Posted on 04/14/2013 4:41:05 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Freepers LAUGH in face of potential deadly outbreaks. Nothing happened in 2007 or of recent history, therefore, IT’S HOGWASH!
Ping... (Thanks for the ping, nully!)
It's rare for someone to die from a cold, so we aren't concerned about it. However, tens of thousands die from seasonal flu in the US every year. A pandemic can be much worse--the 1918 pandemic killed around 50 million people worldwide.
The possibility of a flu pandemic is a huge worry.
I am beginning to understand that it is not about warning us to a possible pandemic, but they are hoping for one to depopulate the earth. It is just wishful thinking on their part. Of course they expect that their inoculations and technology will save them from being part of the 60% who dies, but it is purely wishful thinking on their part.
Wow, it's hard to understand why you would say such a thing. You do realize that the people working in public health who are genuinely worried about a deadly outbreak are not the far-left kooks who want to depopulate the earth? And being concerned about a highly deadly pandemic is not the same as wanting everyone to die from one?
What’s worrisome about H7N9 is it can spread yet be asymptomatic for some time.
“The detection of H7N9 is an asymptomatic contacts raises concerns that H7N9 is far more widespread than represented by the 61 confirmed cases (see map), which includes 13 fatalities.
The confirmed cases have a case fatality are of more than 92% (13 fatalities out of 14 outcomes). All of the other confirmed cases are hospitalized, including the above case who was hospitalized for observation.”
Very few living Americans have actually seen a serious epidemic, much less a devastating and lethal epidemic. But we have been very fortunate in this, as the absence of epidemics is not the common state of mankind, and will likely not last.
Those who mention the Spanish flu of 1918 are referring to the “common” form of influenza called type H1N1 swine flu. Most people have some degree of immunity to its common strains, but it can mutate into a far more lethal disease fairly easily.
What this means is that influenza has an unusually large number of “flexible genes”, that mutate easily into new strains for which there is far less immunity. They can also swap genetic information with other types of flu, and even what is called “parainfluenza” viruses. This can result in a type of flu that is “novel”, for which our immune systems have very little, or no, defense.
This most recently happened in the middle of an “ordinary” flu season in Europe. Unexpectedly, when the flu hit Ukraine, it mutated into a dramatically virulent form.
It was still technically H1N1, and its infection rate was about 2m in a population of 43m, which is higher than normal, but what stood out was the severity of the disease. Typically, people who caught it were bedridden for a week to a month, and most of those who died did so with lungs completely destroyed by the profound immune system reaction to the disease. Lungs described in autopsy as “looking like they had been burned.”
Even many physicians did not believed that this was caused by flu, because “flu does not do that.”
The whole nation of Ukraine was pretty traumatized by the event, and it caused a change in their elected government.
But all of this is preface to the real threat, which is not H1N1, or even this new disease, H7N9, which is novel to humans.
It is still with H5N1 avian flu, which still has the potential destructive capability of a thermonuclear bomb.
H5N1 is so different from other types of flu, and in so many ways, that it is unique. It is naturally about five mutations away from being easily transmitted between people, the only thing preventing, by some estimates, a planetary mortality rate in excess of 1 billion people.
It has defied the usual progress of diseases by maintaining a 60% mortality rate of those infected. There is no immunity to it. It has an extraordinary number of animal vectors, with radically different immune systems, only some of which it quickly wipes out.
Literally a chicken farm showing the symptoms of the pathogen at night will have most of its chickens dead within a day. This has happened to tens of thousands of poultry farms and wild flocks already. Governments around the world now regularly exterminate millions of animals with just a single confirmed case.
The world medical community is so frightened of this pathogen that even North Korea has agreed to be cooperative in detecting it and taking measures to prevent its spread.
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