A Knight At The Oprah

by DemFromCT

Oprah is the most powerful celeb in media today. And on Tuesday, she takes on bird flu. Sometimes it takes a non-geek voice to get the message out. Since we don't yet know who is on (but it looks like Mike Osterholm from CIDRAP), a well known 'get prepared' voice, you might see the volume ratcheted up a tad on the bird flu story.

The concern about bird flu is that it might make the jump from birds to humans in a more easily catchable form. There's a big outbeak in Turkey (21 human cases in two weeks) raising concern, because even though there have been no new confirmed cases, some of the virus isolates are exhibiting mutations that make it easier to catch.

The latest WHO FAQ is here, and sporadic cases keep being reported elsewhere. Flu Wiki will continue to follow events, and try to pull together information from everywere in a single place. It's also a good site to debunk rumors.

Stay tuned; events are unfolding in a most unique way.

Comments

[DemFromCT]

More on Turkey and neighborly relations here.

[emptypockets]

Let me try this one again -- I think I posted it in a deadthread. The $1.9Bil in grants and loans for poorer countries to deal with bird flu -- any thoughts how that will be spent, or if this is a situation where more money goes to more help or just to more middleman profit (a la Iraq contractors)?

[DemFromCT]

I wish I knew... it needs to go to reimbursing those whose chickens are culled, surveillance costs and medical bills.

As to where it will go...

[James]

I read that some of the more recent cases in Turkey have resulted in the infected humans surviving, and not dying as most of the earlier cases had. Isn't that a good sign?

I know they found a few more cases in Indonesia a few days ago, humans catching the flu from dead fowl.

[DemFromCT]

yes, it's a decent piece of news... it may be the virus is changing, it may be the use of tamiflu early is beneficial. No one knows for sure.

The major mechanism of spread is still bird to human (B2H) rather than H2H.

But what we have to watch for is if each new country affected has an escalation of cases.

[James]

I mentioned this on DKos but I am very wary of Oprah going near this subject. She is prone to drive her audience into a frenzy, and make the situation all about her. Ten years ago she caused hysteria by saying she would never eat beef again thanks to Mad Cow Disease. Sales of beef in the US plummetted and she was sued by the beef lobby (they lost).

[DemFromCT]

it has plusses and minuses, no doubt. Her message boards are quite something.

[CaseyL]

"Her message boards are quite something."

You ain't kidding. From the message board at Oprah's place:

"I AM TERRIFIED OF BIRD FLU. I CANNOT WAIT UNTIL TUESDAY'S SHOW SO I CAN LEARN HOW TO PROTECT MY CHILDREN AND MYSELF. OPRAH THANK YOU FOR BRINGING THIS IMPORTANT ISSUE TO THE TABLE!"

Dear grinning God. I hope that was a troll.

Maybe it's just me being contrary, but the more hysterics I hear about the flu, the less I worry about it. People have worked themselves into frenzies over any number of apocalyptic predictions, and none have actually come true.

[DemFromCT]

That's what they said in New Orleans in July, CaseyL. Think about it.

If you want a more sober assessment, purchase this article from Nature (Alarms ring over bird flu mutations: Turkish virus shows increased affinity for humans). or check out the Director-General from WHO:

Jan 22 2006 The WHO’s director-general, Lee Jong-wook, warned that an outbreak in Britain was “inevitable and possibly imminent”.

I prefer the prepare, not panic approach. But pay attention because something is happenin that poses a significant risk.

[CaseyL]

You're right: NOLA was an apocalypse that did come to pass.

I was thinking more along the lines of the early AIDS pandemic, when people were convinced it could be caught via casual contact, and panicked accordingly; the Y2K scare, which got some people selling off all their worldly goods and heading for the hills; the tragicomedy of the Hale-Bopp comet with its "Saturn-like Object"; not to mention the Swine Flu and Hanta virus scares. (Plus the various geopolitical panics the Bush Admin keeps pushing.)

And I want to clarify: when I say I'm 'not worried about avian flu," I don't mean that I think it'll go away all on its own, la-di-dah. I mean that I'm reasonably confident WHO, CDC, and other public health entities will be able to nail the thing when and if it mutates to H2H contagion, and come up with a vaccine, and get the vaccine distributed. Because, like Y2K, this potential disaster is being watched and tracked like crazy, and a lot of people are doing a lot of work to make sure they, and we, are ready for it.

I also think comparisons to the 1918 flu are overwrought, because epidemiology was a new and mostly unformed science in 1918, and the national and international infrastructures to deal with pandemics we have now plain didn't exist in 1918. There are other differences 'twixt then and now, but those are the biggies.

[DemFromCT]

There are, indeed differences, but there are, alas, similarities. An excellent report on the topic is here. These folks are consultants to WHO and CDC, charged with explaining why we have a problem. see especially here.

Besides the fact that the > 50% death rate in young healthy children in SE Asia happened despite some pretty good medical care (same in Turkey where by the end of the weekend, it might be 6 of 22), the sheer number of patients in a pandemic would overwhelm our emergency rooms.

So the advances would be overwhelmed by the scale of the pandemic, similar to katrina's effect on health care. Only, it'd be everywhere at once. No joke.

[emptypockets]

ok cmon guys somebody post something new -- Dem's pun is killing me.

And that's from someone who nearly went to a screening of "Horse Feathers" last night.