Posted on 02/21/2005 3:09:17 PM PST by bitt
Washington — The Earth may be on the brink of a worldwide epidemic from a bird flu virus that may mutate to become as deadly and infectious as viruses that killed millions during three influenza pandemics of the 20th century, a federal health official said Monday.
Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said scientists expect that a flu virus that has swept through chickens and other poultry in Asia will genetically change into a flu that can be transmitted from person to person.
The genes of the avian flu change rapidly, she said, and experts believe it is highly likely that the virus will evolve into a pathogen deadly for humans.
She made the remarks in a plenary lecture at the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In Asia, there have already been a number of deaths among people who caught the flu from chickens or ducks. The mortality rate is very high, about 72 per cent of identified patients, said Dr. Gerberding. There also have been documented cases of this strain of flu being transferred from person-to-person, but the outbreak was not sustained, she said.
“We are expecting more human cases over the next few weeks because this is high season for avian influenza in that part of the world,” said Dr. Gerberding. Although cases of human-to-human transmission have been rare, “our assessment is that this is a very high threat.”
This assessment, she said, is based on the known history of the flu virus.
The avian flu now spreading in Asia is part of what is called the H1 family of flu viruses. It is a pathogen that is notorious in human history.
“Each time we see a new H1 antigen emerge, we experience a pandemic of influenza,” said Dr. Gerberding. In 1918, H1 appeared and millions died worldwide. In 1957, the Asian flu was an H2, and the Hong Kong flu in 1968 was a H3.
There had been small appearances of the H1-type of avian viruses in other years, but nothing like the H5 now rampaging through the birds of Asia.
“We are seeing a highly pathogenic strain of influenza virus emerge to an extraordinary proportion across the entire western component of Asia,” she said. “The reason this is so ominous is because of the evolution of flu.... You may see the emergence of a new strain to which the human population has no immunity.”
Study already has shown that the virus can infect cats who can then infect other cats, which Dr. Gerberding said was “another harbinger” of the possibility of a human pandemic.
“The science here is all alerting us that we have a great deal to be concerned about,” she said.
The CDC chief said her agency is getting ready for a possible pandemic next year.
A special flu team, organized last year, continues to monitor the spread of the avian flu and to analyze the strains as they appear.
The government has ordered two million doses of vaccine that would protect against the known strains of avian flu. Dr. Gerberding said this would give manufacturers a head start on making the shots that would be needed to combat a full-blown epidemic of an H1-type of flu in this country.
CDC is also plugged into an international communication and monitoring system that, it is hoped, will give an early warning of the emergence of a deadly new flu.
But at the same time, the agency is helping to produce the 180 million or so doses of regular flu that are needed annually. Dr. Gerberding said the timeline for producing the regular vaccine yearly is very tight, with little room for problems. To produce a new vaccine in response to the sudden emergence of an H1-flu bug would require an extraordinary new effort, she said.
“We don't now have the capacity to do both,” said Dr. Gerberding.
ping your lists, if you think....
So, my death will taste like chicken?
All I know is I have heard about 10 people tell me in the last 30 days about gallbladders being taken out all of a sudden with hardly a single sign of a problem and then bam. Not saying it is related to anything...just odd. Not to mention myself having gallstones...but im goin the eastern medicine route. Western Medicine gives me the creeps.
Gaia's gettin' angry!
I try to keep my ear to the ground when it comes to emerging diseases.
This one could be bad. Very, very bad.
Capture some of those damn birds and send them to: China. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia...let them work out the scientific details about how to prevent any disease they transmit...
My grandmother used to tell me about 1918. She would try to help as best should could. The sick were quarantined in their homes where we lived. Those who had the courage would cook meals for them and leave the food and buckets of water on their porches. I think she said they burned the hospital after it was over. Of course back then that wasn’t unusual.
BTTT
Feathery tickle in the throat
Fowl taste in the mouth,
Sudden change in attitude or feeling down in the mouth,
or just not giving a cluck.
The problem is that they could do the same to us before we do it to them.
Don't need to capture them. Birds are highly migratory creatures. This could spread worldwide in six months, easy.
Of course the fact that it kills alot of birds does put a crimp in them flying somewhere.
But like most other diseases, there are bound to be some animals that become carriers. Infected, but immune to the symptoms.
Could be grim. Could be appropriations time, too.
Sounds like a Fluster Cluck to me.
So what happened to the AIDS in Africa? Thought THAT was supposed to be OUR problem.....
now you know why I always took the veal!
My first thought as well.
Thanks for your calm response.
AHHHH!!!!!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
He talked about how bad that flu was up until shortly before his death at 96. Must have been really awful.
Well, on the plus side,
you may be a winner in
that Ed McMahon thing . . .
So be it - I allow that our abiltiy to prevent same will be much before their aility to do same - will we take casualties? Yes...but we must deplete their population before they try to do that to us...it is only after we can presnet to them a "peaceful" solution that they will start to follow some laws of civility...we must be ruthless in logical anticipation of their acts...those people do not respect "law and order" until they get hit up side the head with a stick...they only respect power - yes, it is sad that peace does not appeal to them until they know they will be destroyed by onemeans or another...
Bummer!
While Rome burned.....
Nitro fiddled...
just kidding.
LVM
If I remember correctly I think we lost 18 million. In 1918 that was a lot of people. I could be wrong.
MarkT i am with you. i believe this could be a formidable weapon in our war on terror. perhaps, this is what we(they) are experimenting and this is the first foray. if so, i am hoping we are a number of steps ahead of them and this is not their experiment. nevertheless this would certainly be an apparent innocuous way for us to inconspicuously diminish the legion of terrorists.
Between global warming warnings and all these flu outbreaks that are to come but never do, I don’t know where to hide anymore.
From what I hear we now have medicine in the US that will dissolve them. I had mine out in 1984. I sure wish they would have had it then. You might want to check with your doctor about that first. :)
Brooklyn says you are certainly welcome.
My name is no gamble.
"October 1918 turns out to be the deadliest month in the nation's history as 195,000 Americans fall victim to influenza." This from PBS site.
Note this was for one month...the month of October. Even with advances in medicine one must worry. With modern travel what it is transmission will be very very fast.
Oh, no. Its not the end of the world again...I don't know if I can take another one.
IMO, anytime someones starts issuing warning about a worldwide pandemic, it must be appropriations time.
I'm not a doctor or even have any real knowledge about virology, but I do know that we live in 2005 and pandemics predates modern medicine.
I don't know whether avian flu will mutate to infect humans, but I am sure that, if it does, Democrats will blame it on Bush. Michael Moore will probably make a documentary featuring Ted Kennedy saying that it was an epidemic concocted in Crawford for political purposes.
Humans will be the most effective and deadly carriers of this virus, should it move into the human species.
Almost instantaneous air travel (instantaneous relative to the incubation period) will spread it worldwide before anyone can react.
Forget birds or other animals. Once it jumps to humans, WE will spread the disease.
I'm not sure they had that technology in 1918. I read an article about it once I think it was in National Geographic. Many soldiers had this flu and brought it back with them. There is something about war that seems to facilitate sickness and the likelihood of pandemics, epidemics. People are not so healthy...people are sick, hungry...people are on the move and spread the disease during wars.
LOL
Is the vaccine available here in the U.S.?
Mystery of 1918 flu pandemic solved
Scientists identify key factor in switch from birds to humans
Tim Radford, science editor
Friday February 6, 2004
The Guardian
British scientists have solved a secret of an avian flu virus which killed up to 40 million people worldwide 86 years ago. They now know more about how a disease of birds switched to humans to trigger the most lethal outbreak in history.
A team from the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, north London, used pathological samples taken from victims of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 to recreate the structure of a haemagglutinin protein vital in the leap between species.
-snip-
Flu kills thousands of Britons every year but those most at risk are the elderly, the very young or those suffering from some other illness.
But the 1918 strain was different: it hit the young, healthy and well nourished of neutral countries as fiercely as it ravaged the refugee camps in wartorn Europe.
It first appeared in March 1918 in a military camp in Kansas, in the US, and 522 soldiers were ill within two days. In the end it killed about 700,000 people in the US and about 230,000 in Britain. The French called it la grippe, the Russians, "the Spanish lady". Mortality rates were huge: in some communities up to 70% died. The virus disappeared within 18 months as mysteriously as it came, leaving 20-40 million dead.
-----
------
As their lungs filled … the patients became short of breath and increasingly cyanotic. After gasping for several hours they became delirious and incontinent, and many died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth. It was a dreadful business.
--Isaac Starr, 3rd year medical student, University of Pennsylvania, 1918.
By the fall of 1918 a strain of influenza seemingly no different from that of previous years suddenly turned so deadly, and engendered such a state of panic and chaos in communities across the globe, that many people believed the world was coming to an end. It struck with amazing speed, often killing its victims within just hours of the first signs of infection. So fast did the 1918 strain overwhelm the body's natural defenses, that the usual cause of death in influenza patients---a secondary infection of lethal pneumonia---oftentimes never had a chance to establish itself. Instead, the virus caused an uncontrollable hemorrhaging that filled the lungs, and patients would drown in their own body fluids.
Not only was the Spanish Flu strikingly virulent, but it displayed an unusual preference in its choice of victims---tending to select young healthy adults over those with weakened immune systems, as in the very young, the very old, and the infirm. The normal age distribution for flu mortality was completely reversed, and had the effect of gouging from society's infrastructure the bulk of those responsible for its day to day maintenance. No wonder people thought the social order was breaking down. It very nearly did.
But at the close of the First World War, when Spanish Flu appeared, the world was a very different place. Since then, outstanding advances in our knowledge of the germ world have been made, adding dramatically to our repertoire of medical wizardry. Surely what happened back then couldn't happen again.
Or could it?
During the 1918-1919 fall period the number of Americans who died from influenza is estimated at 675,000. Of those, almost 200,000 deaths were recorded in the month of October 1918 alone. Worldwide, the mortality figure for the full pandemic is believed to stand somewhere between 30 to 40 million. So, with the world population today having more than tripled in the intervening years, what is to stop a modern flu pandemic from claiming upwards of 100 million lives? The answer, it seems, is nothing at all.
Today, of course, we have vaccines and antiviral drugs. But in the Third World, at least, these combatants are in very short supply. In India, where the Spanish Flu is thought to have culled more than 10 million from the population, public health care is still notoriously deficient. In China, with a population one third larger again, the situation is not much better. Even for developed countries, where vaccines are readily available, the fraction of the population that routinely subjects itself to inoculation generally hovers around 10 percent. In the event that the public were to receive adequate warnings of an impending pandemic, it's likely of course that this number could be significantly increased. But even then, it may not matter. By their nature pandemics tend to take us by surprise. The next influenza strain that ravages the human population will probably not be the one we were planning to encounter.
It'll start in China first, the filthiest "developed" nation on the planet, just like SARS, and they'll give us a lot of doubletalk -- if they give us anything at all -- while they try to "save face" and fix it themselves with that hocus-pocus about "energy" and "balance" and "harmony" that they call medicine over there.
In this case, IMO, any rumor you hear about any flu problems in China is not only more likely to be true than false, but much worse than that.
My grandfather lost his wife and kids to that flu. He never had a sniffle. He married my grandmother in 1921, if I recall correctly.
Some people may have a built in resistance to this stuff, I guess.
Feathery tickle in the throat
Fowl taste in the mouth,
Sudden change in attitude or feeling down in the mouth,
or just not giving a cluck.
==============
LOL! And don't forget these other symptoms:
-Scratching
-Pain in the breast or leg bone
-flightiness
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