| Avian Flu Spreads To 5 More Countries
Posted: 3/17/2006 11:00:25 PM | The deadly migration continues unabated, as the unstoppable avian flu was discovered in five more countries spanning thousands of miles.
In Israel three employees of an infected chicken coop are in the hospital, as they and thousands of birds have been found to be sick or carrying the virus.
A dead buzzard in Denmark was found to be carrying H5N1. This comes just a day after two ducks in neighboring Sweden were found to be ill.
In Afghanistan they've begun culling birds by the thousands upon getting back six positive tests results.
A hundred thousand birds have be targeted for death after an outbreak was confirmed in Jalgaon, India.
And hours after the story broke internationally, the tightly controlled press in Myanmar admitted that the disease had broken out across the country.
Meanwhile, in Serbia a teenager has been hospitalized with a fever and is feared to be infected.
Does anyone think this will reach North America and become a Pandemic? | |
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longte
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Joined: 10/18/2004
Msg: 2 | |
| Avian Flu Spreads To 5 More Countries
Posted: 3/17/2006 11:34:56 PM | The number of human fatalities is insignificant
I believe it is still less than 100 fatalities
Absolutely not worth the rhetoric and fears that are being spread by researchers and pharmaceutical companies looking to make money out of our fears
Most transmission is by Direct Contact with Infected Poultry
Few, if any, cases have come from pet birds or inter human exchange
Cats have beenshown to catch it, but no cases of transmission from cats have yet been diagnosed
Best precautions are to simply stay away from Chicken Farms and don't go Duck shooting, or handle fresh wildfowl, or buy life chickens etc
Yes it is a nasty little bug, but not worth getting paranoid about
You have a much higher risk of dying in a plane crash
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| Avian Flu Spreads To 5 More Countries
Posted: 3/18/2006 6:18:36 AM | Well as long as it's contained you may be right, however the virus could mutate, and I think our governments should be on top of this at border control.
The deadly H5N1 virus that causes avian influenza has infected 151 people since 2003, when the first bird-to-human transmission occurred in eastern Asia. 82 of these people have died so far.
26 MILLION birds have been destroyed so far. That's a pretty high number. | |
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| Avian Flu Spreads To 5 More Countries
Posted: 3/18/2006 8:00:10 AM | It is my understanding that all it will take for a pandemic to
begin is the following: A human who already has some form of
virus gets the Avian flu. The two virus then join together and
form a strain that can then pass from human to human. This is
a simplistic view of how a pandemic will begin from the now H5N1
virus, and, why a vaccine is difficult to produce. They just don't
know what the virus will look like once it mutates.
Currently the Avian flu is a major pandemic among birds. Only time
will tell if it is to be the cause of a human flu pandemic. IMO the
odds are not in our favor. This is mainly due for one due to world wide
travel and the inability we will see, if this happens, of early infected
people to be recognized and quaranteended among other things.
OP: Thanks for the post! | |
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longte
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Joined: 10/18/2004
Msg: 5 | |
| Avian Flu Spreads To 5 More Countries
Posted: 3/18/2006 9:09:07 AM | The biggest problem is exactly the one stated above
This bug keeps changing
And will continue to change as we spent millions trying to keep ahead of it
The vaccines developed for the Hong Kong Outbreak in 2002 do not work on the new strain
This New strain is twice as deadly; possibly because of the antibiotics we used against the first one
If a virus is left alone to mutate naturally, it usually destroys itself fairly quickly
Our playing with viruses like this one, is what often increases the virulence of the bug
Here we have a case where, in Europe, simply because a few cats were found to have caught the virus, [but no-one has yet caught it from a cat] thousands of pets are being dumped or put down daily
Our breeding/feeding methods for farmed poultry have caused this
Just avoid that situation and you should be fine
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