Pandemic Flu Awareness Week

by DemFromCT

According to the Houston Chronicle:

The most important speech President Bush gave last week was not the prime-time address from Jackson Square in New Orleans. The world will little note nor long remember what he said there. It was stagey and prosaic, and his words were artificially elevated in importance by the passing political moment, not the substance of his remarks.

The most important speech Bush gave last week was delivered at the United Nations. It contained an ominous reference, which very few people seem to have noticed. The president signalled his concern over a new threat currently building in southeast Asia — and this time the threat has nothing to do with terrorism.

In the poultry farms of Vietnam and Thailand, in the slums of Indonesia, along the migratory routes of wild fowl in China, a new strain of bird flu is mutating and spreading. It's just a matter of time, scientists say, before the strain — H5N1, the most virulent form of influenza ever identified — will fully lodge itself within the human population. When that happens, start looking for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalyse — in particular, the one named Pestilence who's riding a pale horse.

This is not your ordinary, off-the-shelf, garden variety flu strain. It's a superbug. Currently, the virus is transmitted to humans only through direct contact with birds. Up until now, there's been very little to worry about unless you work with chickens in Thailand, or you eat Vietnamese delicacies such as uncoagulated duck blood soup. But scientists tell us that the virus is mutating, and it will soon become a human-to-human contagion that's spread the old-fashioned way — by nose, hand and mouth.

It is for that reason that we at Flu Wiki will enlist the help of bloggers everywhere. October 3-9 will be Pandemic Flu Awareness Week. If you have a blog, consider linking to some authoritative flu sources during that week, or even running a few flu stories of your own. There's plenty of material to use. Steal the logo. Get the word out to your readers. A little knowledge goes a long way; public health authorities can't do everything themselves. And perhaps knowledge dissemination will help them focus on what's real, not just what's feared, so they can share with us what we need to know.

Comments

[DemFromCT]

More on what's happening in Indonesia here.

[DemFromCT]

this is the best analysis I've seen regarding Indonesia:

With the deaths of two young girls (ages 2 and 5), the Indonesian alarm bells are ringing more loudly. WaPo reports ten more hospitalized with high fever, bird flu suspected (numbers of hospitalized patients differ in various news reports). TimesOnline says some of the hospitalized cases come from rural areas where poultry farming is prevalent. But they report also a 9 year old girl who died after visiting the zoo. Her death seems not included in the other reports, so it is unclear what the current toll is. If zoo visitor case is accurate, combined with the reports of infections in a zoo guide and food vendor, it suggests transmission from birds has suddenly become much more efficient.

[Meteor Blades]

Yikes. I usually like to see the words "more" and "efficient" combined.

Having spent a good portion of the past five years on business trips in Indonesia, it's clear to me that whatever can be done to stop or delay bird flu's spread will not be done. A good deal of travel in the archipelago is done on cheap plane rides, with one of the main destinations for everybody being Bali, which is back up to about 1.35 million tourists last year, after a huge drop caused by the 2002 disco bombing. Australians make up 20% of the total tourists. If the virus mutates so that it can transmit human-to-human, my guess is that the Aussies will be the first Westerners to see large numbers of flu victims, although everybody else will be close behind.

[YK]

Yikes, indeed. I read one of the "fictional scenarios" on the Flu Wiki, and it seems like a flu pandemic would be the perfect marriage of every problem we've faced over the past few years. It requires careful planning and rapid response. The actions needed are subtle; raw military power won't save us here. Neither will the free market. This problem requires international cooperation, often pitting national and corporate interests against the common good. But it also involves individuals, and the longstanding problems of poverty and ignorance. In short, it requires everything that our current government seems incapable of doing.

Fortunately, we at least have the Flu Wiki! Thanks, DemFromCT.

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