WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton said onMonday said that it was “increasingly likely” that bird flu would bedetected in the United States as early as this year.
Speaking toreporters, Norton and Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns unveiled aplan to increase monitoring of migratory birds that are likely to bringthe bird flu virus to U.S. shores.
Norton said bird flu wouldlikely first be detected in the Pacific islands in Alaska, wheretesting for the disease will be a priority.
Norton stressed that detecting the disease in birds in the United States would not signal the start of a human pandemic.
I usually don’t post much about bird flu because I dont really need to..you can see articles about it everywhere. Someone pointed out to me that even if it doesnt ‘jump’ to humans theres still going to have to be a massive cull of fowl. The practical upshot of thismeans that if you like chicken and have a deep freeze, now is the time to stock up. Between mad cow, bird flu and who knows what else its start to not leave alot of options for us carnivores. And before someone suggests cannibalism, thats the most likely candidate for tainted meat.
Even in countries that have/are experiencing bird flu there doesnt appear to have been much of a panic. On the other hand, few of those countries had a population that travels internally as much as this country. NY-to-LA, Chicago-to-Denver, Florida-to-Phoenix, all those traveller just doing regular travel, let alone holiday travel, are all happy little vectors.
(shrug) Have food, have water, have ammo, have fuel…bolt the doors, pull the blinds and hermit for a month or two.
bolt the doors, pull the blinds and hermit for a month or two.
Just a month or two?
However long it takes for the sick, infirm and elderly to die off.
I still think the whole thing is being way over-hyped.
It’s practically a state secret that the discovery of H5N1 in poultry dates back not to 1997 but rather to 1959, when it was identified in Scottish chickens.
also
Jeffery Taubenberger, a molecular pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Md., told the Washington Post that of the roughly 4,400 amino acids in the avian flu, perhaps only 25 would have to mutate properly to create a new Spanish flu. “It could theoretically provide a checklist for surveillance,” he told the Post. “You might be able to say: this strain has six of these changes; it’s a worrisome virus we need to keep our eye on. Or this one has none.”
That’s a gross oversimplification, though. It’s not as if there were a thief intelligently picking a lock with 25 tumblers one by one. When mutations occur, as one tumbler randomly falls into place, another can as easily fall out of place. And remember, those tumblers have been turning for at least 46 years, since the Scottish outbreak. Long before H5N1 becomes transmissible from human to human, it may mutate into a 98-pound weakling, capable of causing little more than a sniffle in humans.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/349zwhbe.asp?pg=1
Avian flu doesn’t over-concern me given it affects birds and the few hapless humans that contracted it from birds (and A few cats in Germany).
My small worry is that the distribution of bird flu being worldwide, which places it into greater contact with humans and raising the probablity that it’ll mutate (my understanding is that it’ll require a human intermediary to make it transmissable).
My country of choice for the first human-to-human cases is Africa. Poor vet surveillance, poor medical facilites, superstition compounding ignorance and a willingness not to report things that would cause their economies to fail even more, not to mention reduce foreign dollars.
So, I’ll just watch and wait. But man, if we enter a recession with the compounded effects of a pandemic—damn, that’s going to be a rough time.
Cheers!!!
Plus the time it takes for new cases to stop appearing, yeah.
Or, if you’re in reasonably good health, you can go out, catch it as soon as possible, feel icky for a couple weeks, and then be immune before the pharmaceutical companies can come up with a vaccine.
One of the things people seem to ignore is that the people who are dying are not exactly in the prime of health, and medical care has progressed a step or two[1] since the 1918 pandemic everybody likes to crow about.
Remember the flu pandemic of 1968? I don’t because I wasn’t born. But most people who lived through it don’t even seem to know it happened.
If you aren’t old, very young, immune compromised, or in poor health already, your risk is probably pretty low.
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[1] or 32,764,519
But I absolutely agree with your take on the possible impact to the food supply.
For city people that balk at cannibalism, there is a surprisingly large amount of non-human meat to be had. We have multiple packs of feral dogs, thousands of stray cats, raccoons, possum, squirrel, and pigeons.
And Security Forces always have rations issued to them.
Hell, yeah. I can’t look at a pigeon anymore without thinking, “If the shit hits the fan, I’m going to eat you.” And ducks. Don’t forget the ducks, and the geese.
“…you can go out, catch it as soon as possible, feel icky for a couple weeks, and then be immune…”
>>> The only problem with that approach would be if the hype DOES turn out to be warranted. In the case of the 1918 pandemic, it was those who were in the prime of health that were most gravely effected; young, healthy people becoming infected & being dead within less than a day was hardly unheard of. My grandmother did live through the Spanish flu, and though she never wanted to talk about it, I was left with the impression that it was the most traumatic thing she ever went through.
Theyre not security forces…theyre mobile individual resupply points.
That’s exactly what they are.
Hiding away until secondary and tertiary waves – which will probably have worse strains – show up hardly seems like a winning strategy.
I’d rather take my chances with an early strain and build an immunity than poke my head out just in time to get the really tough strain.
They’ve seen drug-resistant strains develop in people they treated with Tamiflu. That isn’t like antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that show up over years of antibiotic use by tens of thousands of people. We’re talking a person contracts it, they treat with Tamiflu, a resistant strain develops in that person. Human immune response is far more agile than any single drug, especially if it’s already working the problem.
Secondary waves are probably going to be much nastier than primaries if it does transition to being human-transmissible because so many people are going to rely on antivirals.
As a side note, I would guess that the reported mortality rates are inflated[1], because so far it has mostly been restricted to nations where people don’t normally go to doctors until they already have one foot in the grave.
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[1] but I wouldn’t venture to guess to what extent
“theyre mobile individual resupply points”.
I fall into that catagory.
My understanding of pathogens is that seceding generations become less lethal as time goes on. This because the more lethal variants run out of hosts (by killing them), while the not quite so lethal ones are able to keep going, and going…
I totally agree with you on lethality also being a function of the availability of quality health care. I just don’t know if the system in the USA could stand the strain.
and
in a week start going stark raving mad when you discover the neighbors have welded your door shut. and to think bird flu is only the lesser of other flu evils out there, especially havia 3. Wildflower 06
It seems somewhat intuitive that living things tend to become “better” at surviving, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Variation radiates in all directions, some more beneficial to the organism, some less. Evolutionarily speaking, even for something that reproduces as rapidly as most viruses do, we’re talking about a very short time-horizon here, so all bets are pretty much off. 20 years down the road the avian flu strains that survive will probably be less lethal (or at least they will take a longer time to be lethal) than those existent today.
It is true that as a wave progresses, it will tend to become less lethal, but subsequent waves are likely to start out more lethal than the first. That was the case in the 1918 pandemic. Each wave started out more lethal than the preceding, then weakened as it progressed.
But we like you. Youre our ‘man on the inside’.