OT: Bird Flu

[sportdan30]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/conditio ... index.html

7.4 million likely to die from bird flu....how they come up with that number is beyond me. Scary to say the least.

[AJColossal]

My cousin who grew up in the late 70's and early 80's thought that every night he went to sleep would be his last because the Russians were going to nuke us at any time.

There will always be a boogie man.

[sfz_T-car]

I have a hard time taking sportsdan's bird flu concerns seriously when accompanied by his Jayhawk mascot avatar.

[pk500]

Maybe you should worry about something else. From the WHO:

-- 12.5 million of the estimated 32 million worldwide heart attacks are fatal (Integrated Management of Cardiovascular Risk , WHO, 2002)

Bottom line: When it's your time, it's your time.

Take care,
PK

[sportdan30]

I have a hard time taking sportsdan's bird flu concerns seriously when accompanied by his Jayhawk mascot avatar.

If need be, I'll kill the Jayhawk myself.

[sportdan30]

Maybe you should worry about something else. From the WHO:

-- 12.5 million of the estimated 32 million worldwide heart attacks are fatal (Integrated Management of Cardiovascular Risk , WHO, 2002)

Bottom line: When it's your time, it's your time.

Take care,
PK

Very true.

[wco81]

Bill Maher tried to suggest that the Bush admin. was raising alarms at this possible pandemic to deflect attention from its political troubles.

But the WHO expert whom he was interviewing said the threat was real. The last pandemic, in the early 20th century, killed over 50 million. We now have 3 times the population, not to mention modern transportation to spread communicable diseases much more effectively.

This morning, CNBC showed WHO estimates of economic losses in the hundreds of billions from a short time. I think for comparison, in the first year of SARS, the loss to global GDP was $800 billion.

[Leebo33]

I have a hard time taking sportsdan's bird flu concerns seriously when accompanied by his Jayhawk mascot avatar.

[10spro]

One thing needs to cleared guys. It's called bird flu right?. It affects currently mainly any kind of bird species, however only when a human happens to digest in any shape or form any of these affected birds, then a possible fatal result may happen. As PK was suggesting, I would be way more concerned about checking a cholesterol level, your heart, high blood pressure, prostate cancer cancer ,etc.

[CincyKid]

I have a hard time taking sportsdan's bird flu concerns seriously when accompanied by his Jayhawk mascot avatar.

If need be, I'll kill the Jayhawk myself.

or the avatar may contract bird flu

at least mine only has to watch out for motor boats

[wco81]

One thing needs to cleared guys. It's called bird flu right?. It affects currently mainly any kind of bird species, however only when a human happens to digest in any shape or form any of these affected birds, then a possible fatal result may happen. As PK was suggesting, I would be way more concerned about checking a cholesterol level, your heart, high blood pressure, prostate cancer cancer ,etc.

If we could avoid infection just by not eating infected birds, then it wouldn't be the big potential threat they're making it out to be.

The WHO said today that the H5N1 strain has been killing birds in 15 Asian and European countries and that "it was only a matter of time" before this virus becomes trasmitted from human to human just like any other flu.

[10spro]

Sure, they have to do that, Asia, Romania, Turkey even England had some cases. WHO doesn't want another SARS scenario and everypne is taking precautions. Like you said wco, if people are concerned , they shouldn't be eating poultry, one thing is to educate people , another to scare them.

[TheMightyPuck]

Maybe you should worry about something else. From the WHO:

-- 12.5 million of the estimated 32 million worldwide heart attacks are fatal (Integrated Management of Cardiovascular Risk , WHO, 2002)

Bottom line: When it's your time, it's your time.

Take care,
PK

I just polished off a trader joe's pot roast (1lb, pure delicious fat) when I read this. I'm going to chalk up the pain in my left arm to anxiety.

[pk500]

Sure, they have to do that, Asia, Romania, Turkey even England had some cases. WHO doesn't want another SARS scenario and everypne is taking precautions. Like you said wco, if people are concerned , they shouldn't be eating poultry, one thing is to educate people , another to scare them.

Not really, 10s. Avian flu can mutate into a strain that is deadly to humans, which is what happened in the pandemic early in the 20th century.

Right now it just f*cks up birds and has infected some humans in Southeast Asia. But it could become an easily transmitted virus deadly to humans.

Still, I'm more concerned about cancer and heart disease -- proven, existing, widespread killers of humans -- than a coulda, woulda, shoulda form of the flu.

Take care,
PK

[wco81]

Well sure they have to balance public education versus causing unnecessary panic.

But lets say they get people stirred up and worried about this and it doesn't turn out to be as bad as feared. You might have a lot of people staying home, maybe delaying or not taking trips. So there would be an economic consequence but at least there was education about minimizing the spread of the influenza.

Maybe the way they handled the SARS scared people more than they needed to. Or maybe by publicizing it, they helped minimize the spread of it.

BTW, if the virus mutates to become transmissible from human to human, avoiding infection will be a lot harder than just not eating poultry.

[Zeppo]

As stated earlier in this thread, I am not a biologist or a doctor, and could very well be wrong on a lot of specifics, but as far as I understand it. . .

I don't believe one can get the flu from eating infected poultry. I think if you cook the meat, you would kill the virus. One gets the flu from being in contact with the birds, especially with their feces, I think, and their saliva and other bodily fluids.

This H5N1 is highly transmissable from bird to bird, across species. Very rarely, it has been contracted by a human from contact with an infected bird. But it has not yet shown an ability to transmit from infected human to human. The concern is that when (not really if, but when) it mutates into a form that can transmit easly from human to human, that its spread will be impossible to hold in check.

The main problem is that this is a 'new' strain of the flue, that we humans do not have immunities built up to. Pandemic flues happen regulalry throughout human history. My understanding is that they generally happen two or three times a century, so we are sort of 'overdue.' The last big one was in the 20s, known as the Spanish flue.

Folks who die every year from the 'regular' flue are folks who have comprimised or undeveloped immune systems; so it's generally elder people, people who are already sick, and children. The concern with a mutated bird flue like H5N1 is that those who are likely to die are the healthier ones, with strong immune systems. With a flue like this, it's the person's immune system overreacting that can kill him.

Again, I'm no doctor, and I would love to hear one of our resident physicians and/or biologists chiime in on this subject.

This is a very real threat to public health. This isn't a pie in the sky, 'let's see how scared we can make the population' kind of situation. WHO and CDC are not politicians looking to get votes. A pandemic will happen, though it may not be the H5N1 strain. That is, we could get lucky and avoid it with this particular one. There is no way to know if this flue will mutate in 6 months, 16 years, or maybe not at all. There is no doubt that our public health infrastructure is unfit to deal with the kind of flue that spread around the world in the 20s (the so-called Spanish flue). One particular issue is that flue vaccines are made in chicken eggs. So if this flue can infect and kill the chickens used to make the vaccines, the difficulty making vaccines could be catastrophic.

President Bush has now put this on the front pages, and pledged a bunch of federal dollars. Or really, it seems he has pledged a bunch of federal mandates that States will have to pay for, but let's not go on about that. . . . But of course, we can't just quarantine the US off from the world, it will be a global problem.

[kevinpars]

I don't know what to think. I still can't figure out how the CDC didn't have enough regular flu vaccines 2 years running.

One thing is for sure - it is a global issue. We just can't shut our borders and keep it out of the country.

Another thing you can count on is that companies like KFC and Chick-Fil-A will be damn sure to educate us about how you can't get the flu (eating their products is 'safe' and they are already working on coming out with ways to 'educate' people about this "fact"). Even so, I expect that Honeybaked Ham stock will go through the roof as people switch from turkey to ham this Thanksgiving. Funny how people don't have a problem with poultry being filled with steroids and antibiotics, but this flu thing will send them scampering to the 'other white meat'.

Yet Another thing you can count on is that if the flu becomes a pandemic and it forces the cancellation of college football games, the SEC will be the last conference in the country to agree to stop play.

Yeah, and a pandemic will give the oil companies another reason to raise gas prices.

[Pete]

I have a hard time taking sportsdan's bird flu concerns seriously when accompanied by his Jayhawk mascot avatar.

If need be, I'll kill the Jayhawk myself.

or the avatar may contract bird flu

at least mine only has to watch out for motor boats

Motor boats hit dolphins?

[bdoughty]

Motor boats hit dolphins?

Blasphamy.

That is the great Manatee


STATUS:
Endangered

DESCRIPTION:
Manatees range in color from gray to brown. They use their two small front flippers to crawl along ocean or river bottoms. Their flat, horizontal tails are pumped up and down to move them along. Despite their small eyes and lack of outer ears, manatees are thought to see and hear quite well.

SIZE:
The average adult manatee weighs 1,500 to 1,800 pounds and measures ten to 12 feet in length.

POPULATION:
The largest population of manatees is found in Florida, where 3,000 individuals now live.

LIFESPAN:
Manatees are thought to live 50 to 60 years in the wild.

RANGE:
Manatees take up residence primarily in Florida’s coastal waters during winter and migrate either as far north as the Carolinas or as far west as Louisiana during the summer months.

HABITAT:
Manatees can be found in the warm waters of shallow rivers, bays, estuaries and coastal waters. Rarely do individuals venture into waters that are below 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

FOOD:
Manatees are herbivores and eat marine and freshwater plants.

BEHAVIOR:
Well known for their gentle, slow-moving nature, manatees have also been known to body surf or barrel roll when playing. Normally they rest and feed often. Manatees communicate by squealing under water to demonstrate fear, stress or excitement.

OFFSPRING:
After a one-year gestation period, calves are born weighing between 60 and 70 pounds and measuring about three to four feet.

THREATS:
Most manatees have a pattern of scars on their backs or tails from collisions with boats. Scientists use these patterns to identify individuals. But these collisions can be fatal for the manatee. Besides boating accidents, manatees have been found crushed or drowned in flood-control gates and also suffer from pollution and habitat loss.

PROTECTION:
*CITES Appendix I, Florida Manatee Sanctuary Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Endangered Species Act.

*Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, an international treaty with more than 144 member countries. Appendix I listed species cannot be traded commercially. Appendix II listed species can be traded commercially only if it does not harm their survival.



http://www.savethemanatee.org/

[10spro]

The threat of an influenza pandemic has been in the forefront of the state's emergency preparedness and planning efforts for several years and will remain so. Here's the situation with bird flu: Birds have their own flu viruses just as humans do. Occasionally, such viruses spread from birds to humans. Let me state that I am no expert either, but this is called "jumping the species barrier." This is what has happened in recent years in East Asia. The H5N1 bird flu virus was first identified in poultry in Hong Kong, where it later jumped the species barrier and infected 18 people, causing six deaths in 1997.

This year, the virus has sickened more than 100 people. Half of those have died, making this a significant disease event. With the recent finding of infected wild birds in other parts of Asia and potentially in Europe, the concern for global spread in birds is increasing.

However, those who have contracted this virus have had direct contact with infected birds in East Asia. There is no confirmation of any human-to-human transfer of the virus. The H5N1 virus is not thought to be genetically capable of being transmitted between humans.

This current bird flu outbreak has caught the attention of the media and the scientific community because it seems to have some of the same genetic traits as the terrible 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that reportedly killed 50 million people. To say that we are "overdue" for a pandemic flu strain to occur is to say that you are overdue to win the lottery. Both are real long shots, but both are possible. In either case, we need to be prepared.

In conclusion I still think the human most at risk today is the chicken farmer working in Vietnam. In the meantime, there are some simple steps we can take to prevent the spread of another deadly virus: human influenza. It usually doesn't make the headlines, but the ordinary human flu directly affects thousands of people around the world.

So far the bird flu is a "potential" health threat and I believe WHO is doing its best to educate people. For more info click on:

http://www.scidev.net/ms/bird_flu/