January 28, 2006

• Mortalities from a Flu Pandemic Hard to Predict

  How scary is this!??! like if you get it.. you just drop dead!!! =(

  

  AFP/Getty Images

  A nurse administers a drip to flu patients at a
  hospital in Beijing, Dec. 12, 2005. China is investigating its fifth
  confirmed human case of bird flu. Scientists say it is difficult to
  predict how many people might die in an actual bird-flu pandemic.

   

   

   

  Human Bird-Flu Cases So Far

  Cambodia: Reported its first outbreak of bird flu among
  poultry in 2003 and its first human case in 2005. It’s had four
  confirmed human cases so far, all of them fatal.

  China:
  Battled dozens of bird-flu outbreaks among poultry before confirming
  its first two cases in humans in November. Five human cases have been
  reported so far, two of them fatal. The most recent involved a
  31-year-old female farmer from Liaoning province; she recovered.

  Indonesia:
  Most recent confirmed case involved a 35-year-old man from West Jakarta
  who died Nov. 19. The country has had 14 confirmed cases, all of them
  in 2005; nine have been fatal.

  Thailand: Most
  recent case of bird flu involved a 5-year-old boy who died Dec. 7.
  Results suggest the child was infected from dead chickens in his
  neighborhood in Nakhonnayok province. It was Thailand’s second bird-flu
  death this year and its fifth confirmed case. Since 2004, Thailand has
  reported 22 cases, nine of which have been fatal.

  Vietnam:
  Identified its first human cases of bird flu in January 2004. Since
  then, the country has reported 93 human cases, 42 of them fatal.

  – Maria Godoy

   

   

  
  

  Morning Edition, December 16, 2005 ·
  When public officials talk about bird flu, they often quote a scary
  statistic: Half of all the people known to be infected with the virus
  have died. But scientists say that figure has little bearing on what’s
  likely to happen in an actual pandemic.

  In fact, flu
  experts have pretty much ignored the 50-percent figure when estimating
  how many people might die in a bird-flu pandemic. That’s because such a
  high mortality rate goes against all of our experience with flu
  viruses, says Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
  Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

  “We have never in our
  wildest dreams seen that in our history, where you have something that
  spreads rapidly throughout the world and kills 50 percent of the
  people,” Fauci says. “Even with the infamous 1918 pandemic, we didn’t
  even come close to a 50-percent mortality. It was more like 1.5 to 2
  percent.”

  Of course, that was high enough to kill tens of millions of people worldwide.

  Fauci says one reason flu doesn’t kill more people is that even a
  strain as lethal as the current bird flu usually gets weaker as it
  spreads.

  “It is highly, highly likely that it will
  decrease its mortality and its virulence for humans, because from an
  evolutionary standpoint, it makes no sense for viruses to kill all
  their hosts,” Fauci says.

  That would amount to viral suicide.

  Another problem with the 50-percent figure is that it includes only the
  people who got so sick they were actually tested for bird flu.

  “There probably are milder cases of illness, as well as people who have
  no symptoms whatsoever,” says Dr. Tim Uyeki, a medical epidemiologist
  at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  Uyeki says death rates from viruses like West Nile and SARS seemed very
  high at first. But they began to fall once doctors began finding the
  people who got milder cases.

  And Uyeki says there is
  already some evidence that the current bird-flu virus, known as H5N1,
  doesn’t make everyone it infects severely ill.

  When
  H5N1 surfaced in Hong Kong in 1997, it appeared to kill about a third
  of the people it infected. But Uyeki says a study of poultry workers
  there told a different story.

  “Among market poultry
  workers,” he says, “about 10 percent had antibodies to H5N1 virus,
  suggesting that they had been infected. But these were people who never
  were identified as severe cases, had never been hospitalized.”

  So the actual death rate in Hong Kong may have been much lower than it seemed.

  But if 50-percent mortality is too high, it’s hard to know what the right number is.

  One reason is that the H5N1 virus isn’t acting the way most viruses do,
  says Dr. Frederick Hayden of the University of Virginia.

  “This virus so far has not shown any diminution in virulence for birds
  or for mammalian hosts,” Hayden says. “If anything, we’re seeing
  evidence of increased pathogenicity.”

  when i told eli!! it was the cutest thing he wrote this

  sonik31: if there was a big catastrophe
  
  sonik31: and something happened
  
  sonik31: to society
  
  sonik31: i hope to dear god that i can be with you
  
  sonik31: that would be so romantic

  awww my boyfriend is such a sweetheart!

  • 12:17 am
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