The International Herald Tribune is on the case, promoting some serious international support.
<the international community has failed to come forward with sufficient funds to finance chronically needed public health and veterinary responses, research or vaccine development.
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For their part, the governments concerned have sought help from abroad, most recently Vietnam, where the A(H5N1) strain of the virus has killed 12 of the 15 people infected in the last five weeks. > iht.com
The USA goes on about forward defence, invades Osama's hangout and looks for imaginary WMDs in Iraq, but seems to be completely ignoring, or not taking at all seriously, the hugely larger risk from the H5N1 WMD. A bunch of Islamic Jihadis with box-cutters hit the jackpot. They won't achieve such a winner again. They are a low-level threat compared with quarter of the USA's population catching H5N1 and half of them dying [30 million or so dead, of all age groups].
Vietnam producing H5N1 and thereby killing millions of Americans is like Montezuma's Revenge. There's some irony in the fact that the USA isn't doing much at all to help Vietnam to control the disease. Maybe Vietnam doesn't want their help.
Whether Vietnam wants help or not, there should be huge efforts on developing vaccines. The virus seems so endemic now that unlike sars, it doesn't look as though it's going to be bottled up. Vaccination is the only way I know to stop the disease killing. Going to live as a hermit in the hills would be good too.
12 dead of 15 cases is 80%. While that's a small number of cases as a statistical base, it certainly doesn't show any attentuation of the lethality of the bug.
Mqurice |
