Reply #41: From the who today [View All]

[Mojorabbit]

U.N. Says Bird Flu Spreading
April 26th, 2006 @ 1:46pm
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer

http://www.620ktar.com/?nid=36&sid=137174
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Bird flu has hit 45 countries, killed more than 100 people and seems to be spreading quickly, the U.N. official in charge of tracking the virus said Wednesday.

Dr. David Nabarro said the virus has led to the deaths of some 200 million birds and has impoverished millions of small poultry farmers.

Between 2003 and 2005 the virus was reported in 15 countries. But in the first four months of this year it has moved rapidly to 30 new countries, with major outbreaks in Turkey, Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, India, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Bukina Faso.
snip
"This is very similar to the virus that caused the influenza pandemic of 1918," Nabarro said. It's not identical but it's similar. ... So therefore, the 1918 virus, which caused this huge pandemic associated with 40 million deaths, seems to have a successor waiting in the wings."
and
Latest computer model not optimistic
A pandemic flu is likely to strike one in three people if nothing is done, according to the results of computer simulation published in Thursday's journal Nature. If the government acts fast enough and has enough antiviral medicine to use as preventive dosings _ which the United States does not _ that could drop to about 28 percent of the population getting sick, the study found.

"Both cases we came up with were very pessimistic," said lead author Neil Ferguson of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College in London. "There is no single magic bullet for stopping pandemic flu."
snip

Ferguson's computer simulation is the second released this month and is more pessimistic than one led by Timothy Germann of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who said the flu could be less infectious and that efforts could slow it a bit.
snip

Bill Hall, spokesman for Department of Health and Human Services, said his agency has 28 million courses of the antiviral (9.3 percent of the U.S. population), but acknowledged that on hand, there's only enough medicine for 5 million people (1.7 percent. The other 23 million courses are on order and should arrive by the end of the year. The plan is to have 81 million courses (27.1 percent) by 2008, he said.

snip
"Twenty-five percent doesn't go very far and we don't have anywhere near that," said study co-author Donald Burke, professor of international health and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health. "If it does occur before we have enough drug and enough vaccine, then the epidemic will have a substantial impact."
http://www.620ktar.com/?nid=36&sid=178773