Bush Plan Shows U.S. Is Not Ready for Deadly Flu

LOL, dam ole jsp98m3 has got the right idea :) . Think I will go down to hooters or Sammies :cool: in B'ham and start looking for the right one. :p
 
Best way to protect from bird flu is 1) don't let the chickens and ducks nest under your bed 2) don't thicken your soup with bird doo doo 3) wash your hands every week or two whether you need it or not 4) don't eat birds that drop dead in your front yard.
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Nice... :mad: :mad:

Thanks a lot, I used to like you, now youve spoiled my family Thanksgiving reunion. I really wasnt into cleanin out under the bed, we alwsy run out of cornstarch, my mom screams when I turn the hose on her (heck shes 70) and if I cant just pick up the dead ones, Ill have to buy a fresh one.

Meek you are so off my buddy list!

WilddangAlaska
 
Mike,

Most people don't die of the flu (the virus) but the bacteria infections afterwards, the complications of the virus destroying or weakening the bodies immune system.

We also have used and abused the anti-virual medications that we've created. Viruses are a very unique living organism, as it changes itself to become immune to whatever medications that we create as well as change to ensure it's survival. It's one of the most fantastic life forms on this earth because it changes to survive and can take down even the mightyist(sp) life form, man.

Life is dangerous
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Ya think :D. There is only one absolute in life, and that is death.

Wayne
 
In this particular case (avian), it is influenza that does the killing. The infection is extremely virulent and fast acting. The lungs fill with fluid and the coughing and racking cause blood vessels to rupture and give a telltale bloody frothy discharge in the phlegm.

People have been known to drown in their own fluids in 1-2 days. Parasitic bacteria are a problem in weaker flus, we are all generally exposed to and lead to ear and sinus infections, etc. In this case, you will likely drown in your own juices if you get it and don't fight it off. Thankfully only about 20% of the people are dieing.

If you travel to SE Asia, eat only food that is completely cooked. The Chinese are kind of goofy on duck and chicken anyway. They like to dissect a chicken down the middle then take a cleaver and just whack the living sh*t out of the thing, right through the bones and cut it into chicken "fingers". They stick the whole thing in their mouth and spit the bones and gristle out. Unnerving for the first couple of years...... And this in spite of being fanatics for KFC that divides the chicken up into out "normal" pieces.

Did I mention they don't tend to cook duck or chicken adequately and don't clean preparation surfaces adequately nor their utinsels?

Very freaking odd. Because they are very, very, very aware of disease and wash their hands often and thoroughly.

Their bathrooms would make an ebola outbreak look tidy.

A nice people with lots of contradictions.
 
JSP,

Thank you for the correction. I haven't studied the Avian strain and I do appreciate being corrected :).

Many places that you visit (countries) don't have the same rules about food prep that we have in the US. My only example being those in Mexico when we went on the weekends to get drunk cheap. We always ate at this one place that couldn't pass US standards even if they tried. Their bathrooms consisted of a trough and plugged up toliets (if you had to go #2, you were in trouble) and this was even in the "fancy" nightclubs. You saved #2 until the shops opened, they were generally cleaner or you went to the border patrol station.

So the spread of disease from those countries is highly possible and with our open borders especially to the south of us, the possibility of the Avian flu coming over us like a wildfire is great.

Because of the vaccine shortage of last year, I have done a couple of things to help protect myself and others.

1. I wash my hands about 5+ times a day.

2. I don't shake hands with anyone. I know that some would be offended and some have, but then I just say that it's against my religion, this seems to help.

I haven't resorted to face masks yet, but I do tend to keep a good distance from people with whom I have to speak. For those people that like to be right there in your face and move with you as you move back, just be honest with them, would you please stand at least 5 feet from me, no offense but I can hear you without you being in my face.

As Rich said, it's up to us to protect ourselves and own. The world is a dangerous place and disease is a fact of life. Just add space between you and them (people) and you don't have to shake hands, there is nothing that says that you must do so and if they get offended, oh well.

Wayne
 
I was sick the first three times I went to China. All food related. I had it coming out of both ends. The second time, I had to be taken to the hospital. Good news! The Chinese are adept at treating it. I wonder why.

Better news. A doctor exam, blood work, 2 liters of saline/glucose by IV, medication, and a chest X-Ray (Tuberculosis is common) all came to a grand total of the equivalent of $28.72 in US dollars. Doctors make an average of less than $2 per hour.

Now after 50 trips or more with multi-country stops in China, Taiwan, S. Korea, Philipinnes, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam I seem to be immune to anything they can throw at me. I've probably spent well over 1 year of ground time in China. I own an apartment there. Since I also live in San Diego I also seem to be able to eat at Tijuana street vendors with no issues either.

My only food related problems now are heart burn from too-rich food.
 
"Most people don't die of the flu (the virus) but the bacteria infections afterwards, the complications of the virus destroying or weakening the bodies immune system."

You have some back up on that?

It's always been my understanding that the primary cause of death due to flu is either dehydration.
 
Article from the Wall Street Journal

From the WSJ last week...

AVIAN FLU: PREVENTING A PANDEMIC

Avian Virus Caused
The 1918 Pandemic,
New Studies Show

By BETSY MCKAY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 6, 2005; Page B1

There is a new reason to worry that the avian-flu virus could erupt with little notice into a global pandemic that kills millions of people: It happened already.

After nearly a decade of research, teams of scientists said yesterday that they had re-created the historic influenza virus that by some estimates killed 50 million people world-wide in 1918 and 1919. The scientists concluded that the virus originated as an avian bug and then adapted and spread in humans by undergoing much simpler changes than many experts had previously thought were needed for a pandemic.

Some mutations of the 1918 virus have been detected in the current avian-flu virus, suggesting the bug "might be going down a similar path that led to 1918," says Jeffery Taubenberger, chief of molecular pathology at the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, who led one of two studies.

The studies, published yesterday in the journals Nature and Science by researchers from the Armed Forces institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine, suggest that a bird-flu pandemic could erupt in more ways than previously thought -- and could be as lethal as its predecessor. Unlocking the mysteries of the 1918 bug "has taken on new urgency," says Dr. Taubenberger.

The findings could also help researchers hone their efforts to develop vaccines and treatments for avian flu by pinpointing which pieces of the virus made it so virulent. CDC researchers narrowed in on a gene in the re-created 1918 virus that allows the bug to attach itself to cells and multiply. With the gene, the virus was highly lethal; it lost its virulence when researchers removed it. Those findings and the genetic makeup of the virus will now be publicly available. The U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity endorsed making the genetic information public to promote development of tests, treatments and preventive measures, the CDC said.

Deciphering clues from the bug has never been so urgent. Avian flu continues to spread in poultry flocks and is jumping to humans with increasing frequency. The lethal strain has claimed 60 lives in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia since late 2003.

Most of those cases occurred in people who had direct contact with infected poultry. But health officials are concerned that the virus could mutate and begin spreading between humans, and that when it does, it will rapidly sweep the globe. On Tuesday, President Bush unexpectedly announced he would consider using the military to enforce quarantines in the event of an outbreak in the U.S.

"If 1918 happened like this, why couldn't or shouldn't 2005 happen like this?" says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, who has warned in several papers that the H5N1 virus could morph into a 1918-like pandemic. "These viruses are kissing cousins."

Precisely why and how the 1918 virus killed so many people has been considered one of the greatest remaining secrets of virology, and the team led by Dr. Taubenberger has spent the past nine years trying to decipher it. According to historical accounts, suffocating victims turned deep shades of blue; many hemorrhaged, bleeding even from their eyes and ears. More people died during the pandemic than in World War I. Unlike with most flu epidemics, most of the casualties were otherwise-healthy people ranging in age from 15 to 34.

But studying the virus was nearly impossible until recently because virus samples weren't preserved at the time. In February 2004, Dr. Taubenberger and his team published sequences for five of the 1918 virus's eight genes, using material preserved from the lungs of U.S. soldiers killed by the flu, as well as the body of an Inuit woman exhumed in 1997 from the Alaskan permafrost. The team completed sequencing the remaining three genes, and their work is published this week in Nature.

They concluded that the pandemic was caused by an avian virus. The scientists also discovered 10 changes in amino acids that distinguish the 1918 virus from avian bugs, suggesting that the virus mutated on its own, without mixing with another virus, to become transmissible in humans, they say. The current avian bug has made five of the 10 changes found in the 1918 virus. (Emphasis added by DM.)

In the study in Science, researchers from the CDC, Mount Sinai, and others then re-created the virus using a process known as reverse genetics to determine which of its features made it so lethal. The virus was then injected into embryonated chicken eggs and mice and was found to be "exceptionally virulent," says Terrence Tumpey, a senior scientist at the CDC who led the effort. The team also found that the bug had an unusual ability to penetrate cells that flu viruses don't usually reach deep in the lungs, providing some clues as to why the disease's symptoms were so severe.

While the research advances scientists' understanding of the avian-flu threat, it raises questions about how to keep the virus from escaping from a laboratory or falling into the hands of bioterrorists. Not only has the virus now been created in a CDC lab, but its genetic information will be published in GenBank, a public genetic-sequence database maintained by the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Tumpey says the experiments were approved by two CDC committees with internal and external experts, and were conducted under strict safety and security standards inside a CDC lab.

The 1918 flu virus would be unlikely to cause a pandemic today, Dr. Tumpey says. This virus is in the same family as the seasonal influenza viruses that have been circulating for several years. Many people today have some immune protection from these types of viruses because they have been exposed to the seasonal flu viruses either through natural infection or vaccination.

The researchers say they are pushing ahead with their work. Dr. Tumpey says he and his colleagues plan to analyze the remaining four of the eight genes whose virulence they didn't study, with the hope of identifying more virus proteins. Dr. Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute says his team's goal is to create a "checklist" that would help researchers tracking viruses determine which mutations are important and which are minor.

"We hope to work out in the future the rules of how this happens, how a bird virus becomes a human virus," he says.
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Once an epidemic starts we can identify the exact virus and start making vaccines. Shortly after the epidemic starts it will go pandemic, especially in this age of travel and population masses. About 10 to 12 months after we start making the vaccine, we can vaccinate around 10% of the US Population. Of course by then the pandemic will have killed tens of millions worldwide, and possibly millions here in the US. The 1918 virus killed nearly a million in the US and it was a much less traveled and densely populated country at that time.

Basically we can not protect against a viral flu pandemic, because it takes so long to make the vaccine. Our best bet right now is to be working on improved vaccine manufacturing processes.
 
Butch-
If viral vaccines were simple a matter of manpower and manufacturing, HIV would have been conquered easily in the 90's. Viruses simply don't lend themselves to easy vaccine answers.

Look to more personal forms of prevention. .gov doesn't have a very good track record of protecting its own.....witness the Anthrax scare a few years ago. Vaccines are available, but not to the general public.
Rich
 
Rich, good points. When it comes down to a pandemic we are going to be left twisting in the wind.

There is promising new work being done on creating vaccines faster. Flu vaccine is a bit easier to work on than HIV. The way it is done now is to take a sample of the flu virus and to physically inject it into a chicken egg and wait for development, then they have the vaccine. The new research could improve on the time to vaccine, which is the main thing we need right now.

The way annual flu vaccines are created now is to develop a vaccine that includes three anticipated varieties of flu, which is a guess that may or may not be correct, and if incorrect it is too late to do anything about it. If we had an "instant" vaccine production system we could get around the guess work part. I doubt if there will be an instant system soon, but certainly we can hope for weeks instead of months.

Profit is the main motivation for this new implementation. As it stands now the three or four manufacturers realize that if the guess is wrong they could end up with millions of dollars of worthless vaccine, and go out of business. Narrowing the time frame could get rid of that potential and make the business lucrative, which helps us all in the end. Gotta love market forces....
 
We effective got out of the vaccine bidness in 1993 when Hillary sponsored a bill to make vaccination affordable to family with chilren. "It for the children so we can do any damned marxist scheme we want." Congress went along and effectively capped the prices US manufacturers could get. Simultaneously congress did not protect vaccine manufacturers from liability suits. In classic market adaptations vaccine companies said, "Prices forced down, no reduction in the liability risk. Ergo, no profit. Screw vaccines, we'll produce botox." Of the 7 companies making vaccines 5 exsted the business. So in order to get cheap vaccines, the US buys it from overseas. . . . .Great Britain for example.

Guess what kiddies. Even if they had a handle on the structure of the lethal form of the virus (they don't) it would take time to design it and then make it. All the while people are dying. Oh, and what do you think will happen in GB when their share of the pandemic starts? I'll bet vaccination production will be nationalized making far less available for the US to purchase.

Give thanks to congressional marxists for our inability to produce sufficient vaccines in the US even if we knew what to make.

I listened to a program today doing a round up of known facts about bird flu. Human victims are showing up all over the world. Bird victims are more plentiful. If the variant that goes lethal acts like other viri, symptoms show up 10-14 days after exposure during which time the subject is contagious. During that time the person carrying the viri worst case will infect (not to be confused with exposed to) 30 people. Figure the geometric progression of 30:1.

Bottom line, we here on liberty oriented fora can smugly agree it all about scaring the sheep. The reality of the situation is we are looking at a major problem for which precious little can be done but for which there are extreme societal and political consequences. We live in a society that is not wanting to hear from it elected officials, "Hey, there's nothing we can do." So elected officials will make lots of fuss and feathers about doing something knowing in the final analysis it will be ineffective.

Now, back to conspiracy thought. If Bush can whistle up a hurricane and drive that sucker right into the the heart of the democrat plantation in Louisiana, a pandemic ought to be a piece of cake. So we know he can create disasters therefore we know its all to scare the sheep into surrendering their freedoms. Sounds asinine to me. :rolleyes:
 
Yep.
And limiting public contact. Politely declining a handshake, hug or kiss. Stuff like that.

A private plane, 6 months of food and fuel for two, a secluded mountain hideout with high speed internet by satellite and a good lady are also a real plus.
RichigotmineLucibella
 
"Dont got the plane but got the food and the lady, and got a lot of places for the secluded hideout up here..."


Don't count on that to protect you.

During the 1918-19 epidemic, remote villages in Alaska and Canada, even ones so remote that they didn't receive visitors during the flu duration period, were hit. In some villages mortality rates ran into the 80% range.
 
During the 1918-19 epidemic, remote villages in Alaska and Canada, even ones so remote that they didn't receive visitors during the flu duration period, were hit. In some villages mortality rates ran into the 80% range.
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All correct Mike, except the part about no visitors....flu MUST be transmitted by a human vector

WildnomeAlaska
 
Anyone else want to go ahead and start planning a class-action lawsuit for Bush's incompetence in dealing with the avian flu? It's THE MAN'S fault that we had to endure this, so we should get paid for it, right?
 
If the flu can be transmitted to humans from birds, and from birds to birds, then those remote villages may be visited by birds. Alfred Hitchcock anyone?
 
Wash dem Hands ! The Russians in Afghanistan didnt have a good hygiene program and suffered numerous disiease casualties from poor hygiene. I carried the hand santizer due to contact with those locals...

When I was deployed overseas I carried a bottle of hand sanitizer with me and washed my hands often. I had to eat off the base sometimes as I had to deal with local officials and contrators, but we used good resteraunts and ordered the meat well done. One SSG ate something from a street vendor and had to wear adult diapers for about two weeks...lol
 
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