Canadian disease experts say quarantines WON't WORK with bird flu

[highplainsdem]

I've already posted about this article in LBN, but want to post it here, too. If the Canadian experts are right about this and quarantines would be useless -- this article says the speed and infectiousness of the bird flu virus would make quarantines comparable to trying to bail out the Titanic as it sank -- then Bush really has no valid excuse at all for wanting to use the military to enforce quarantines.

These are experts who know, from personal experience with SARS, when quarantines WILL work, so I believe their opinion that quarantines WON'T work with avian flu is particularly important to consider.

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>

[iamjoy]

1. I'm No Expert - But I Knew This

I knew quarantines wouldn't work because with the flu most people are infectious before they are symptomatic.

And with air travel being so popular, the virus would spread across the country, mostly in medium to large cities before we knew it.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Your signature is a great catch. Five years old and so true

"If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us" Governor George W. Bush (10/16/00)

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Not knowing is the worst part

H5N1 Bird Flu could well be the worst thing to have ever hit the human race. Or it could be a dud.

It still hasn't become fully transmissible from birds to humans, let alone fully transmissible human-to-human. That's going to be the key. Flus like this are typically contagious, but that still leaves a big range of contagiousness.

Pathogenicity -- how sick it makes the patients -- is also not yet "set". It's been averaging about a 50% kill rate, but the first patients had more like a 90% rate. The Spanish Flu of 1918 had "only" a 5% mortality rate, and it was a disaster. These parameters of the disease will only be expressed through the natural selection of the most viable organism strains. Viability doesn't ensure how pathogenic a disease organism is, fortunately. But it is still likely to be a nasty flu.

Military quarantines? When half of the military come down with the flu from rounding up its initial patients, they might be a good idea. From what I've heard, particle masks are as good as anything else.

From the standpoint of the public, the best antidote to fear is education. It will also be the best means of mitigating or preventing the spread of the flu.

--p!

[kestrel91316]

5. If a virus kills TOO quickly, it kills the host before it can

spread the virus to enough others to propagate the epidemic through the general population. So with increased spread p2p, we can expect mortality to decrease somewhat from 50%.

What that "somewhat" will be is open to speculation, and we cannot accurately predict it.

Another thing to remember is that as more and more people become seriously ill in a hypothetical pandemic with significant mortality, the health care system will rapidly become overwhelmed, and this will increase mortality from secondary factors.

[IChing]

4. I didn't know that birds fly around the planet also

So, if infected they could fly out of the quarantine.

gee logic and science what a pair of strange birds.

[progressivebydesign]

6. Another expert said that a hard quarantine was the WORST idea.

This person, wish I could find the article, said that the types of quarantines Bush was hinting at was wrong. What flu viruses need to do is actually circulate and they become less virulent as they spread. Some people will carry the bug but be asymptomatic, as others here have pointed out, and with every case the virus weakens a bit traditionally as people with mild cases develop antibodies against it.

The reason for the high mortality rate, to me, seems pretty obvious. 1) it is a pure strain going from animal directly to human 2) do you all honestly think that the people who were killing their own birds to eat in villages in Asia had access to good health care?

I'm not saying this might not be catastrophic, but 1) it has not mutated to a human-to-human disease. 2) our health care technology and delivery is a helluva lot better than in 1918 the date people point to in panic (people in 1918 died from dental infections and childbirth regularly). 3) Even the experts are not in agreement on the danger and scope of this. It's unknown. It could very well be something along the lines of the Hong Kong flu which did kill people, but did not end the world, as some people are trying to push.

[no_hypocrisy]

7. That won't stop the quarantine. He'll still go ahead with martial law.