arkon

At the moment I'm a bit glad to be here in the middle of nowhere in Australia!
There have been outbreaks of bird flu in both Turkey and now they think Hungary. They say it has a 25% mortality rate so as we now have a new born I'm glad to be so isolated. It reminds me of that rubbish sci fi opera the survivors. It woudl be a bit ironic if when I eventually return to the UK it has a population smaller than Australia!! :scared: :scared:

Carkedit

You are safe from terrorist attacks too..the mortality rate from them is WAY higher than bird flu..

Guess you wont be eating turkey and chicken for a while then...

HUP

You certainly won't be eating turkey to much in Australia, to bloody expensive .

manxfamily

Arkon, I love your pessimistic posts, but where in oz are you?

moneypenny20

Don't know where you read that, but from what I have seen/heard no one has died of Avian Flu just something similar and as yet they haven't found a link between the two.

You sometimes come across as a "glass half empty" sort of guy. I hope you find happiness somewhere in the world soon.

Tiawamutu

He's in WA

moneypenny20

No he's not. He's near Newcastle ........ I think

Tiawamutu

Aye think I'm getting him mixed up with someone else

God knows how....must be the aussie wine

Carkedit

Think you will find Arkon is from Northern NSW

arkon

Plenty of people have died and it's been confirmed as the H5N1 virus. 60 people have now died in romania from it and plenty more in asia. What your refering to is that currently they they think it only transmits from bird to human and not very easily from human to human. The worry seems to be if someone with a humun human flu gets it then is could mutate to a much more easily transmitted virus. With a 25% mortality rate and the fact we now live in the jet age with less border security than the 1918 pandemic means that the potential for disaster is much greater than its ever been.

If this is seeing the glass half empty then so be it. It's no good sticking your head in the sand and the point of the thread was just to say I've found another positive about living here on the mid north coast of NSW. I will have to get rid of the chickens though!

phoenixinoz

Och arkon...stop worryin....it's just a cold that chickens get...unless they're male of course...and then it's flu

We're not dooooooomed yet man

Go get yersen a drink and remind yourself how lucky you are to live in Gods country

ozzieeagle

Maybe you should be honey

There will not be enough vaccine thats for sure....

Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert who has been studying the risk of pandemic flu for decades and is a US government adviser, said governments should be preparing to cope with the pandemic instead of relying entirely on the hope of using vaccines and drugs to control it.

If the H5N1 avian flu begins to easily infect humans, it will move too quickly for drugs and vaccines to be of much use, Osterholm said.

"It doesn't matter if we have a vaccine now or not. We can't make it," Osterholm said in a telephone interview.

The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed at least 65 people in four Asian nations since late 2003, and has killed or forced the destruction of tens of millions of poultry.

Experts say it is mutating steadily and fear it will eventually acquire the changes it needs to spread easily from person to person.

If it does, it will sweep around the world in months or even weeks and could kill millions of people -- as many as 150 million, according to the most dire forecast by the World Health Organization.

When avian flu infects people it looks like any other flu with respiratory symptoms, fever and other common effects but it will kill many more than the 500,000 people who die of ordinary flu each year around the world.

People have known about the risk of an influenza pandemic for a very long time, said Osterholm, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota who advises the federal government on such issues.

"We have had a pandemic flu plan as a planning process since 1976," said Osterholm. "Nobody has completed it. It been one of the most long-standing incompleted processes in Washington. Nobody wants to believe that modern medical science can't handle something."

But it cannot, said Osterholm, who has seen the current US flu plan. The plan has not been published yet but leaked versions suggest the country has done little to prepare for an H5N1 pandemic.

Osterholm and other experts have long been complaining that there are not sufficient hospital beds, equipment or trained workers to cope with a major epidemic.

"The one thing I worry desperately about it is the impact of overreliance on neuraminidase inhibitors," he said.

There are two drugs in the class -- Roche and Gilead's Tamiflu, known generically as oseltamivir, and GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza.

They work to reduce the severity of annual influenza and may prevent infection if used at the right time. Tests suggest they also work against H5N1, but no one knows how well.

"I think that potentially neuraminidase inhibitors may work if you are already on them as prophylaxis (prevention)," Osterholm said. That would mean taking them daily for days or weeks.

"That means that very, very limited supply is going to become a lot more limited."


FIGHTING OVER SCARCE SUPPLIES

The United States has enough courses of Tamiflu to treat about 2.3 million people. The Health and Human Services Department says another 2 million treatment courses are on order and will arrive by the end of the year.

But some 90 million people would need the drug in the event of a flu pandemic, University of Virginia flu expert Dr. Frederick Hayden told a meeting on Saturday.

At current capacity, it would take about 10 years to produce enough oseltamivir to treat 20 percent of the world's population, Hayden said.

"Now people are saying whoever has the most Tamiflu wins," Osterholm said. "I worry so much that Tamiflu is a surrogate for protection."

And vaccines are not an answer yet and will not be for years. There is an experimental vaccine against H5N1 but there are only a few thousand doses of it.

It takes months to make influenza vaccine and H5N1 kills chickens -- the source of the eggs that are needed under current old-fashioned production methods to make flu vaccines.

Companies are trying to develop more modern methods but are years away from doing so. And work cannot begin on a true vaccine against H5N1 until it actually starts infecting many people, because the vaccine must match the virus precisely and no one can predict just how H5N1 will mutate.

And it is mutating.

A study published last week showed that the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed at least 40 million people globally and may have killed more, depending on estimates, was a purely avian virus that acquired a few mutations that gave it the ability to infect people easily, spread among them and cause highly fatal disease.

H5N1 is mutating in a similar way and experts believe it is only a matter of time before it, too, infects people easilly.


It's got to happen within the next 5 years, and possibly even 2.

phoenixinoz

The thing is ozzieeagle....a pandemic of some sorts or another has been threatened on numerous occasions over the years. Yes, we're right to worry but the government can't legislate for all of them i.e keep loads of flu vaccines on standby just in case. It would cost a fortune, cos as you know the vaccine's become "redundant" once the next flu virus comes round.

The reality is it is probably going to happen one day and so the most vulnerable people i.e children, old people and those most suseptible etc, should try vaccinate against it. Other than that, the government should make us aware and we should act sensibly.

What else can we do?

What will be, will be

Apart from the above precautions, we're all in the hands of the gods m8

ozzieeagle

Only thing I can think of, is to make sure ourloved ones and ourselves are as fit as possible.

Dammit that means exercise, lol, next week maybe.

phoenixinoz

Yep....you're right.

But you know....we probably have more chance of getting run over

So buggar the exercise and get yersen another cold one!