Otherwise your have a higher chance of dying from getting bonked in the head by a coconut than dying from bird flu.
Don
http://www.fumento.com/disease/flu2005.html<snip>Let's break the pandemic issue down to its simpler parts, namely: How likely is avian flu to become readily communicable between humans? How contagious would it be? What interventions could be taken if it did become pandemic? How deadly would it be?
But first, How exactly does "avian" flu differ from "normal" flu? Every year several strains of flu circulate around the globe, usually reaching U.S. shores in late October and infecting 5 to 20 percent of the population. Flu leads to the death of about 36,000 Americans in an average year. To reduce the level of illness and death, we vaccinate. Unfortunately, flu mutates rapidly, so the antigens on the virus's protein coat change each year. This is known as "antigenic shift" and explains why we need to get new vaccines every fall – the protective antibodies we received from last year's vaccination were designed for last year's antigens. Health authorities tell us the white lie that there is no carry-over immunity from being vaccinated or infected the previous year; but actually there is some.
Nevertheless, if there were a radical "antigenic shift," the annual vaccine would be worthless. We would then suffer another pandemic such as the Asian flu of 1957-58 that caused about 70,000 U.S. deaths and a million globally, the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 that caused 34,000 U.S. deaths and 1-4 million globally, and the big daddy of all modern pandemics, the Spanish flu of 1918-19, that killed more than half a million Americans and about 25-50 million worldwide. (It should be noted that some experts, such as Dr. Edwin Kilbourne, emeritus professor of immunology at New York Medical College, believe avian flu is closely enough related to flus to which we've already been exposed that we would have some natural protection.)
Lots of animals get influenza, and it often jumps from species to species. Sometimes we give it to them, and other times they give it to us. That's the worry with avian flus. They were first recognized in Italy over a century ago, but the current epidemic of H5N1 among birds wasn't discovered until 1997 in Hong Kong, when it began killing chickens and then spread to humans, six of whom died. (This prompted the first panic.)
Poultry vaccines are available, and international bodies encourage their use, but compliance has varied tremendously. Vietnam appears to be making a heroic effort to inoculate all of its poultry, and other countries might follow suit, but vaccinations cost money, and the U.N. claims the West isn't forking over big enough premiums for an avian flu insurance policy. Once a flock is infected, nothing can be done but to slaughter every bird. In the meantime, migratory birds can carry it to another part of the country, or even to other continents, as we've recently seen.
As of November 9, 2005, 125 cases and 64 deaths have been reported from avian flu since late 2003, all in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. There have been a few cases of possible transmission from one family member to another, but that would have involved massive exposure and it could also be that the second family member got the disease directly from fowl. Nobody is saying that H5N1 is yet a threat to anybody other than bird farmers. But could it become one? snip
It's practically a state secret that the discovery of H5N1 in poultry dates back not to 1997 but rather to 1959, when it was identified in Scottish chickens. Perhaps haggis had a protective effect on the farmers, but there was a terrible outbreak of the related H5N2 among both chickens and turkeys in Pennsylvania in 1983-85 (17 million birds were destroyed) that appears to have originated as H5N1 in seagulls. So H5N1 has been flying around the globe for over four decades and hasn't done a number on us yet. That doesn't mean it won't ever; but there's absolutely no reason to think it will pick this year or next.
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