This new strain of flu. H5N1. Any of y'all read about it? It's supposed to be the next new horror pandemic. Scares the living crapola out of me!
What scares me more is our "government" that will be "taking care of us".



Ronald Reagan once said something like.........."the most terrifying words in the English language are...........I'm from the Government and I'm here to help you." hahahahahhhh

Is that the Asian bird flu or some other little delight that I haven't heard about yet ?? I think infected birds have gotten as far as Scandinavia and some North Sea coasts (From China and far east) but I don't think we have had a human case yet.

here's the most recent cdc link on the H5N1
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avian/index.htm

In 2003-2004 the outbreak in southeast asia infected something like 70 people with 40-45 dying. It's not the old and the babies either, these were healthy young people.  It appears that the main resevoir of the virus are ducks and geese and they spread it to the chickens and then the pultry workers get it from handling the chickens during processing.  There was one suspected case of person to person transmission in either thailiand or vietnam.  The major concern of the WHO now is that it has begun moving from china to russia and into parts of northern europe among birds.  The big issue here is that the more widerspread the virus is, the greater the chance of someone or some animal getting concommitant infections with the h5n1 strain and another strain of flu (such as swine flu). With the two strains inside a host there is a chance that the viruses will swap dna and the more lethal strain will pick up the person to person transmission gene or genes from the the less lethal strain. If that happens we are all in a world of shaZam! because then the lethal h5n1 strain will be able to spread by person to person contact.  If that happens I'm moving my family to the mountains for the next 6 months or so.  Early estimates are 2-3 million dead in the US alone if the pandemic hits before they have any developed vaccine for it.

jake

wow.  That is prety scary.  Lets just hope that this doesn't turn into the next plague.

Thanks! I went to the CDC site and "signed up" for updates and such.
Thanks again. Wilson

another problem is with gloablization.  transmission would be unprecedented with the fact that you can get all the way around the world in less than 24 hours.

Not very encouraging  

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/20/MTFH19822_2005-09-20_05-56-51_SCH016489.html

Wow. That's a completely downer article. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping it's not as bad as what I'm reading.

mother nature has her ways of thinning out the population of any particular species that gets too successful at breeding -- too bad they all involve dying horribly.  why can't there be a virus that just makes you go to sleep and not wake up?

what most people don't realize is that the most recent flu pandemics were in 1957-58 and to a lesser extent in the late 60's . Most of us tend to think of the last pandemic as being the bubonic plague that spread across europe and the middle east in the 1300's (if memory serves me).  Viruses and bacteria are faster at evolving than we are.  If you think of coevution between us and microorganism as an arms race ala the cold war, we are losing badly.

jake

Well...  It's either die in a few days from a virus/plague/flu pandemic or starve to death 'cause oil costs to much to farm and transport food.

I think I'll take the quick death.