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

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (49369)	11/1/2005 8:22:41 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

Stratfor today Now let us qualify that: Since December 2003, the H5N1 bird flu virus -- which has caused all the ruckus -- has been responsible for the documented infection of 121 people, 91 one of whom caught the virus in Vietnam. In all cases where information on the chain of infection has been confirmed, the virus was transmitted either by repeated close contact with fowl or via the ingestion of insufficiently cooked chicken products. In not a single case has human-to-human communicability been confirmed. So long as that remains the case, there is no bird flu threat to the human population of places such as Vietnam at large, much less the United States. In this article , I wrote something similar, this was nearly three weeks ago. cybermusings.blogspot.com 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.