third world country. The million dollar question is what % of those infected go to the hospital? If the answer is 100%, then H5N1 is very deadly. If the answer is 5%, then H5N1 is not greatly different from other strains of the flu virus.
Could H5N1 mutate in an unpredictable way so that it meets all three criteria for a pandemic? Sure, but so could any other strain of the flu virus.
If we can't predict how it will mutate, we can't develop an inoculation against the mutated virus. Perhaps the vaccine being developed now will still be useful after a pandemic causing mutation, perhaps it will be useless. We don't know, and we won't know until we do get another pandemic flu, which we will, sooner or later.
In the meantime what about all of the other threats? There is a thread today about predictions of devastating Hurricanes, worse than Katrina. The Yellowstone Caldera will blow one day, killing somewhere between a few hundred thousand and everybody in the country, depending on which web page you look at. The New Madrid fault will suffer a major earthquake one day, devastating everything between Chicago and Baton Rogue. California is still destined for the big one. Some folks say that the Azores (or maybe the Canary Islands) will suffer an earthquake that drops them into the Atlantic and sets off a Tsunami that devastates the entire Atlantic seaboard.
We need to find a middle ground between being Ray Nagin, and doing nothing constructive, and being Chicken Little, and running from the crisis de jour of the media.
And will they be needing money to fight it? US dollars perhaps?
Yes. Kinda like I make sure my projects have no loose ends!
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