Tejeck, a couple of glitches in your review: <As for the mortality rate..........the rate to date is 50%. >
Initially it was 70%. Now it's down to cumulative mortality of 50% [meaning recent death rate is even lower].
BUT. And that is a BIG but. But that is with Tamiflu and whatever other treatments the patients are getting. Without Tamiflu the death rate would be higher.
As you might have heard, there isn't enough Tamiflu, or anything else, for mass treatment in the next 6 months, when the bug could become rampant.
What matters is the death rate when untreated. While there is the wishful-thinking idea that a virus usually becomes less fatal during genetic drift, reassortment, recombination, that's only a probabilistic outcome. It's not necessarily the case. The mortality rate could well be 70%. Or even worse.
<Human to human transmission is possible but not until the virus mutates at least once. >
Logic error. If the bug can hop from a live chicken to a live human, as has been happening all too often, then it can hop from a live human to a live human.
No more mutation is needed. The need for the change is to make the virus virulently transmissible from human to human. With the current transmissibility, which is not much, just as it is not easily passed from bird to human, there's no risk of a pandemic. The pandemic will come from the genetic change.
That might all seem a bit pedantic, but let's keep things straight. Humans can infect humans as easily as birds can infect humans, and I expect more so as humans kiss more humans than they kiss birds. Though perhaps the fingers in mouth vector is more important than aerosols or kissing. Bird handlers putting their fingers in their mouths is perhaps the main method of propagation from bird to human.
Mqurice |
