Bird Flu: "This thing Just Continues to March" (Interview w/Dr Michael Osterholm)

No, I haven't read the book. I'm familiar with the Mena Airport operation, which was set up by the CIA after the Democrats in congress denied any funding for the Contras in Nicaragua.

Bush senior (as Reagan's VP and former CIA director) and Bill Clinton (as Governor of Arkansas) worked together on this project. My sense of the business, however, is that clinton was in it for the drug money and Bush was in it as a matter of patriotism, to defeat the Sandinistas. Iran-Contra, of course, was demonized by the Democrats and the media. But it was preferable to letting Communists take over Latin America, as they threatened to do.

"Doubling the death rate from the 1918 Flu makes me question his other data. He's hyping. According to the link below the death rate was 2.5%"

The case mortality rate varied widely. An overall figure is impossible to obtain, or even estimate reliably, because no solid information about total cases exists. In U.S. Army camps where reasonably reliable statistics were kept, case mortality often exceeded 5 percent, and in some circumstances exceeded 10 percent. In the British Army in India, case mortality for white troops was 9.6 percent, for Indian troops 21.9 percent.
In isolated human populations, the virus killed at even higher rates. In the Fiji islands, it killed 14 percent of the entire population in 16 days. In Labrador and Alaska, it killed at least one-third of the entire native population (Jordan, 1927; Rice, 1988).

From your own cite:http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/

"The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster."

Clearly, if it is not known how many people died it cannot be precisely determined exactly what the mortality rate was. Dr. Osterholm did not claim to have an exact figure and niether did the article you cite. You need more than this to (honestly) attack the credibility of one of the foremost researchers in the field.

Hello,
I recalled our conversation about the 1918 Spanish flu:

>"The extremely rapid spread (i.e. hours) of the Spanish flu among troops at military bases can only be explained by airborne transmission."<

Related to that, I thought you might find this interesting:

http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.html

"The swine flu virus of 1976 really was antigenically quite similar to the Spanish flu virus; the "problem," if you want to call it that, was that 1976 had little in common with 1918. There are certainly scary "what-ifs" concerning H5N1. But what truly propels the more hysterical scenarios is the specter of a repeat of 1918-19.

Hard to believe that until recently this flu was known as the "Forgotten Epidemic." Today, you can't get through the day without hearing about it. On the other hand, people have been predicting another Spanish flu practically since the first one died out; so this is an old sport.

Yet in addition to realizing there have been astonishing advances in medical knowledge since 1918, it's important to realize that worldwide conditions then provided unique circumstances for increasing both the deadliness and the contagiousness of any type of influenza.

There was a war going on, remember? Not just any war, but history's worst war of attrition. He who throws the most bodies at the enemy wins. And it was a war of trenches. As University of Louisville biologist Paul Ewald observes in his brilliant 1994 book Evolution of Infectious Disease, it's the mildest strains of flu that tend to survive and spread, because those are the ones that live long enough for their hosts to communicate to lots of other people.

The virulent strains that kill quickly, by the same token, are least likely to be transmitted and to prevail. They quickly get buried with their victims. Trench warfare, he says, flipped this on its head.

The development of antibiotics, an anti-pneumococcal vaccine, and antivirals is hardly the only difference between 1918 and now.

At first, as is well documented, the prevailing influenza was indeed mild. But by late summer in France it was turning vicious, because soldiers with mild strains stayed in the trenches and nursed their aches while the sickest ones were packed onto crowded trains and trucks, then squeezed into hospitals already packed with casualties and soon to be bursting at the seams with flu victims.

We have no such disease factories today. Indeed, the only close parallel we have today is – the packed chicken farms of Asia. H5N1 intensified and spread among birds as the Spanish flu did among humans."

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