Posted on 04/25/2009 8:36:54 AM PDT by rdl6989
The swine flu virus that is responsible for an outbreak in Mexico and has been detected in the southwestern United States has the potential to cause a pandemic, a top international health official said today.
"It has pandemic potential," Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization, told reporters during a telephone briefing. "It is infecting people."
Chan held the briefing after cutting short a trip to the United States so she could rush back to the WHO's headquarters in Geneva to convene an emergency meeting of special experts to decide what steps should be taken to contain the virus. It is the first time the committee has been called upon since it was created two years ago to handle disease outbreaks.
"The situation is evolving quickly," Chan said. "We do not yet have a complete picture of the epidemiology or the risk, including possible spread beyond the currently affected areas. Nonetheless, in the assessment of WHO this is serious situation that must be watched very carefully."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
No we wouldn't have been. Thousands of people are traveling perfectly legally every day on flights to and from Mexico City (and Hong Kong, and any other city you care to name.) There's a day or so where someone has no symptoms and then another day or so where it's basically a cold. We've never been stopping people stepping off airplanes with a cold.
It's amazing that people think the ONLY movement of people between the US and Mexico is an illegal coming across the southern border.
But, never let facts get in the way of political axe-grinding, I guess.
1918 flu pandemic.
http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
The question was a religious one to see where his allegiant is!
but themn on flights is less likely to be poor and the poor tend to have teh higher sickness rate, not health care, poor sanitation, crowded living.
if we had a sealed boarder already, when anoutbreak like this happens, we simply ban the international flights and ships from entering the USA.
with the open boarder, we got a much bigger job to tackle,a dn no time to spare. that is the problem. we need to stop illegal and legal immigration mexico until this thing is done. also at least air passengers could be put in a 48 hour qurentine (or what ever incubation time is required) before release from the airport. cant do that when they are running trhu the desert, thru a tunnel, or hiding in the back of a truck. and yes if an airpassenger displays sickness sings, at least we can address that then and there. the illegal can be coming over, cuoghing up ineddible flem, fever, open soars what ever, and no one is here to intercept him.
the worst are the illegals by far, but we also got to control the airports and harbours
LOL!
There is irony in the name Swine flu!
If the terrorist don’t eat pork and America free of those heathens!
Just poison them off...
not good.
Ah jeez. influenza truther, that’s me!
“Nationalism pervaded as people accepted government authority. This allowed the public health departments to easily step in and implement their restrictive measures.”
Best quick read on this: “The Grerat Influenza” by John Barry. Bottom line - we are no more capable of defending against this than we were in 1918.
Pigs are one possible location of “genetic ressortment” because they are capable of contracting, human, bird, and swine flu simultaneously. Once this happens, the various strains can mix and match to develop a novel virus. The asian “bird flu” killing folks in indonesia, Egypt etc. is H5N1. The Mexican virus human component is H1N1.
By definition, there can be no vaccine against a novel virus. Best guess is that it will take a year to develop and manufacture (6 months of development, 6 months of production.) I.E. too late for right now.
Best defense is social distancing. #1 thin
g to do is to close the schools (virus factories) as well as any public gathering (church, baseball games, movies etc etc.) This requires political will power. Any bets on 0 moving boldly and discomfiting folks, especially in the cities?
biggest threat is not mortality, but abseteeism. Estimates run ~40%. What happens when there is no one to run the electric grid, stock ATMs, chlorinate water, and, my personal favorite, the methamphetamine distribution system breaks dow
This is a serious situation. I hope the CDC and public health can get ahead of it. Worst case, this H1N1 and H5N1 break out at about the same time.
Obama won’t waste a good crisis of course, but then as usual will fail completely at addressing the real issue and thats the illegal immigrants and lax border security.
Or to go further to act upon whoever may claim responsibility for this if that were to happen. Suppose this is an AQ generated event, and some of America knew it was, my guess is we will be inundated with diversionary propaganda in the very near future to divert attention from that.
Or then again the Obama administration will use it to create detainment centers if indeed it becomes widespread, my worst fear is that if this is an engineered virus is that it also has a latent piggyback more virulent strain of something else attached to it, one infects and spreads fast but the knockdown punch comes later.
Kind of reminds me of “The Plague” by Albert Camus as well.
My maternal grandfather died in that.
WHO is hoping and praying for a Pandemic to finally justify WHO’s existence and be the ticket for the UN to assert control of World Heath Care.
I wouldn’t be surprised if 0bama and company actually encouraged the spread of this disease, so as to create a crisis they could take advantage of.
You got that right, The Obama Group seems to be terribly frustrated that America has failed to panic on many manufactured issues and or recent events.
In order for them to have the majority of support from the nation on their agenda they require something substantial enough that can be used, and so far almost everything they have tried has been blocked by saner thinking minds and places like FR.
The other point, though it isn’t 100% clear to me yet, is that it seems that the virus was first detected in the U.S. - perhaps in a less-lethal form - then spread to Mexico and evolved slightly. I haven’t seen exact dates yet, but it seems to me by inference that these California and Texas cases were FIRST.
Vaccines that have already been produced are often not effective against new strains of virus.
I’m definitely for protecting our borders, but I very much agree with your analysis.
“Kind of reminds me of “The Plague” by Albert Camus as well.”
A great read indeed!!!
You post makes me wonder: Did akaObama eat hot dogs in uncontrolled situations on the campaign trail? Compared with the CSQ, and then with McCain?
ML/NJ
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.