"You can't contain this like we did with SARS. All we can do is mitigate."

[highplainsdem]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051022/BIRDFLU22/TPHealth/

BIRD FLU

'YOU CAN'T CONTAIN THIS LIKE WE DID WITH SARS. ALL WE CAN DO IS MITIGATE'

By PETER CHENEY

Saturday, October 22, 2005 Page M1


<snip>

"We've never seen anything like this before," says Allison McGeer, an infectious-disease expert who helped lead the battle against SARS, the disease that crippled Toronto in 2003, killing 44 people and sickening hundreds, including Dr. McGeer. But SARS was nothing compared with what will happen when the avian flu makes its way here, she says.

"This would be a far different situation," Dr. McGeer says. "We are talking about a catastrophe."

<snip>

The H5N1 virus is a far more dangerous opponent, says Dr. Basrur, with a higher mortality rate (more than 50 per cent of the people infected with avian flu have died, compared with less than 15 per cent of SARS patients) and a much higher degree of infectiousness. It won't be possible to contain the disease by isolating patients through enforced quarantine, as was done with SARS. The sheer speed and infectiousness of avian flu would make that an exercise in futility that could be compared to trying to bail out the Titanic as it sank. Worst of all, infected people are contagious long before their symptoms show. By the time officials realize that someone's sick, they may have infected numerous others.

<snip>

Everyone involved in the planning process warns that dealing with avian flu will be nothing like the battle against SARS. "You can't contain this like we did with SARS," Dr. McGeer says. "All we can do is mitigate."

<snip>

I think this is an important article. If Canadian infectious-disease experts who know when quarantine works say that quarantine won't work with avian flu, then people should be made aware of this so Bush can't get away with using the supposed effectiveness of a military-enforced quarantine as a pretext for martial law.

[Kagemusha]

1. They're talking about a future human flu, not a present avian flu.

Just so this is put in some perspective.

[kestrel91316]

2. The point is, flu in humans is too highly contagious, whether by

the inherent contagious nature of the virus, or because of humans' hygiene habits (or lack thereof) and high population density. When was the last time our normal flu got stopped by any measures taken by people to contain it. You know how easy THAT is to catch, right?

[rfkrfk]

3. Bird Flu Alert Level --> Orange, avoid air travel, or wear respirator n,t

[zann725]

4. And this "code Red" alert coincidentally comes from WHO? "Peter Cheney?

Family tree check, please!

While a "bird flu" pandemic might ultimately sweep the world, my deep, deep gut-level feeling IS that it will do so ONLY with the help of a strain coincidentally mutated by certain sources with "pharmaceutical ties"...who would benefit most from a large "thinning of the human herd."

Tin-foil or not, that continues to be my gut-level reaction. There is something truly "rotten in D.C." about this whole hype, and its timing in lieu of this Admin's pending "eviction" from the WH. ONLY with a crisis of this magnitude can they justify maintaining their control under the guise of military quarantine, "needed" (they say) to contain, not save the humans "potentially" effected victims of Democracy.

Horror of horrors. "1984" was a kid's book, compared to this!

[AuntiBush]

15. Agreed!

Rotten is right!

[wickerwoman]

24. Bird Flu is the new "Africanized" Killer Bees...

One of those vague, pending threats that never materialize but take up airspace from the problems that we could actually do something about.

And where does it come from? China? Think that's a coincidence?

I'm betting in Michael Moore's next movie, all the reporters talking about bird flu and going to come across as just as silly, alarmist and xenophobic as the reporters talking about "Africanized Killer Bees Swarming Across the Mexican Border" in F911.

[rainbow4321]

5. There was a very small snippit on the TV news aboout US "quarantine"

the other night...not even a full report, just a single sentence in a report. That a quaratine center has **already** been setup on the U.S's East Coast, think they said Virginia??? Not sure, but somewhere around there. Then they added there were plans to set up similar sites around the country. Haven't heard anything else since that.
Guess the media's newly grown balls have not matured enough for them to ask chimp's cronies "Hey, what's up with the quarantine centers and how the hell are you going to get flu victims there and keep them from leaving? Military guards? What if those with the flu have families, jobs etc..."

[Karmakaze]

6. Spot the propaganda...

So you have a certain viewpoint you want to push but the evidence doesnt stack up - no worries just make it up!

"with a higher mortality rate" - Ok the CURRENT strain of H5N1 has a higher mortality BUT if it mutates it could become FAR WEAKER. So lets not mention it could mutate.

"much higher degree of infectiousness" - Well the CURRENT strain of H5N1 is barely infectious at all - in fact human to human infection is so rare we dont even know its happened for sure. Ok so now we ASSUME it WILL mutate so that it becomes MORE infectious.

Notice the problem there? IF it mutates it could just as easily become LESS dangerous as MORE dangerous. But they dont mention THAT do they. In fact they don't even mention that this is merely a possibility, they assert it as though it has already happened.

Pure propaganda on a par with Bush's WMD lies.

[suziedemocrat]

13. I agree! This MAY be a real threat.

But so many people either gloss over or leave out the fact that the current virus only spreads from birds to humans and not human to human - it makes me a little suspicious. Maybe it would be a simple and probable change for the virus to start spreading from humans to humans. But since they don't seem to stress the fact that it needs to change to become the horrible threat they keep discussing - it makes me want to dismiss everything they say.

[AuntiBush]

16. Ok.

Thanks Karmakaze for calming my fears. <--- Fear-Factor "again" at play. Same tactics at play.

[goforit]

19. Kinda like West Nile?

[KittyWampus]

32. How often do viruses mutate into less lethal or infectious forms?

[Fovea]

7. Step 1

Stop all commercial airline traffic. Slower travel kept the plague from spreading through Europe a lot faster.

[goforit]

20. And mind you it will certainly help Global warming!!!

[CHIMO]

8. For A Good

Overall picture, I found this interview on the topic very good.

Mike Davis on The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu

AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Mike Davis, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, renown urban theorist, social historian and author of six books, including City of Quartz. His latest book, which has just come out, is called The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. I spent an hour yesterday interviewing Mike Davis in San Diego. He began by talking about the central thesis of his book.

MIKE DAVIS: The principal concern in my book is that most of the world, the poor countries of the world, have absolutely no protection against the threat that most public health authorities consider to be an inevitable threat of an avian influenza pandemic. They don't have access to anti-virals. They don't have access to vaccine. Indeed, they don’t -- many of them don't even have the means of surveillance to detect the flu or monitor its progress once the flu pandemic were to reach the southern hemisphere, the poorest countries in South Asia or southern Africa. And right now probably the most worrying thing that's happening in the world is not that birds with avian flu have reached the doorstep of Europe, but the very same birds will imminently carry avian flu probably to East Africa and the Nile Valley and almost certainly into South Asia. And I think what we need to be most worried about is the combustion of avian flu, with its potential to become a human pandemic, with urban poverty.

AMY GOODMAN: Mike Davis, can we take a step back and explain what avian flu is?

MIKE DAVIS: Of course, because a lot of people would ask and ask with good reason, ‘Why should we be so worried about a disease which has infected under 200 people, killed less than 100, when we live in a world where millions of people die every year of malaria, tuberculosis, H.I.V.?’ And the answer, of course, is the experience of humanity in 24 weeks in 1918, when between 40 and 100 million people died of a pandemic influenza. This is the greatest mortality event in human history. There have been two subsequent pandemics in 1957 and 1968. Neither were anywhere as deadly as 1918. And then, suddenly in 1997 this new flu emerged in Hong Kong, and scientists discovered to their horror that rather than being incubated in a pig or a human being who had been co-infected with several strains of the flu, it had jumped directly from birds to humans with a wild and extraordinary virulence that’s now -- probably half the people who we know have had this flu, die of it. And the concern is that if this flu were to acquire the few mutations that it would need to become transmissible in the same ways an ordinary flu or winter cold, and if it preserved any portion of its current virulence, it could be a catastrophe on a global scale comparable to 1918.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/19/1332209

It covers a lot of ground.

[oblivious]

9. I don't understand how they can say half the people die from it.

How can they possibly know how many people have had the virus. It may be in the millions for all we know, with the rest not showing any symptoms or treating it as regular flu and not seeking medical attention. So all they may have seen are the sickest ones (a tiny number), of whom 50 per cent died.

With Sars, for example, a few people got sick, but I vaguely remember a Canadian study of air travellers showing that a large portion of air travellers tested showed having had some exposure to the virus but showed no symptoms whatsoever.

I'm confused.

[nashville_brook]

10. anyone remember the stephen king short story about A-6?

or the Andromeda Strain?

how ironic is it that we might survive Bush only to suffer devastation from the FLU.

[Fly by night]

11. At least one DUer needs to lay off the kool-aid.

This story is complete bullshit. The only people who have contracted bird flu have had direct contact with infected birds' blood. This is not an air-borne pathogen.

Hell, why doesn't the Smirking Chimp administration start an AIDS scare based on the same premises -- that IF HIV mutates, becomes an airborne pathogen and starts taking days instead of years to kill, THEN we'll have a serious worldwide pandemic. If that rumor started, my guess would be that Rummy or the Cat Killer would have stock in anti-retroviral meds also.

If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.

Come on, DUers, how many threads do we have to start that document what an unmitigated pile of horse-shit this avian flu bug(aboo) is before our own Chicken Littles actually read them.

[AuntiBush]

17. Thanks, Fly by Night

It caught me off guard. Suffering from Fitzmas-itis right now.

[goforit]

21. True, it is not airbourne......Yes it so easy to be hysterical.

[Fly by night]

12. Our local TV station just ran another "bird flu" story. Here's my response

As I understand, the only people who have contracted bird flu so far have had direct contact with massive quantities of infected birds' blood because they work in the Asian poultry industry. This is not an air-borne pathogen. It is, however, just the latest attempt to distract us from a US government that is running amok, in Iraq, in Syria, in Venezuela and our own country.

If they become cynical enough, the Bush administration might start an AIDS scare based on the same premises -- that IF HIV mutates, becomes an airborne pathogen and starts taking days instead of years to kill, THEN we'll have a serious worldwide pandemic. If that rumor starts, my guess would be that someone in the administration would stand to benefit financially from the scare, as Rumsfeld is now profitting handsomely from our massive purchases of Tamiflu (to fight "killer flu") recently.

This "bird flu" nonsense reminds me of the old saw: If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, ... if we had eggs.

I would like to suggest that Channel 4 take the time to interview Dr. Bill Schaffner, Chairman of the Infectious Diseases program at Vanderbilt University Medical School before continuing to repeat these mindless (and unnecessarily troubling) non-stories about mutated flus that haven't. I have copied Dr. Schaffner on this email to facilitate your getting in touch with him.

While you're at it, you might also want to check on a very troubling (and true) story you haven't covered -- the fact that multiple biohazard sensors in our nation's capital detected the presence of aerosolized tuleremia on the day of the recent large-scale anti-war protest there. (This story was covered in the Washington Post. I would be happy to provide a link, if you are interested.) Funny that a biological warfare agent just happened to be detected in numerous places where the anti-war crowds were gathered -- an agent that has not been detected before or since that protest.

Maybe that helps explain why so few corporate media were present to cover the largest protest in DC in decades. Or maybe not. In this very unstable time, we need the Fourth Estate to do its job as it has not done for some time. Or maybe you'll want to re-run the recent story about how feeding prostitutes is illegal in Nashville -- I'm sure your reporter, James Allen, would like to see his face on the air at least one more time after having to resign in embarrassment over falling for that story (which was published as a joke -- and identified as such -- in the Nashville Scene.)

I do hope you contact Dr. Schaffner soon. Thank you.

Fly by night

[highplainsdem]

23. Some news stories/transcripts quoting Dr. Schaffner:

I was curious about what he had to say on this matter, since you seem to think he believes there's no reason to be concerned about bird flu.

http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/index.cfm?section_id=9&screen=news&news_id=45206

Tennessee preps for bird flu
By M.B. Owens, [e-mail]
October 17, 2005

With concern growing every day about the spread of the bird flu overseas, there is the question regarding what would happen if it or some other similar avian influenza went the next step and became a pandemic — a worldwide epidemic.

<snip>

Just last week, European officials discovered that the deadly H5N1 strain had made the jump from Asia into the outskirts of Europe. Though the virus at this point primarily affects birds and humans in direct contact with those birds, experts fear a mutation could make humans more susceptible to the disease by the transmission of the virus from person to person, thus possibly creating a worldwide pandemic.

“It is just a matter of time before happens,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Just like with hurricanes, the big one eventually comes, Schaffner said.

<snip>

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9672257/

MSNBC
The Abrams Report

Under a flu outbreak, will U.S. quarantine?
Two experts discuss the possibility of entire towns being sealed off

TRANSCRIPT
Updated: 10:56 a.m. ET Oct. 12, 2005

<snip>

DAN ABRAMS: All right, Dr. Schaffner, let me start with you. Look, you are hearing the president there talking about the real possibility of a quarantine; you're saying it won't work?

DR. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY: Well I think it'll be very hard to make it work. Certainly initially we want to diagnose the imported cases very quickly and institute a voluntary quarantine of their contacts. But we are going to get repeated introductions and influenza spreads much more rapidly than SARS. So the notion of kind of walling off a neighborhood or something like that is unlikely to be very, very effective. It really hasn't worked for respiratory disease like influenza in the past.

<snip>

ABRAMS: Michael Leavitt, the health and human services secretary said this: "It will require school districts to have a plan on how they will deal with school opening and closing. It will require the mayor to have a plan on whether or not they're going to ask the theaters not to have a movie, et cetera."

You wouldn't disagree with that, Dr. Schaffner, would you?

SCHAFFNER: Oh absolutely not. In fact we encourage it. There is going to be a federal plan, there are state plans, local plans. Indeed my own institution has a plan and we have drilled it further, and so, I think it will be very important to put the emphasis on local public health and local security folks, the local municipalities to control the introductions. I think the military can be terrifically helpful in moving vaccine and moving drugs from point to point around the country. I don't think they are going to be terribly useful going door to door. There are just not going to be enough of them.

<snipping more paragraphs, including Schaffner's final statement that "if we have a pandemic, it will have a major impact on our society" -- that was in response to another doctor saying that there's "no doubt" thousands of Americans will die if we have a bird flu pandemic>

http://www.vanderbilthustler.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/10/07/4345fbc3af106


Bird flu threat addressed
Professor comments on Bush's proposed plans.


by Rachel Stevens
October 07, 2005

<snipping paragraphs where Schaffner says that using the military to enforce quarantines in a bird flu pandemic won't work>

The fear is that H5N1 will mutate to spread easily, a catastrophe because it is so different from annual flu strains that people have no natural immunity.

Schaffner said that concern for a large-scale bird flu pandemic is legitimate due to the current situation in Asia.

<snip>

Emphasizing the need for the country to be prepared, Schaffner compared the bird flu to recent hurricane disasters.

“Like the hurricane, we’re not sure when it’s coming or how fierce it will be, but we know it’s coming,” he said.

<snip>

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,161740,00.html

Bird Flu May Pose Threat to Humans
Thursday, July 07, 2005

<snip>

If a bird flu virus infects a person who also carries a human flu virus, the result could be a hybrid bug that passes easily from person to person. "That's the spark that sets off the forest fire of a global pandemic, and that's what everyone is worried about," said flu expert Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University.

The flu outbreak in migratory birds at Qinghai Lake "makes us ever more anxious this event could occur" because it suggests the virus could become more widespread, said Schaffner, who was not involved in the new studies.

<snip>

It seems to me that Schaffner is in agreement with the Canadian experts quoted in the story I quoted in the OP here. Including where he emphasizes that an enforced quarantine WON'T work -- which, again, is the main point of my posting the OP, since what these experts are saying directly contradicts what Bush has been saying about using the military to enforce quarantines. That's the fact I hope will get widespread attention -- that the infectious disease experts are saying quarantines won't help if there's a bird flu pandemic. Bush has no legitimate excuse to be planning for quarantines. This is something that should be brought up every single time the possibility of using the military for quarantines is mentioned.

[Fly by night]

29. Re: "if we have a pandemic, it will have a major impact on our society"

If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs ... if we had eggs.

IF HIV mutates, becomes an airborne pathogen and starts taking days instead of years to kill, THEN we'll have a serious worldwide pandemic.

I would recommend that you watch Keith Olbermann's recent "Countdown" story about the link between the timing of the Bushies' "terror alerts/pandemic warnings" with the revelations of new scandals within their culture of corruption.

Even Schaffner's own words (which you sampled selectively) reemphasizes that everything we are now postulating about a pandemic of bird flu is theoretical, not real. If you're a starling, you have something to be worried about. If you're a human, I would worry about getting rid of the unelected junta that has taken control of this country. Now that is a REAL risk to your health, and that of your children's children.

[highplainsdem]

30. NO ONE has said that we already have a pandemic. All the scientists

I quoted are saying is that it's a real threat. Schaffner said that it's coming, that it's just a matter of time, and that we need to prepare. That's a rational attitude, in my opinion.

You wrote:

I would recommend that you watch Keith Olbermann's recent "Countdown" story about the link between the timing of the Bushies' "terror alerts/pandemic warnings" with the revelations of new scandals within their culture of corruption.


I was the first person in the GD forum to post about that show when Keith first mentioned it, the Monday before it was broadcast (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=5027594 ). I'd also posted about his show on the coincidental timing of the terror alert the previous week, and I posted another topic about Craig Crawford's column on this subject the next day, several days before the special report. And I saw the show.

And by the way, I don't recall ANY of the specific terror alerts Keith mentioned being "pandemic warnings." You're blurring this.

I'm not a Kool-aid drinker, as you rudely suggested in another post. I'm very skeptical of BushCo.

And as aware as I am of the Bush administration's fondness for fake terror alerts, I still believe the multinational concern we're hearing about, concern expressed by doctors and scientists as well as goverment officials about the threat a bird flu pandemic could pose, is something entirely different and worth paying attention to.

On the other hand, as I've been emphasizing here, Bush's talk of using the military to enforce quarantines is completely at odds with what the experts say will work. Obviously there are political motives there.

[Fly by night]

33. I'm very skeptical of BushCo....completely at odds with ... the experts ..

There are lots of things that MIGHT happen that we should be concerned about. Schaffner, for one, is concerned about a future flu pandemic like the 1918 pandemic (which is realistic), not as much that the bird flu will mutate into an airborne person-to-person pathogen in the near future.

If we're looking for things to worry about, I am very concerned about the prospects for another hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast before Thanksgiving. I am also concerned about the thawing of the permafrost in the tundra releasing volumes of methane sufficient to kill millions of people. Such releases of methane have killed thousands already and many climatologists have raised this concern, which requires nothing more than a short-term continuation of the global waqrming path we are on. It does not require something that has not yet happened with the bird flu (significant cross-species mutation of the virus.) There's lots we can worry about, and the solution to many of them is removing an unelected (and ignorant) despot from control of our country and our planet.

We've both made our points and my guess is that we are sticking to them. (Likewise, my point has been echoed by others on this thread.) Sorry to have offended you with my "kool-aid" comment, but some degree of skepticism is warranted these days when we keep getting from this White House instructions to "Look, look over there, quick. Be afraid, be very afraid. Just don't hold us accountable.") Peace out.

[AuntiBush]

14. This Stinks to High Heaven

Don't like it one bit! Call me a conspiracy nut, whatever, it came out of nowhere, and is spreading rapidly by the day.

Are they trying to get rid of us?

[are_we_united_yet]

22. It has

actually been around since 1997 I believe.

And I agree (though I'm no Biochemist/Biologist), the hype seem disproportionate to the risk though the risk is something to be concerned about.

[goforit]

18. Start taking any vitamins/juices you can for the battle now DUrs!!!

[Maraya1969]

25. Hygiene is very important

[smirkymonkey]

26. Does that mean I have to stop sleeping with my pet pigeons?

Maybe I should change the sheets more often. :shrug:

[Maraya1969]

34. I kiss my bird all the time. But he doesn't have contact with other

birds. He does take a bath everyday but he is not toilet trained. Oh well, I love the little shit.

[Mike03]

27. Dr. Bill Wattenberg

said this about "quarantines" last night as a guest on the John Rothmann Program (KGO, San Francisco). I can't stand Wattenberg's politics but he is not an alarmist and is known for laughing off things that other people worry about--like Y2K, which he predicted would be a total non-event. He did not say people should panic but should be prepared, and not rely on things like Tamiflu or the hope of a vaccine. He said the way to survive a pandemic is to lay in enough food and water so that you can simply avoid going out during the period in which the flu sweeps through your community. He also said don't expect there to be utilities or services. For what it's worth. He's a blowhard, but on this issue he's got my strict attention.

The other thing to keep in mind is that this administration is not the only bunch to be concerned--if anything, they are late to the dinner table. The other industrialized nations have been on this for a long time. Even if we can't trust * , I personally do care about this because of the state of alarm in other nations

[leesa]

28. Booga. Booga.

[cassiepriam]

31. I am confident Bush will handle this as well as he did Katrina.

Maybe Brownie can head up the response team.

[mcscajun]

35. You don't have to believe Bush to believe there's a plausible threat

from avian flu.

While it is true that BushCo never found a fear they wouldn't (or couldn't) exploit (it's like flies to shit), the threat of avian flu turning into a pandemic is, unfortunately, quite real.

http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Security&loid=8.0.213996080&par=0

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=31362

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article317481.ece

http://www.who.int/csr/disease/influenza/pandemic/en/#virus

This is why Bush is covering his ass now. I'm not going to stick my head in the sand just because Bush is screaming like Chicken Little for his own self-serving and bizarre purposes.

Can anyone guarantee an outbreak will mimic the 1918 Influenza Pandemic? No. You want guarantees, there are none either way.

Can scientists predict that an outbreak would mimic 1918? Yes. The predictive models so far indicate that if this strain rises to pandemic level, we'll be looking at something more like 1918 than 1957 or 1968. No one will have immunity to it, existing flu vaccines will not prevent infection, and Tamiflu (ordinarily used to ameliorate symptoms and shorten the span of a bout of influenza) is being partially discounted for those who contract the avian flu. The H5N1 strain is showing resistance to Tamiflu.There's some talk about using Relenza, another antiviral that's shown some efficacy against H5N1.

The other problems are an increase in flu drug-resistance in general, plus the rise of many antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

All that is exactly the concern driving the World Health Organization (WHO) and responsible governments around the world. Of the 100 people who have contracted avian flu in the past two years, 64 have died. That's an incredible mortality rate. If the pandemic hits, the WHO is talking about possible death figures of between 5 million and 150 million people. What passes for "concern" shown by * is another matter; as usual, George "arrives late for the party and shits on the dining room table"; in this case, by using the Avian flu as fuel for one of his "be afraid, be very afraid...and only I can save you" speeches.

Another Duer recently spoke about Bush being the little boy who cried 'wolf'; and they're right. While he's been busy scaring those he can, those of us he can't scare have been growing more and more cynical about what comes out of his mouth, to the point that even if he managed one day to state an absolute truth that we already knew to be true, we'd have to check with our sources before we'd truly accept it. This is the ultimate danger of the man. (I use the term "man" loosely, and with apologies to male humans everywhere.)

[gulfcoastliberal]

36. Stock a survival kit w/min 10 days course of tamiflu per person and

if you can afford it a 10 day course of relenza, too. Get it by any means possible.