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Biotech / Medical : SARS and Avian Flu -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (2590)	10/11/2005 6:01:51 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 4232

Thanks for the view. Interesting. Correct assessment of risk, as your handle indicates, is an important part of reading the news. my patients seemed more nervous than usual. btw, I am not a medical authority of any kind. I like to think I can assess and balance risks at times though. Doctors are sometimes wrong. An example: I was diagnosed with arthritis when I considered it to be a pulled hip ligament about two years ago. I had climbed over a high fence, didn't have a problem one side of it, I did on the other. Since then I have made a full recovery and performed heavy manual labor for about a year after that. "Arthritis" gone! Now sure, hypochondriacs will all over react to a medical scare, but they will always find something to over react too. They are not part of the story to be considered. That pressure on the health system will always be there. A placebo administered by the patients doctor could possibly be the best solution. However, requesting a prescription "in case it occurs" is not a hypochondria type of condition imho. That is called "forward planning" in case there is an outbreak. I think Elroy's reply to your same question on another thread is appropriate. mad cow disease weren't learned by our leaders — that potential health threats are more effectively examined in the laboratory than at a news conference. Sorry. The good doctor Marc Siegel made a slight BLUNDER there imho. -LOL- As if ALL scientists paid by whoever can be expected to tell the truth. It was only the outcry by concerned scientists and PLUS the outcry by the popular press that started to reverse the BSE debacle in the UK. Marc Siegel does not sound concerned by crisis type health threats by those remarks. Foolish even. Mad Cow disease (also the "Foot and Mouth" outbreak which forced many animal culls), were very much real in the UK. We were under siege for some considerable period of time. Those risks have been properly dealt with now after many initial mistakes. I do not think many other countries deal with those problems as well as we do now. [i.e. read:- I am real concerned if my sirloin steak was not bred and grown locally in the UK these days. I have scientific training and saw the tricks played in supressing news etc by those with influence or power wrt the BSE crisis. The guys who could lose money and so forth] Very prominent during the UK's "bad period" BSE crisis, the mid 1990's, was the relentless official government press saying there was no problem. Playing down the risks all the time without a thought. There was real definite risk. People started to die and the deaths could have gone off the chart unless something was done. Governments and officials do the daftest things (usually) in times of real crisis, you have to be prepared (as best you can), against that for a start. During the mid 1990's, even thge UK's cats and dogs were better protected against infection by BSE then humans protected against the human equivalent; Jakob-Creutzfeldt disease. onto the Avian flu issue.. The fact that a large portion of the wild bird population are now infected with H5N1 is a consideration here. because millions of birds throughout Asia have been infected When the UK government and local councils started to buy protection for their employees, I decided it was time to start taking protective action myself. Government experts and decisions are usually nearly always wrong, maybe "nearly right" lots of times, they might get a course of action right one day though. I doubt it though. My protective action will probably be not needed, or maybe even ineffective if there is an outbreak, but the assessment of the risks involved made the decision clear for me. What the good doctor Marc Siegel writes makes no difference to my analysis. He reinforces my conclusions if anything.

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (2590)	10/11/2005 7:57:04 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 4232

<"No. Tamiflu is an antiviral drug that has not yet been proved effective against bird flu. And even if it worked, there's still no bird flu to treat."> I think it has been proven to be fairly effective. Whether that lasts is another matter as the virus is already being treated with Tamiflu and the H5N1 which can avoid Tamiflu's agency will go on to produce. So Marc Siegel was wrong in his first sentence. Then what's this "three times per century" business. There's no law of nature which says that. < Though flu pandemics occur on the average of three times per century, and we are clearly overdue (the last was in 1968),> We aren't overdue. It's not like an earthquake, or volcano, which absorbs natural pressures which have to eventually be released. There's no due date for a high-mortality viral epidemic. Then he starts with the "over-reaction" nonsense. <Why the overreaction? For one thing, direct comparisons to the Spanish flu of 1918, a scourge that killed more than 50 million people worldwide, has alarmed the public unnecessarily. In fact, there are many scenarios in which the current bird flu won't mutate into a form as deadly as the 1918 virus. > There has been gross under-reaction. If people had reacted to the threat properly, there would now be vaccines galore and Tamiflu and Relenza and other treatments waiting by the ton in warehouses around the world. He has the benign-diagnosis psychosis I mentioned. He assumes the problem will be the smallest one. It might be. But if it isn't, then what? If mortality remained at 50%, and half the world was infected, then there would be something like a billion dead people. If those billion people are worth say $1 million each, that would be $1000 trillion in damage. Not to mention economic losses. But hang on, they aren't all worth $1 million each. Lots of Americans are only worth $50,000 and some even have negative value. It's only the average Yank that is worth $2 million in road death calculations. Worldwide, the average value of those killed would perhaps be only $100,000 each [ignoring economic losses too and you can be sure those will be enormous - McDonald's sales will drop for a start; no more Happy Meals]. That would be $100 trillion in human life losses. That's a big loss in case Marc Siegel is not up with economics. The USA spends $100s of billions on much lesser threats, such as a shortage of Iraqi oil, or a dislike of Saddam. His sense of time is odd too. "Long before" for example. <Unfortunately, public health alarms are sounded too often and too soon. SARS was broadcast as a new global killer to which we had zero immunity, and yet it petered out long before it killed a single person in the United States.> Sars killed a bunch of people in Toronto and some in western Canada. Which is not a long way from the USA. Maybe he's geographically challenged, as are many Americans, and thinks Canada is near Taiwan. If it hadn't been for public uproar, masks coming out, avoidance of crowds etc, sars could well have done much better. Also, sars was good training for governments, the medical guild and public that there are rampant infections which can take over in a short time. Sars was a convenient live-fire training course which might minimize damage from H5N1. Already, the medical guilds and politicians are on the case in regard to H5N1 [not that "already" is the right word, as they are very late to the party but it's better than normal]. Reading to the bottom, he confirms my diagnosis of him as having benign-diagnosis psychosis. <The public must be kept in the loop, but potential threats should be put into context. The worst case is not the only case. > He should get treatment, urgently. Mqurice PS: Suppose there are 30% of Americans catch the bug without a vaccine being available, and mortality is only 30%, that would mean 30 million dead Americans. At $2 million each, that would be $60 trillion. Oh gee, that's a big problem. Not to mention economic losses too. This part is a bit goulish, but there is an energy shortage. If they were used as power station fuel, or their fat esterified, they could make up the fuel deficit and lead to lower prices for survivors. SUVs could drive again!! On clear freeways. It's an ill wind that blows nobody good. Every cloud has a silver lining.