Life-and-Death
Flu
The Bird Flu of 1918 killed over 40 million people, around the globe.
AND NOW! A reminder, a warning, a caution and remedies & protection.
What do You do When the Doctors, Nurses,
Careers and
Governments Begin Dying?
Imminent, The Bird
Flu Pandemic ?
Do The Recent Bird Flu Stories Scare You? ...
They
Should!
Experts put the probability of a global influenza
pandemic at 100% - an absolute certainty!
When it hits it's estimated that it will last 12-18
months, will touch every corner of the globe and according to The
Director of the Center for Infectious Disease will kill
anywhere between 30 Million and 380 Million People!
The World Health Organization predicts that
up to 30% of the world’s population will
become infected...
Governments are so frightened that they're already
stockpiling drugs and training thousands of people on how to cope, WHEN
IT HITS...
The pandemic could strike next year, it could be in ten years ... it could strike tomorrow!
One thing all the experts agree on is that a global flu virus will attack the human race, this is an "absolute certainty" and you must do everything possible - NOW - to protect yourself and those closest to you.
Bird Flu or the H5N1 virus as it is known, has already mutated into a human form.
Bird Flu is not an ordinary virus. You can't treat it with an normal flu vaccine because there isn't one and it kills quickly ... it has been fatal in 50% of people infected so far.
Publish Date: 5/29/2006
Officials worried about bird flu preparation
Illness could become easily transmissible between humans
By Kate Martin
The Daily Reporter-Herald
Local health officials are concerned that residents are not preparing properly for a potential influenza pandemic.
Health officials around the world are concerned a mutation in the avian influenza virus, which has human mortality rates topping 50 percent, could cause it to be easily transmissible from human to human.
“You’ve got to pray that it doesn’t go pandemic,” said Larimer County Health Department Director Adrienne LeBailly. “But if it does, you’ve got to pray even harder that it’s not as bad as it has been.”
A pandemic is a disease that affects a large number of people all over the globe.
While LeBailly said some media outlets are playing up the possibility of a pandemic — including a made-for-television movie by ABC, “Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America” — she said not enough people are preparing for a pandemic.
Seven percent of residents have set aside enough food and water to outlast a pandemic — three months’ worth. The rest, she presumes, are doing nothing.
“Every year I buy fire insurance for my house, and I’m not mad at the end of the year that my house didn’t burn down and I wasted that money,” she said. “There is a natural tendency for public officials to try to reassure folks. I don’t know that we want to prepare our message to prevent people from over-preparing rather than helping the 93 percent of people (who are doing nothing).”
Health officials in Kubu Simbelang, Indonesia suspect several family members passed bird flu among themselves. At least six members of the family died earlier this week, and three more bird flu deaths have struck the village. Officials don’t think the virus has mutated to transmit more easily among humans. Rather, the family’s close living situation is blamed for the illnesses according to Associated Press reports.
The World Health Organization has also put the maker of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu on alert for possible shipment of the global stockpile for the first time, officials said Saturday. Bird flu has killed at least 124 people worldwide since the virus began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003.
Previously, LeBailly said, scientists thought the 50 percent mortality rate was skewed because they thought people who caught the virus but were not sick enough to go to the hospital did not report it. But LeBailly said some studies have shown that most people who catch the virus experience severe symptoms, not a mild case.
Three influenza pandemics occurred in the past century, LeBailly said: 1918, 1957 and 1968. The 1918 pandemic had a 2.5 percent mortality rate. In Loveland, death certificates are available from 1918, and health officials used them to track the flu’s progress. During the worst week of the pandemic, LeBailly said, 17 people died.
“Loveland’s population was one-tenth what it is today,” she said. “That’s 170 people by today’s standards.”
All cases of bird-to-human transmission have so far occurred outside North and South America. However, experts expect migratory birds will carry the virus from Asia to North America. They say they expect it to arrive in the Midwest by late summer or early fall.
Dr. Barb Powers, director of the Colorado State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said the lab will be one of few facilities in the United States equipped to test birds for avian influenza.
LeBailly said people should understand that if a pandemic hits, it will hit everywhere at roughly the same time.
“We won’t be able to get help from others,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Questions about Influenza
What is avian influenza?
Avian influenza is a virus that is spread primarily from bird to bird. Occasionally, the virus can spread to humans.
Currently, the H5N1 avian influenza virus only transmits easily among other birds. Humans can catch it if they come into contact with infected birds, or surfaces contaminated with bird feces or blood. The virus so far has not transmitted between people.
What is pandemic flu?
Pandemic flu is when humans become exposed to a highly transmissible form of a virus that humans alive today have not been in contact with. The flu spreads rapidly among the population because people do not have an immunity to it.
How can a bird flu virus change to one that is easily transmissible between humans?
The virus can change in one of two ways: slow mutation, or by combining its RNA with an already-existing flu virus, which is called reassortment.
Source — Dr. Adrienne LeBailly, Larimer County Department of Health and Environment
Preparing for a Pandemic
• Prepare about three months worth of supplies for each person in the family. If a pandemic strikes, it will take about six to eight weeks for the virus to clear from the community. Include nonperishable food, water, toiletries, prescription medications and a first aid kit. Buy supplies that you use anyway, so you can rotate them out to keep them fresh.
• Talk to your employer to see what plans the company is making; whether people can work from home to minimize virus transmission, or if people will come in to work in shifts. Persuade sick people to stay home. Sanitize commonly used surfaces: doorknobs, railings and copy machine buttons, for instance.
• If you must mingle in public, do not touch your eyes, nose or mouth with your hands. Do not shake hands, and try to maintain a lengthy social distance to avoid transmitting the virus.
Source — Dr. Adrienne LeBailly, Larimer County Department of Health and Environment.
Click the banner to learn how to protect you and your Family/Friends and pets!
WASHINGTON -- While official Washington
has been poring over Harriet Miers' long-ago doings on the Dallas City
Council and parsing the Byzantine comings and goings of the Fitzgerald
grand jury, relatively unnoticed was perhaps the most momentous event
of our lifetime -- what is left of it, as I shall explain. It was announced
last week that American scientists have just created a living, killing
copy of the 1918 ``Spanish'' flu.
This is big. Very big.
First, it is a scientific achievement
of staggering proportions. The Spanish flu has not been seen on this
blue planet for 85 years. Its re-creation is a story of enterprise, ingenuity,
serendipity, hard work and sheer brilliance. It involves finding deep
in the bowels of a military hospital in Washington a couple of tissue
samples from the lungs of soldiers who died in 1918 (in an autopsy collection
first ordered into existence by Abraham Lincoln), and the disinterment
of an Alaskan Eskimo who died of the flu and whose remains had been preserved
by the permafrost. Then, using slicing and dicing techniques only Michael
Crichton could imagine, they pulled off a microbiological Jurassic Park:
the first ever resurrection of an ancient pathogen. And not just any
ancient pathogen, explained virologist Eddie Holmes, but ``the agent
of the most important disease pandemic in human history.''
Which brings us to the second element
of this story: Beyond the brilliance lies the sheer terror. We have quite
literally brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction.
It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years
of the First World War. It killed more humans than any other disease
of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby,
who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes The New Scientist,
when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories
in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus
ever tested.
Now that I have your attention, consider,
with appropriate trepidation, the third element of this story: What to
do with this knowledge? Not only has the virus been physically re-created.
But its entire genome has now been published for the whole world, good
people and very bad, to see.
The decision to publish was a very close
and terrifying call.
On the one hand, we need the knowledge
disseminated. We've learned from this research that the 1918 flu was
bird flu, ``the most bird-like of all mammalian flu viruses,'' says Jeffery
Taubenberger, lead researcher in unraveling the genome. There is a bird
flu epidemic right now in Asia that has infected 117 people and killed
60. It has already developed a few of the genomic changes that permit
transmission to humans. Therefore, you want to put out the knowledge
of the structure of the 1918 flu, which made the full jump from birds
to humans, so that every researcher in the world can immediately start
looking for ways to anticipate, monitor, prevent and counteract similar
changes in today's bird flu.
We are essentially in a life-and-death
race with the bird flu. Can we figure out how to pre-empt it before it
figures out how to evolve into a transmittable form with 1918 lethality
that will decimate humanity? To run that race we need the genetic sequence
universally known -- not just to inform and guide but to galvanize new
research.
On the other hand, resurrection of the
virus and publication of its structure opens the gates of hell. Anybody,
bad guys included, can now create it. Biological knowledge is far easier
to acquire for Osama and friends than nuclear knowledge. And if you can't
make this stuff yourself, you can simply order up DNA sequences from
commercial laboratories around the world that will make it and ship it
to you on demand. Taubenberger himself admits that ``the technology is
available.''
And if the bad guys can't make the flu
themselves, they could try to steal it. That's not easy. But the incentive
to do so from a secure facility could not be greater. Nature, which published
the full genome sequence, cites Rutgers bacteriologist Richard Ebright
as warning that there is a significant risk ``verging on inevitability''
of accidental release into the human population or of theft by a ``disgruntled,
disturbed or extremist laboratory employee.''
One batch of 1918 flu has the capacity
for mass destruction that no Bond villain could ever dream of. Why try
to steal loose nukes in Russia? A nuke can only destroy a city. The flu
virus, properly evolved, is potentially a destroyer of civilizations.
We might have just given it to our enemies, Duh!
Have a nice day.
By Charles Krauthammer via TownHall.com
14 October 2005
Corroborating Links;
BBC NEWS | Health | The 'bird flu' that killed 40 million.
Scotsman.com News - Bird flu - 1918 flu victim may hold clues to outbreak.
Bird flu: 1918 spanish flu.
Bird Flu Resources Site.
Avian Birds Flu Vaccine.
Bird Flu/1918 Articles/Threads - OtherHealth.Com.
Bird-Flu-Forum.Com
Bird Flu - Avian Bird Flu.
Bird Flu-Avian Influenza Flu (overview - key facts).
Bird Flu Hot News.
*Bird Flu Remedies* @ JohnPinto.Com
News.Avian-Influenza.Info, By Countries.
Bird Flu Information and News.
Bird Flu Remedy @ UK.
Thank you for visiting, send yourself and your friends to
The infection known as “Bird Flu” or “Swine Flu”
is caused by the “avian influenza virus” (avian – bird, influenza – flu). An “influenza pandemic” is caused by
the appearance of a new type of influenza,
a virus in the human body, spreading it from
one person to another and
consequently generating a worldwide infection.... |
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