The bird flu has more chance of turning you into a bird than it does to kill you.
"Avian H5N1 looks like a 70% case fatality in humans. But this has never been true of any human strain," Longini told WebMD last December. "There has never been any human influenza virus that has behaved that way in recorded or even unrecorded history."
This, right here, is the statement that would calm people down about the bird flu, but I doubt you're ever going to hear this on the news. Why? Because news organizations don't want to calm your fears. Calming your fears means you won't obsess and glue yourself to the television or radio to get more information.
I'll take a guess as to why this is the case and I suspect I'm mostly, but not completely, right with my guess. The H5N1 strain of the bird flu is extremely deadly to humans because it is completely foreign and our immune systems have little defense against the disease. If H5N1 mutates such that it becomes more capable of infecting humans it will also pick up genes that are present in other diseases that affect humans. This means it will be less foreign and our immune systems will be able to better fight the infection. It also means that existing anti-viral drugs may have more effect at reducing the length of infection.
One is the H7N7 bird flu that in 2003 infected a number of people in the Netherlands. This virus usually caused pinkeye in infected people.
This is an important bit of information that will likely never show up on the mainstream media broadcasts or websites. The bird flu might not even cause the flu in humans. In the case of H7N7 it usually caused pinkeye. The next strain that infects humans might just cause a bad cold, strep throat, or some other lesser disease that may not be very lethal due to the nature of the infection. On the other hand, it could cause meningitis, pneumonia, or send your body into toxic shock.
"The case fatality of even highly virulent flu strains are a couple of deaths per 10,000 people." Longini told WebMD last December.
And I'm sure if you look at the recorded deaths you'll find that they are mainly among the old, young, or those with weakened immune systems. Among average age, healthy people I suspect the fatality rate is even lower.
But the first batch of this prototype vaccine likely will not be a good match for whatever bird flu virus eventually emerges to cause a pandemic. New batches of vaccine will have to be made. That process would take more than a year. Meanwhile, experts suspect that modern transportation would carry flu around the world.
This is true, but the problem is also that this won't work for the initial strike of the disease. A vaccine that takes more than a year to create for a version currently infecting people isn't very useful. Further, the bird flu would behave exactly as the flu does now. It mutates all the time. In a year it could mutate into a form that cannot infect humans or it could mutate into a new version that the newly created vaccine doesn't stop. The best they can do is what they do now, try and guess which strains will be prominent *next* year and make a vaccine that targets those strains.
This, right here, is the statement that would calm people down about the bird flu, but I doubt you're ever going to hear this on the news. Why? Because news organizations don't want to calm your fears. Calming your fears means you won't obsess and glue yourself to the television or radio to get more information.
I'll take a guess as to why this is the case and I suspect I'm mostly, but not completely, right with my guess. The H5N1 strain of the bird flu is extremely deadly to humans because it is completely foreign and our immune systems have little defense against the disease. If H5N1 mutates such that it becomes more capable of infecting humans it will also pick up genes that are present in other diseases that affect humans. This means it will be less foreign and our immune systems will be able to better fight the infection. It also means that existing anti-viral drugs may have more effect at reducing the length of infection.
One is the H7N7 bird flu that in 2003 infected a number of people in the Netherlands. This virus usually caused pinkeye in infected people.
This is an important bit of information that will likely never show up on the mainstream media broadcasts or websites. The bird flu might not even cause the flu in humans. In the case of H7N7 it usually caused pinkeye. The next strain that infects humans might just cause a bad cold, strep throat, or some other lesser disease that may not be very lethal due to the nature of the infection. On the other hand, it could cause meningitis, pneumonia, or send your body into toxic shock.
"The case fatality of even highly virulent flu strains are a couple of deaths per 10,000 people." Longini told WebMD last December.
And I'm sure if you look at the recorded deaths you'll find that they are mainly among the old, young, or those with weakened immune systems. Among average age, healthy people I suspect the fatality rate is even lower.
But the first batch of this prototype vaccine likely will not be a good match for whatever bird flu virus eventually emerges to cause a pandemic. New batches of vaccine will have to be made. That process would take more than a year. Meanwhile, experts suspect that modern transportation would carry flu around the world.
This is true, but the problem is also that this won't work for the initial strike of the disease. A vaccine that takes more than a year to create for a version currently infecting people isn't very useful. Further, the bird flu would behave exactly as the flu does now. It mutates all the time. In a year it could mutate into a form that cannot infect humans or it could mutate into a new version that the newly created vaccine doesn't stop. The best they can do is what they do now, try and guess which strains will be prominent *next* year and make a vaccine that targets those strains.