Remember H5N1? You know, the bird flu that was going to wipe out civilization three years ago? How the dead were going to be stacked like firewood in the streets? How the Western World was totally unprepared for the utter devastation that would be caused when 90% of us died from it in a matter of days? How we needed to DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW, which the Bush Administration interpreted to mean stock up on a flu vaccine made by a company Donald Rumsfeld owned stock in, so at least ONE Republican would be sure to profit while all the rest of them were keeling over? OH THE HUMANITY!!!
Well, there are a LOT of dead birds…millions of them in fact. Wild birds killed by the flu throughout Asia and Europe, then millions more poultry livestock deliberately slaughtered in Southeast Asia, where the virus first emerged. But there really aren’t many dead people. The much-ballyhooed bird-to-human transmission of the disease simply hasn’t occurred.
There have been a total of about 340 human cases (and 212 deaths) since the virus first emerged, almost all of them limited to the parts of Southeast Asia where the poultry have been most affected and the people live among the livestock. Only one human-to-human transmission has been documented between a father and son with close contact to the birds. Now, the head of the World Organization For Animal Health has gone on record saying “oopsie”. The H5N1 virus is “extremely stable” and shows very little likelihood of interspecies transmission.
The panicmongers haven’t been too quick to pick this up, having moved on to other things that will surely cause the collapse of human civilization any second now. We still have the mortgage crisis, after all. (Just don’t tell them that the “vast number of foreclosures” is really only about 4% of American homeowners) And the rising sea levels. And killer meteorites. Something is BOUND to pay off.
Thanks for posting this with links. I was one of those who said “we’re all gonna die.”
Boy do I feel stupid – thanks to the gummit. Is there anything coming out of D.C. that we can take at face value? (Other than more debt.)
The snow. Don’t forget the snow. Or everyone OD-ing on french toast and syrup.
Now that I followed the links, it wasn’t our gummit directly that called “sky is falling.” Just sayin’
Right. It’s an international organization that monitors animal diseases. “Quasi-gummit” would be more accurate.
Before you dismiss the threat from H5N1, look up “reassortment”. That’s how we’re all going down – when a human being is infected with 2 viruses and those viruses exchange genetic material.
That’s how the Bird Flu is going to make the jump – it will mix it up with a virus that DOES have the ability to be spread from human-to-human and when it does, it’s going to be bad.
Don’t ask me how I know. But I happen to know. For real.
That’s what they’ve been talking about right along. Clearly, that possibility exists, but the likelihood seems more and more remote. The OIE people seem to feel that there are now adequate controls on the spread of the disease among birds. Possible and inevitable are two very different things.