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

To: Think4Yourself who wrote (2637)	10/13/2005 9:56:22 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4232

Okay, so how many of the H5N1 dead were aged over 60 and how many aged over 60 were infected? Was that ratio lower than those aged between 20 and 50? < Supposedly H5N1 has caused the same storms in the deaths in Asia. The people killed were not the old and infirm > What was the age distribution of those killed in the Spanish flu and were they also crowded in the trenches, ready for the infection to pass from person to person? Did the age distribution of those killed match the age distribution of people alive at the time? There were not many people aged over 60 in 1918. Life expectancy was a LOT lower then and amidst a huge baby boom of the era around the world, the proportions of old were much much lower than now. Families of 10 were common then. How were cytokine 'storms' measured in those days? Presumably the same 'storms' applied to sars and to other influenzas, which contrarily to that 'cytokine storm' theory, kill the old. I don't believe it. Got data? Here's the population pyramid for Vietnam. census.gov Note the lack of old people. Maybe 5% are over age 60, [4 million of 84 million] so with deaths of hang on, I'll get the UN figures... here we are: who.int 91 cases and 41 deaths. So 2 of the deaths should have been old people if mortality is uniform across age groups and 1 if the cytokine storm theory is correct. And of the 91, there should be 4 old people if the infection rate matches the population distribution, which I doubt. I expect old people aren't messing with the chickens in the markets as much as the younger ones. So I guess there are 2 cases of infection over age 60 in Vietnam and 1 death. Not much data. Those are not large numbers on which to base epidemiological theories such as "cytokine storm" in the healthy young. Mqurice