Asia prepares for bird flu pandemic; experts pessimistic

NewsTarget.com ^ | 2/4/2005 | Staff

[ex-Texan]

NewsTarget.com printable article

Friday, February 04, 2005

Asia prepares for bird flu pandemic; experts pessimistic

Asian nations are stocking up on Tamiflu and making plans for civil-defense type measures in the event of an outbreak of bird flu. The World Health Organization has warned that the bird flu virus is epidemic throughout Asia; if the disease mutates into a form which can be readily transmitted from human to human, the results could be catastrophic.

Overview:

• Richer Asian nations may be arming themselves to fight off a feared bird flu pandemic, but experts say such a scourge would be almost unstoppable and urged tougher action to stop the virus from spreading in poultry.
• The H5N1 virus has killed nine people in Vietnam in recent weeks and health experts say they are aware of unreported outbreaks of the disease in poultry in nearby countries -- all alarm bells after the World Health Organisation warned of a potential pandemic that could kill millions this winter.
• Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand and China have all stocked up on drugs and stepped up their fight against the virus in poultry.
• Drug firms are racing to produce a super vaccine.
• "If the virus gets adapted to humans, no one, no place could cope with it because it is so infectious, and the mortality rate is so high," said Leo Poon, an expert on the virus and professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong.
• Japan has stocked up enough Tamiflu, a drug that the WHO says can protect against bird flu, to treat 20 million people, but it has a population of more than 127 million.
• Thailand has approved a three-year, $104 million plan to combat the disease with education programmes, more laboratories, drugs and surgical masks.
• It plans to double its stocks of Tamiflu, although that will only be enough for just over 5 percent of its 7 million population.
• Lo Wing-lok, an infectious disease expert in Hong Kong, said the infectivity of the H5N1 virus could far outstrip SARS, which infected about 8,000 people around the world in 2003 and killed about 800, straining healthcare systems to their limits.

Source: http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/29239/story.htm

[ex-Texan]

What i can't stand is their constant 'cluck-cluck-clucking' all night . . . a sound that just drives me cock-a-doodle-doo crazy . . . and finding their stupid little feathers all over the bed.
Makes me sneeze (aaahhaaa a-choo!, a-choo! Sniff sniffle ;)

[Mears]

I'm long past the age where I care what people think.

[Judith Anne]

Many people think this is foolish overkill, but we don't care, do we?

Not in the least. ;-D

[M. Espinola]

[ex-Texan]

1918 U.S. Army Photo Of Victims of Spanish Flu

50,000,000 people died from the Spanish Flu in 1918. How many people will die from the Asian Bird Flu over the next two years ?

I do not trust Beijing now, just like I did not trust them when SARS broke out. If the SARS virus was genetically engineered, perhaps only the communists in China, North Korea and Vietnam really know.

[M. Espinola]

The remaining Asian communist regimés will not inform western public health officials of the facts, since how could anything possibly go wrong in these people's paradises.

Bird flu is going to present the world with yet another major deadly health issue.