Do you think the bird flu will become a reality - spark a pandemic ? if so when!
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Influenza is a real threat only when it crosses the species barrier i.e. can be transmitted from pigs to birds to humans. So far this Avian flu has not crossed the species barrier to humans, staying within the confines of the bird community. Once humans start displaying the symptoms of the Avian flu, then we will have something to worry about. Best course of action: make sure your immune system is up to scratch and don't worry because itll take some time to mutate, unless we fight it with antibiotics which will make it mutate faster and then...
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well bird flu is a reality. and it'll come when all the birds migrate and they're expecting 2 million peopel to become infected in america alone.
nope. not unless it turns into a swine flu first.
no. it can only be transmitted by birds, or mosquitoes. and the likelyhood of getting a mosquito n=bite from an infected mosquito is not high. all you have to do is use mosquito-spray around your house. dont use self bug-reppellents, they dont work well and are weird to have on ur skin.
My opinion won't make much difference, nor is there any particular reason to believe it will predict events. But understanding what would have to happen before such things come to pass, might help make some sense of this business.
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flu viruses
The flu virus family is a large one. There are flus which infect birds (we're looking at one here), which infect pigs (there was a swine flu kerfluffle whe Gerald ford was President in the mid 70s), humans, and . Usually, bird flus infect only birds, as in this case. There are only a couple of hundred people, and a few cats, known to have been infected with this flu. The really scary thing is that about 1/2 of them have died. Very few diseases have a mortality rate that high.
Flu viruses sometimes swap bits with each other and acquire the ability to infect another species. A pig flu infects a bird and the two flus 'mix and match' and produce a new flu capable of infecting a human, perhaps. Or some combination. Most of this mixing seems to take place in SE Asia, where duck ponds, a few pigs, and the humans family all live almost on top of each other. But this cross species stuff doesn't seem to be all that common. Human flus have undergone major changes only every few years (2 or 3 since WWII) for instance, and if those changes are the result of this shuffling business, there's an indication of the chances, perhaps.
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prior bird flus in humans
In fact, we know of only one large pandemic which has been caused by a bird flu, or at least by a flu which had bird characteristics. That's the one in 1918, which has only recently been pinned down as a bird flu. Some researchers went looking for bodies which had been buried in the Arctic and remained frozen since 1918. Samples from them finally yielded enough information to reconstruct the 1918 virus, and it was a characteristically bird sort. It's still not clear what made it so deadly, but at least we're pretty sure what it was now. It popped up, killed something like 50 million folks around the world in 18 months or 2 years, and vanished.
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future possibilities
If the present bird flu changes enough to infect humans, and stays extremely contagious as nearly all flu viruses are, it may be a rerun of 1918. And if it retains its lethality in humans (50+% so far, in a very small sample), it will probably be a good deal worse than the 1918 experience. We have more people, packed more closely, and with little margin (extra food capacity, medical capacity, sewerage and water capacity, .), so things should be worse, all things being equal -- as they obviously are not.
There are two things this bird flu does which appear to be new. When infecting humans, it seems to be able to spread by food. Most flus, human flus anyway, don't. This is new. And, it attacks nearly all tissues, while most human flus have largely been respiratory diseases. This is also new. Whether a changed avian flu which readily infects humans will contiue to behave this way, or whether there is something specially vulnerable about the 200 some folks known to have been infected with it, is not known. It may be that lots of people have been infected, shock it off as a cold or something, and never saw a doctor. We don't know.
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defenses
Unlike 1918, we understand what we can do to beat any new flu variant. Vaccines work pretty well on all the flus we've encountered so far. The problem with a flu vaccine is that the various strains fo the flu are sufficiently different that a different vaccine is requires against each, more or less. Every year, epidemiologist have to make a guess about which strain will be important in the upcoming season, and if they guess wrong, the flu season will be a good deal worse. If they gess right, there won't be much of a problem for most people who get the vaccine.
In this case, no one knows what a contagious human version of the avian flu now running around the world will look like, immunologically. So it will have to make the change, and get noticed and isolated, before we can begin making vaccine against it. If our ordinary vaccine manufacturing techniques work, it will be a few months before the vaccine becomes available in quantity. And much longer than that before doses become available for all who might want it.
So at best there will be a window of several months during which the only weapons against this new hypothetical version of the avian flu will be the very few drugs we have which can slow down the ordinary human flu if taken at the right time. One of these is Tamiflu, which has acquired quite a reputation. But neither it nor any of the others cures flu, even the human sort we now get every year. And no one has any idea wheterh any of them will help against this new hypothetical version of the avian flu.
Source(s):
For good information about emerging diseases (like this flu seems to be), see laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague. The bibliography is superb. It was published a little too early to include much about HIV / AIDS, however.
For an historical perspective, see Wm McNeil's Plagues and Peoples. We have little information about ancient diseases and still less about their epidemiology, so a good bit of this is informed speculation by an outstanding historian, but what we do know is fascinating, and the speculation is at least equally so.
An excellent fictional account of a pandemic plague (bubonic plague in this case) is Alan Nourse's Fourth Horseman. Nourse is a physcian and his account of the horrors of plague is clinically accurate. For dramatic purposes, he's personifies the plague a bit, and has assigned the villan role to big pharma. Not very many folks are likely to feel too bad about that, I suppose. It's a good presentation of a modern industriallized society under seige by a pandemic though. A good read.
Bird flu will arrive in the US on 14th May, 2008, via an infected parrot that will be shipped in as a paying passenger on Flight 6754 from Munich. The parrot's cage will be knocked over at the arrival port, allowing it to escape and infect three migrating house martins..
Really. What a silly question.
I think it will, but i can no longer be bothered to explain why - this is about the 15th bird flu question i've answered! I reckon we will start to see something happening in the autumn/winter period of this year. october november ish.
Source(s):
health protection agency (UK)
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