Bird Flu Similar To 1918 Virus

[mtblujeans]

I saw this covered on an early morning news broadcast:

National Geographic Story

This recent bird flu outbreak is not a new occurance. What is wrong with our scientific community that we are not more prepared a second time around??

 

[luvwinnie]

Thanks. Going to print this and read this. I believe the problem is they can't develop a vaccine until it starts transmitting person to person...at least that is what I read.

 

[Trish Bessette]

This is something I have been watching very closely. Although they say the likelihood of a pandemic is slim, we still need to get our act together.

I couldn't even imagine if this did happen, there would be no vaccine to save anyone

 

[mickeyfan2]

This recent bird flu outbreak is not a new occurance. What is wrong with our scientific community that we are not more prepared a second time around??

Actually the scientific community has been working on the 1918 flu for years. In the 60s or 70s a scientist went to alaska and took lung samples of 1918 flu bodies frozen in the ground. He tried, but the technology was not there to deduce the genes. They tried again a year or so ago and found that only one of the original bodies was still in good enough shape to get a sample (all the others were too decomposed). The sample matched the Army samples and the gene was discovered to of the bird flu type. The Alaska body was needed to verify the Army samples.

 

[DawnCt1]

I saw this covered on an early morning news broadcast:

National Geographic Story

This recent bird flu outbreak is not a new occurance. What is wrong with our scientific community that we are not more prepared a second time around??

I do hope that your "what's wrong with" question is purely rhetorical. Viruses mutate, even viruses that we have seen before. They have been working the problem for many years now. They are actually pretty well prepared for a pandemic on the Federal level. One of the big concerns is, will local physicians and health departments recognize the beginnings of a flu pandemic when it hits. The other/same big concern is, will the current avian flu mutate and combine with human influenza. That is what they are preparing for as well.

 

[Quackmore]

 

[mtblujeans]

The news program I saw this morning (on CBS?) had a scientist lamenting about how they were NOT prepared for the bird flu as they have been putting their 'time in' on the 'normal' annual flu vaccines. They do not feel they are making enough money on vaccines, apparently, and they want guarantees that all of the vaccine (any of them, I guess) will be purchased by the government if they develop them. According to the statements I heard this AM, if there is a vaccine, they just have not made nearly enough of it for the entire population of any given country and the scientists, themselves, were coming across as being alarmed at the need for it and their being caught unprepared! I don't pretend to be an expert in this area....I am just reacting to what the media/scientists are making public.

 

[mickeyfan2]

The news program I saw this morning (on CBS?) had a scientist lamenting about how they were NOT prepared for the bird flu as they have been putting their 'time in' on the 'normal' annual flu vaccines. They do not feel they are making enough money on vaccines, apparently, and they want guarantees that all of the vaccine (any of them, I guess) will be purchased by the government if they develop them. According to the statements I heard this AM, if there is a vaccine, they just have not made nearly enough of it for the entire population of any given country and the scientists, themselves, were coming across as being alarmed at the need for it and their being caught unprepared! I don't pretend to be an expert in this area....I am just reacting to what the media/scientists are making public.

This is true. The best country only has enough for 40% of their population. The problem is, if we had 100%, it might be the wrong strain by the time it actually happened. That is the same as why we need a new Flu vaccine each year. It always mutates.

 

[Charade]

Umm.. that's not even funny.

 

[Towncrier]

I think that there is something else we should consider before condeming the makers of the vaccines and that is the litigious nature of the American public. It only takes a couple of multi-million dollar wrongful death lawsuits to make the drug makers shy away from creating flu vaccines. The problem is once again the concept of acceptible risk that a lot of people in the US seem unwilling or unable to comprehend. As much good as vaccines do, there are always going to be those few who are going to be harmed by them. Without starting a debate, there are a large number of people who believe that autism is a direct result of childhood vaccinations. Whether or not that is the case, the drug companies are much better off taking the criticism about not making the correct vaccine or not making enough for everyone than they are facing the hoards of personal injury lawyers ready to pounce on them. Darned if you do. Darned if you don't.

 

[DemonLlama]

I heard this story on the way to work on NPR.

It's scary stuff. Here's a few things the segment covered:

The bottom line is: it's not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN.

60 people have died so far (from direct contact with infectd birds) and they are doing all they can to study, learn, and keep it from becoming a human-to-human spread disease, but it WILL happen. It's the nature of viruses to be adaptable. If the virus can now go bird-to-human, it's not long until it goes human-to-human.

The elderly and the very young will be most susceptible.

And until that h-to-h strain emerges, vaccines we can now make will not be very effective. And even those strains, producing at full capacity, cannot create enough vaccine to cover people.

The real strain will take 6-8 months to create a vaccine once they've identified it and that will be too late for many: it will be a pandemic first, with a wait time of more than half a year to produce a vaccine aimed directly at prevention.