In the 1918 epidemic, healthy young people could die within 24 hours. Maybe not enough time for them to seek and obtain treatment.
The government will just tell drug makers to make more anti-virals? That would be nice, but there is such a thing as production capacity.
The Chinese produce a lot of antivirals. They give them to chickens and ducks.
Oh, you mean like the Great Heterosexual AIDS Pandemic that was supposed to produce AIDS in every family by about 1985?
Got it.
Could it be that our government is paving the way to bar travel to and from the countries afflicted with bird flu? Could it be that we might finally have a reason to prevent people from certain countries from coming here? What are the chance.
I was waiting for the "Swine Flu" as well and even made a Porky Pig outfit to wear in honor of catching flu from pigs - never happened.
Bump.
Very nice article, I'm in complete agreement. The panic crowd is really annoying, the annual "worst flu ever" stories, West Nile psychosis, SARS hysteria, now Avian Flu silliness. Don't these people ever get tired of being scared out of their wits.
You need to do more research, my friend. So far the H5N1 virus has not mutated into a human-to-human contact virus. (It has only met 5 of the 10 mutations) There are two ways it could mutate- 1) meet the 10 stages on its own or 2) attach itself to another virus. At this stage we have no vaccine because we do not know what the DNA make-up will be when it reaches human to human transmission. (At that stage it will take 6 months to develope a vaccine) Since we do not know the DNA makeup of the virus, we will not know it's virolence.
Mutation 1 - could be the worse, yet it could weaken with the mutation. We don't know.
Mutation 2- would be the best worst case scenerio as the virus would be severely weakened and have a more recognizabe DNA.Thus we could have a vaccine quicker.
The major problem we are in at this time is that we don't know how it will mutate and how long it will take to mutate.
In 1918, there were very few elderly. Today we have millions of frail elderly that will not survive. If there is a pandemic, the antivirals will not be available and will be will probably be rationed. The older meds will not be effective because of China use of amantidine treatment of fowl. A pandemic will spread before drug companies have a chance to ramp up production of newer meds like tamaflu.
I am a physician boarded by the American Board of Preventive Medicine. I'm not saying panic but there is very real reason to have deep concern. If we are lucky, when(not if)the mutation occurrs, it will be timed at the end of flu season allowing ramp up of an effective vaccine for the next year and/or it is not a virulent as we expect.
If a perfect storm of timing, drug resistence and virulence develops, we will see millions dead. Or it could just be a moderately bad bug. Time will tell.
You leave out all the bad news. You forgot to note that it took 7-10 DAYS for a ship to cross the Atlantic and almost a month to get to parts of Asia. Today it takes under 24 hours. You forget to note that most of america was rural in 1918, today its urban. You forget to note that there is no vacine for avian flue, that it has a long incubation period so people can travel anywhere in the world infected before anyone knows, and that it kills in days, not the months necessary to produce the tens of millions of doses of any drug that is found to be effective.
You forget that people cannot live in their homes for weeks at a time, as most could and did in the fall of 1918. Then you have to factor in the barbarian. How will Americans react if told to stray home for weeks and they begin to run out of food or have sick or dead in their homes? I suspect not well.
Now add in wide open borders and a wealth of liberal activist lawyers who will immediately try to undermine all effective meansures in court and you have the potential for a worse outbreak.