bird flu
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All seven people infected with bird flu in a cluster of Indonesian cases can be linked to other patients, according to disease trackers investigating possible human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 virus.
A team of international experts has been unable to find animals that might have infected the people, the World Health Organization said in a statement today. In one case, a 10-year- old boy who caught the virus from his aunt may have passed it to his father, the first time officials have seen evidence of a three-person chain of infection, an agency spokeswoman said. Six of the seven people have died.
bloomberg
Were we taking bird flu seriously this would be the moment to shut down all inbound travel from Indonesia until we can set up quarantine facilities through which people from that huge nation would have to pass before coming into Canada.
However, the good news - in so far as the death of a ten year old can ever have any good news - is that this is a mutation which we have been worried about. Now the race is on to make a vaccine which will actually stop the flu in humans. The only trouble being that it will take four month to a year and this may not be the only human transmitable mutation.
Which is why it would be wise to shut the borders now.
As if.
Written by jay on May 24th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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Five more cases of bird flu were reported in Turkey on Sunday, including three cases in Turkey’s capital Ankara, raising fears the deadly bird flu virus was spreading.
Preliminary tests showed that two children and an adult have tested positive for the deadly bird flu virus in Ankara, the city’s governor Kemal Onal told state news agency Anatolia on Sunday.
CTV
That was quick, too quick for any sort of comfort. The story from Van was that the poor children there pretty much lived in a house cum chicken coop. But the people in Ankara are not so obviously in contact with chickens. Soooo..
“This is unusual, and the WHO has to ask themselves whether something has changed,” said Prof. Earl Brown, from the University of Ottawa. “Has the virus changed, or is it something to do with the people in Turkey and their immune systems, or something regional with respect to people?”
ctv
It might also be a good idea to ask when Canada will be imposing a quarantine on Turkey. Or at least a wait period on travel. Hey, maybe someone might ask that question at the “debates”.
Written by jay on January 9th, 2006 with no comments.
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Planners in the health-care arena shudder at the thought of having to decide what to do when they’ve run out of life-saving mechanical ventilators and a gravely ill 15-year-old comes through the emergency department door, Dr. Allison McGeer admitted.
Do they take the oldest person on a ventilator in the hospital off it? Do they call around to other hospitals to see if someone older still can be removed from a ventilator across town?
“I think, at least among health-care workers, to even have the discussion somehow creates a sense of playing God,” she said.
“People know if they get in the situation where the decisions will have to be made, they’ll have to be made. But to overtly have a discussion ahead of time about making them? . . . The general response up till now among health-care workers is that people really don’t think they can do that.”the toronto star
Dr. McGeer knows of what she speaks - as well as being one of Canada’s leading epidemiologists, she worked closely enough with patients in the SARS crisis that she caught the disease herself.
Creating rules for the allocation of vaccines when they are available, anti-virals until then, respirators to keep the ill alive and quarantine regimes to keep the healthy functional requires clear ethical guidelines. The rules have to be effective and they have to be seen as fair if they are going to work.
This is not something which is only the concern of healthcare professionals and public health authorities. The public at large and politicians need to be involved in the conversation and the decisions.
Just to give a few examples outside the hospital: in a pandemic what is the sanction against a person breaking quarantine. Do you arrest them? Because if you do arrest them and put them in jail you might very well be sentencing them to death because they will be exposed to the virus when they otherwise might not be. Or, from the other perspective, is it justifiable to keep individuals in prison if the flu breaks out in that prison and they are non-violent offenders? Should politicians’ families have preferential access to anti-virals. Should politicians below cabinet level. Should we allocate vaccine on the basis of job status? Age? Wealth?
These are not easy questions and they go right to the very heart of what we collectively see as a fair society.
We hope that avian flu does not make the jump to easy human transmission. But we need to prepare for it and for all of the other nasty bugs which get loose from time to time. This is about when, not if.
Written by jay on November 28th, 2005 with no comments.
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Much noise has been made these last few days about splogs. A splog being a blog which is artificially generated by aggregating rss feeds and then putting them up in seratim. It is the dark side of Web 2.0 - the light side being memeorandum and the broken side being The Canadian Bullet.
Apparently the distinguishing characteristic of a splog is that it is designed to gather Adsense dollars (as if) and not to actually perform any useful function. OK. Those do exist and someone has figured out a way of auto generating them and putting them up on blogspot - a bad thing.
A good thing is Peter Grossmann’s Bird Flu Monitor. Yes, it is automated. Yes it does take content from a variety of sources. No it does not have Adsense in a big way - yet; but there is no reason why it shouldn’t as the site makes a real contribution by bringing together various aspects of the discussion about H5N1.
I don’t have time to read every blog entry on bird flu if I have to go and find them myself. But I do have time to drop by The Bird Flu Monitor every couple of days and see what I missed.
Written by jay on October 27th, 2005 with 2 comments.
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Dead parrot had H5N1 bird flu: Britain (CTV)
Horrible as the prospects of bird flu are, the possibility of no longer thinking dead parrots are merely sleeping would leave me pining for the fjords.
Written by jay on October 24th, 2005 with no comments.
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Over at Instapundit Glenn posts a doctor’s comment,
The main way that flu kills is by predisposing its victims to “superinfection” by bacterial illnesses - in 1918, we had no antibiotics for these superimposed infections, but now we have plenty. Such superinfections, and the transmittal of flu itself, were aided tremendously by the crowded conditions and poor sanitation of the early 20th century - these are currently vastly improved as well. Flu hits the elderly the hardest, but the “elderly” today are healthier, stronger, and better nourished than ever before. Our medical infrastructure is vastly better off, ranging from simple things like oxygen and sterile i.v. fluids, not readily available in 1918, to complex technologies such as respirators and dialysis. Should we be concerned? Sure, better safe than sorry, and concerns about publishing the sequence are worth discussing. Should we panic? No - my apologies to the fearmongers, but we will never see another 1918.
instapundit
Gosh I hope the good doctor is right. He certainly has a point that the “elderly” today are in much better shape than they were in 1918. (Not to mention the fact that four years of WWI was not at all good for the populations in Europe and the worry was not good for the Canadian or American population.) And he is certainly right to say that the medical infrastructure is vastly better than it was in 1918 when medicine was barely scientific.
However, as we saw with the SARS outbreak in Toronto, it does not take many severe respiratory cases to overwhelm or come close to overwhelming that medical infrastructure. An outbreak in which, say, 1 in 10 people caught the flu would put paid to the medical infrastructure. Thee are not 30 million high tech acute care beds in America.
Just as importantly, what is known of the avian flu suggests that fully 50% of those infected die from the disease. Which strongly suggests this is a rather different proposition from the 1918 flu where the mortality was considerably lower and may well have been caused by pre-existing conditions.
The point of writing about avian flu is to try to improve the chances that very early in an outbreak government will take the measure necessary to ensure a) that travel is restricted - shut off completely - from regions where the flu has broken out, b) that internal quarantine is imposed very early on to try to limit, or at least slow, the spread of the flu, c) that schools and public places are shut tight as soon as possible,
This all requires planning. It requires people to be thinking in terms of an entire school year where every child is a home schooled child. Or where groceries are delivered curbside and people dash out to pick them up.
In the absence of a vaccine or any really effective treatment, the only way of slowing the spread of the flu - or any other pathogen - will be very strict quarantine with the full support of the population. It is not fearmongering to consider how this can be implemented. it is simply prudent.
Update: From the Guardian
If that’s not sufficiently scary, there’s more. Epidemiologists estimate the 1918 virus killed 2.5% of those infected. But we know that GenZ kills 70% of the people it infects. In other words, the true worst-case scenario based on 1918 could be 1 billion deaths worldwide. This is what Davis means by the monster at our door and why he believes scientists, and the press, are right to sound the alarm.
the guardian
Written by jay on October 18th, 2005 with 4 comments.
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