A new epidemic?
Apparently WHO is hiding the dates of avian flu contraction because human to human transmission in now occurring in Turkey. I have a bag packed, just in case. Whether it's this year or the next it is going to happen. 50% mortality rate is bound to create some anarchy.
posted by mochi at 8:06 PM
3 Comments:
Raod trip to Australia? My volvo wagon can handle it....
There's a lot of info out there both negative and positive. Read something last week that the mortality figures may be greatly skewed by the WHO. The article suggested that many thousands could have had the virus making the mortality rate much more in line with regular strains of flu. Who knows anymore!
"There are conflicting reports on just how deadly the bird flu virus is. Most of the more than 140 cases linked to bird flu and reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) since January 2004 have been severe, killing more than half the patients. Therefore, the world has concluded that bird flu kills half of its victims, and a pandemic of bird flu would be take a devastating human toll.
But there’s new research that suggests it may not be nearly as deadly. The new study suggests the virus is more widespread, but less deadly, than the WHO numbers suggest.
Dr. Anna Thorson of Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and her colleagues conducted the study that was published in Monday's edition of Archives of Internal Medicine.
The new study involved 45,476 randomly selected residents of a rural region of Vietnam where bird flu is rampant among poultry.
· One-quarter of the residents lived in homes reporting sick or dead fowl.
· A total of 8,149 reported flu-like illness with a fever and cough.
· Residents who had direct contact with dead or sick poultry were 73 percent more likely to have experienced those symptoms than residents without direct contact.
· Between 650 and 750 flu-like cases could be attributed to direct contact with sick or dead birds.
· While most patients said their symptoms had kept them out of work or school, the illnesses were mostly mild, lasting about three days.
Flu experts in the United States call the study “compelling,” although not conclusive, and say it’s findings are much more consistent with the way most infectious diseases occur.
The bird flu hysteria has been built almost entirely on the WHO reporting that the flu has killed 50 to 60 percent of its “known” victims. If that turns out not to be true, and it holds that the only way to catch the disease is to come in contact with sick or dead fowl, it could very well be that the bird flu is among the least deadly flu viruses in the world, not the most deadly."
-Jack
Yeah I thought my alarmist post would get a response. I'm really not sure what believe. I don't think if human to human contact is occuring that WHO would release information. No doubt it would cause mass panic.
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