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That happened in 1997, when 18 people were infected in Hong Kong. Six of them died.
In poultry flocks, a highly pathogenic form of the flu can spread rapidly and cause quick degeneration of the animals' internal organs, with death usually occurring within two days--the death rate is close to 100 percent. A less extreme strain produces only mild symptoms.
The largest and most severe outbreak of the latest, highly pathogenic avian flu, H5N1, first appeared in 2003 in Southeast Asia and worsened last year. It's now considered endemic in parts of Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia. It has spread to Europe and caused the death of an estimated 150 million birds. The World Health Organization has said that some migratory birds are partly to blame for spreading the virus, and the agency expects its global expansion to continue. Control of the disease in poultry is expected to take several years.
The threat to humans is twofold: More than 100 people in Cambodia and Thailand have been infected from direct exposure to infected poultry, and roughly half of them have died, usually from viral pneumonia and multiorgan failure brought on by the influenza.
The bigger concern for health experts is a mutation that would turn this bird-based bug into a highly infectious strain that could be spread from person to person. And in a world connected by airplanes, such a disease could become a global pandemic in no time.
"The risk of pandemic influenza is serious. With the H5N1 virus now firmly entrenched in large parts of Asia, the risk that more human cases will occur will persist. Each additional human case gives the virus an opportunity to improve its transmissibility in humans, and thus develop into a pandemic strain," according to the World Health Organization.
The Bush administration is proposing funding for research for faster methods of formulating vaccines. Currently, vaccines are made through eggs, and the process takes six to eight months. That's not enough time to act swiftly in the case of a pandemic. The money will also be spent on stockpiling vaccines and antiviral drugs, such as Tamiflu.
"We need more modern ways to make flu vaccines (and)...protect against many strains, rather than just one. So that's certainly money well spent," Reingold said.
Still, he said, referring to state health offices, "federal resources can fix some things, but not necessarily fix all things to be optimally prepared."
See more CNET content tagged:
flu, health, resource, virus, U.S.
If I remember well from my university days, a virus or bacteria that kills its host dies with it. So it's not the unadapted virus that survives. More than 99% of all viruses and bacteria existing on Earth are not only non-lethal but some even usefull (such as those helping our digestive system).
When it was first brought to Europe by the conquistadors, siphilis was a violent disease killing in a matter of days. In time, the bacteria and the human have adapted to each other. So was the chickenpox or smallpox to the indians.
Adaptation and mutation occurs (it is said!) accidentally but only those "mutants" that are better adapted to the environment survive. And adaptation definitely means letting your host survive and prosper so that you can prosper with it!
I believe it's just one huge hoax! The chances of this virus becoming harmless are AT LEAST as large as those of it becoming lethal. So... why all the histeria?! After all, common, usual human influenza STILL kills each year MORE people than the bird flu virus has killed so far. So is AIDS. Cancer. Smoking. Traffic accidents. Airplane crashes. Domestic accidents.
We're definitely over reacting! Bird flu has been here for hundred maybe thousands of years and contact between man and birds was much more close in the past than it is now (after all, how many of you have seen a living chicken in the past year?) and yet there have been no bird flu epidemics...
Maybe it's just a way of making more money quicker...!?
have reminded us that we're overdue for a flu
pandemic. Historically they've happened every 25
years or so, but the last one was in the late
sixties and only killed about 35,000 people in
the US (around 1 million worldwide). Compare
that to the flu outbreak of 1918 that killed
500,000 in the US (about 0.5% of the population)
and about 50 million worldwide.
The avian flu is probably hyped because as it is
it has a 50% mortality rate in humans so far
(about 100% mortality in infected birds). The
1918 flu had a mortality of about 2.5% and SARS
had a mortality rate of about 4.5%.
It's rare for viruses to jump species, but this
one has. It's more rare still for it to become
transmissible (no evidence of that). For what
it's worth, mutations affecting the mortality of
the flu aren't necessarily related to those
affectings it's transmissibility. The flu could
easily still have a 50% mortality rate (or
higher) if it became transmissible. The good
news is that viruses with a high mortality rate
mercifully tend to incapacitate and kill very
quickly (maybe in a couple of days for a nasty
flu), which greatly limits their spread.
The thing that really makes difference today
isn't so much the mortality rate, but the fact
that compared to 1918, there are 4 times as many
people on the planet -- necessarily living
closer to one another, and moving around more
often and farther than ever before.
It's not really that the chances of a flu
pandemic are very high, or that this one is any
worse (as far as mortality goes, in healthy
people it's no worse than bubonic plague), but
that the press is keenly aware how poorly we (at
least in the US) handle large scale
catastrophes. On the off-chance that a pandemic
does occur, it could largely be mitigated by a
proper response. The problem is, how likely is
that? Probably zero. Hence the hype.
- by robbinmco September 10, 2008 8:27 AM PDT
- Interesting topic. I saw a program on television that was a mock documentary (Discovery, History Channel, Science Channel; it might have been on one of these) of a pandemic flu situation that became so bad that scientists "flipped the switch" to re-create the Big Bang (Genesis Project?). A black hole begins, sucking up a large city, land, the earth. This aired 2-3 years ago. Does anybody out there know what the title of this program, and what channel this was on? And maybe, where can I find a copy?
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