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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 10K a day who wrote (49316)	10/22/2005 8:06:39 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Respond to of 50167

FLU war is a dud... Chickens are not going to disrupt 16 bn year of evolution.....please read this, you may not agree but we will move on... With or without Gods, the risk of tragedies is high. We live in treacherous surroundings; we are bombarded with notions of threats from asteroids every day, global warming or endemic virus that can possibly eliminate us. However, we cannot live in an overkill state of preparedness. Even when the risks are “relatively low,” we the ‘doubters’ make up numbers, killing hundreds of millions of people in the next few years justifying precautions and preparedness. Last week's announcement that the 1918 influenza pandemic was caused by a virus that jumped from birds to humans has increased fears that another avian flu crisis might be looming. As we stare into future, we worry about ‘Global Epidemic,’ the most recent is the Avian Flu, the last one was the Mad cow disease. We forget that in our infancy we have conquered something as ugly as plague without the fifth generation antibiotics; we survived as a race even after such epidemics when there was no cure for leprosy or plague. The moment the World Health Organization confirmed Indonesia's fifth human case of avian influenza after a 21-year-old man in Lampung province in Sumatra tested positive for the virus, a man who was in direct contact with bird breeding, WHO’s Nabarro floated that scary 150 million number on September 29 as his upper-end estimate of how many a 1918-like H5N1 pandemic might kill, with 5 million as his lower-end estimate for a pandemic more like the mild ones of 1957 and 1968. Preparing is one thing, exaggeration is totally another. Risk-talkers should not have vested interests; there are other kinds of mortalities that are pressing and can be addressed with proper distribution of drugs that are available. Aids in sub-Saharan Africa needs more drugs, famine in general needs more food and better distribution. Overstatement of facts, fiction of numbers and ideas have become part of our daily routine. We live in fear of the unknown; we create our own demons in our heads. At the turn of this millennium, the talk was all about Y2K and Nostradamus' apocalyptic prophecies. Nothing came to fore, the turn to the new millennium happened very serenely; no nuclear reactors clogged, no planes dropped from the skies, but preparations were made for the worst. cybermusings.blogspot.com