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August 29, 2005
Avian Flu Fears Spread.
priority cases to receive scarce pills and vaccinations at the
taxpayers’ expense if the country is hit by a deadly bird flu outbreak.
Workers at the BBC and prominent politicians — such as cabinet ministers — would be offered protection from the virus.
NI_MPU('middle');Ken
Livingstone, the London mayor, has already spent £1m to make sure his
personal office and employees have their own emergency supplies of
100,000 antiviral tablets.
If there is an avian flu pandemic in the coming months there
would be enough drugs to protect less than 2% of the British population
for a week.This is especially rancorous for me for obvious reasons, and as I tend toward skepticism in matters of doomsday predictions, I also tend to get overly indignant when government officials demonstrate a craven me-first attitude.
The virus is no said to be spreading from Asia into Russia. From there, fears are that migratory birds would bring the deadly strain over the Urals and into Western Russia and then to the Balkans, which is seen as a possible gateway to central Europe:Lakes and rivers along the Black Sea coast ranging from Ukraine to
northern Turkey attract millions of birds each winter from an area
stretching from northern Russia to Scandinavia. Europe's largest
wetlands, Romania's Danube delta, and lakes in northern Bulgaria, are
popular among flocks of red-breasted geese from Siberia as well as
white-fronted geese from Scandinavia, Poland, and Germany.
"There is a risk of spreading the deadly strain of flu to local
wildlife if any of them is infected," said Boris Barov, head of
Bulgarian Society for Protection of Birds. Jutzi said countries in southeast Europe may lack the capacity to detect and deal with a widespread outbreak.As it stands now, the fear is that the H5N1 strain would mingle with more standard flu strains and mutate into a sort of super-flu that would spread wider and faster from wild birds to farm poultry:The present European
Commission directive designed to curtail the threat of bird flu is
concerned only with 'high pathogenic' strains, but there are growing
concerns that these can originate from 'low pathogenic' strains which
can be transmitted to poultry from wild birds.
On
Friday, the authorities in Finland detected a case of bird flu in the
north of the country which is thought to be a low pathogenic strain.
The discovery has added to concerns over the speed with which bird flu
is edging towards western Europe.Now, no human has been infected in Russia yet, and the epidemic there seems to have stabilized. However, the demonstrated failure with regards to BSE some years back should give everyone pause.
Here's a good explanation why the avian flu is suddenly getting attention:The H5N1 strain is particularly dangerous because
it mutates very rapidly and can mix with genes from other viruses thus
allowing it to spread to other species. In addition it is highly
pathogenic and can cause severe disease outbreaks.
With the infection spreading in birds there's an increased risk for
direct infection of humans, too. And if more people become infected, it
also becomes more likely that humans, if infected with human and bird
flu strains at the same time, could serve as the "mixing vessel" for
the emergence of a novel strain that could easily be transmitted from
person to person. Such an event would mark the start of an influenza
pandemic.Efforts continue in the US to quarantine against H5N1 here.
The government plans to more than triple the number of
quarantine stations at airports around the country and hire scores of
health officers as part of a broad plan to try to stop deadly
infectious diseases from entering the United States.
Ten
new stations, at airports stretching from Alaska to Puerto Rico, are
already open or nearing completion, and about 50 new health officers
are undergoing training. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
plans to build an additional seven stations as soon as it can get the
money. Eight stations that have existed for years are gaining staff, so
that when the plan is complete, the country will be blanketed by a
network of 25 centers designed as a first-line of defense against a
global disease pandemic.Apart from the personal, some economists are claiming that a pandemic that rises to the predictions could cause a world-wide depression:
In a first-of-its-kind report on the financial impact of a possible pandemic,
BMO Nesbitt Burns researchers in Canada warned that an outbreak could devastate
the airline and hospitality industries, trigger mass foreclosures and
bankruptcies, decimate insurance companies, and disrupt food chains as people
switched from animal to vegetable diets.Losses would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars.Before we start building bunkers, buying gold and shotguns, it should be noted that most of this is hypothesis mixed with a tinge of paranoia. There is an old adage that economists have reliably predicted ten of the last eight recessions. Also, it has become a habit to over play threats to sell newspapers and bilk the citizenry out of more tax dollars by hyping danger. Maybe a way to play this is to invest in Whole Foods Market or any number of organic, vegetarian food producers.
Still, this could happen, although I would wager that the reality will be somewhere in between a blip and a global disaster. On which side of center we land will be the subject of more coverage before long.
Some links and info come from Maggie (who is canning tomatoes and wearing a gas mask 24/7) and the Avian Flu blog.
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Posted by dymaxion at August 29, 2005 02:04 PM
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