To: Henry Niman who wrote (2837) 10/19/2005 7:56:23 PM
From: Elroy Jetson Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 3069
I had someone email me that their pharmacy couldn't fill their prescription for Tamiflu, because its in such short supply that the retail channels can no longer obtain it.
I wonder if that's true everywhere?
Roche had previously said they wouldn't divert the retail channel to fulfill large government orders.
Maybe there's just so much Star Anise to go around.
.
To: Henry Niman who wrote (2837) 10/24/2005 10:14:04 PM
From: johnflipflopper Respond to of 3069
>> Stratfor: Special Report - October 24, 2005
>>
>>
>> Special Report: The Bird Flu and You
>>
>> Stratfor subscribers have been sending us a steady
>> river of requests
>> for our opinion on the bird flu situation. Although
>> we are not medical
>> experts, among our sources are those who are. And
>> here is what we have
>> been able to conclude based on their input and our
>> broader analysis of
>> the bird flu threat:
>>
>> Calm down.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> The Politics of Genetics
>>
>> An uncomfortable but undeniable fact is that there
>> are a great many
>> people and institutions in this world that have a
>> vested interest in
>> feeding the bird flu scare. Much like the "Y2K" bug
>> that commanded
>> public attention in 1999, bird flu is all you hear
>> about. Comparisons
>> to the 1918 Spanish influenza have produced death
>> toll projections in
>> excess of 360 million, evoking images of chaos in
>> the streets.
>>
>> One does not qualify for funding -- whether for
>> academic research,
>> medical development or contingency studies -- by
>> postulating about
>> best-case scenarios. The strategy is to show up
>> front how bad things
>> could get, and to scare your targeted benefactors
>> into having you
>> study the problem and manufacture solutions.
>>
>> This hardly means that these people are evil, greedy
>> or irresponsible
>> (although, in the case of Y2K or when a health
>> threat shuts down
>> agricultural trade for years, one really tends to
>> wonder). It simply
>> means that fear is an effective way to spark
>> interest and action.
>>
>> Current medical technology lacks the ability to cure
>> -- or even
>> reliably vaccinate against -- highly mutable viral
>> infections; the
>> best available medicines can only treat symptoms --
>> like Roche's
>> Tamiflu, which is becoming as scarce as the
>> oftentimes legendary red
>> mercury -- or slow a virus' reproduction rate. Is
>> more research
>> needed? Certainly. But are we on the brink of a
>> cataclysmic outbreak?
>> Certainly not.
>>
>> A bird flu pandemic among the human population is
>> broadly in the same
>> category as a meteor strike. Of course it will
>> happen sooner or later
>> -- and when it does, watch out! But there is no --
>> absolutely no --
>> particular reason to fear a global flu pandemic this
>> flu season.
>>
>> This does not mean the laws of nature have changed
>> since 1918; it
>> simply means there is no way to predict when an
>> animal virus will
>> break into the human population in any particular
>> year -- or even if
>> it will at all. Yes, H5N1 does show a propensity to
>> mutate; and, yes,
>> sooner or later another domesticated animal disease
>> will cross over
>> into the human population (most common human
>> diseases have such
>> origins). But there is no scientifically plausible
>> reason to expect
>> such a crossover to be imminent.
>>
>> But if you are trying to find something to worry
>> about, you should at
>> least worry about the right thing.
>>
>> A virus can mutate in any host, and pound for pound,
>> the mutations
>> that are of most interest to humanity are obviously
>> those that occur
>> within a human host. That means that each person who
>> catches H5N1 due
>> to a close encounter of the bird kind in effect
>> becomes a sort of
>> laboratory that could foster a mutation and that
>> could have
>> characteristics that would allow H5N1 to be
>> communicable to other
>> humans. Without such a specific mutation, bird flu
>> is a problem for
>> turkeys, but not for the non-turkey farmers among
>> us.
>>
>> But we are talking about a grand total of 115 people
>> catching the bug
>> over the course of the past three years. That does
>> not exactly produce
>> great odds for a virus -- no matter how genetically
>> mutable -- to
>> evolve successfully into a human-communicable
>> strain. And bear in mind
>> that the first-ever human case of H5N1 was not in
>> 2003 but in 1997.
>> There is not anything fundamentally new in this
>> year's bird flu scare.
>>
>> A more likely vector, therefore, would be for H5N1
>> to leap into a
>> species of animal that bears similarities to human
>> immunology yet
>> lives in quarters close enough to encourage viral
>> spread -- and lacks
>> the capacity to complete detailed questionnaires
>> about family health
>> history.
>>
>> The most likely candidate is the pig. On many farms,
>> birds and pigs
>> regularly intermingle, allowing for cross-infection,
>> and similar
>> pig-human biology means that pigs serving in the
>> role as mutation
>> incubator are statistically more likely than the odd
>> Vietnamese
>> raw-chicken eater to generate a pandemic virus.
>>
>> And once the virus mutates into a form that is
>> pig-pig transferable, a
>> human pandemic is only one short mutation away. Put
>> another way, a
>> bird flu pandemic among birds is manageable. A bird
>> flu pandemic among
>> pigs is not, and is nearly guaranteed to become a
>> human pandemic.
>>
>> Pandemics: Past and Future
>>
>> What precisely is a pandemic? The short version is
>> that it is an
>> epidemic that is everywhere. Epidemics affect large
>> numbers of people
>> in a relatively contained region. Pandemics are in
>> effect the same,
>> but without the geographic limitations. In 1854 a
>> cholera epidemic
>> struck London. The European settling of the Americas
>> brought disease
>> pandemics to the Native Americans that nearly
>> eliminated them as an
>> ethnic classification.
>>
>> In 1918 the influenza outbreak spread in two waves.
>> The first hit in
>> March, and was only marginally more dangerous than
>> the flu outbreaks
>> of the previous six years. But in the trenches of
>> war-torn France, the
>> virus mutated into a new, more virulent strain that
>> swept back across
>> the world, ultimately killing anywhere from 20
>> million to 100 million
>> people. Some one in four Americans became infected
>> -- nearly all in
>> one horrid month in October, and some 550,000 --
>> about 0.5 percent of
>> the total population -- succumbed. Playing that
>> figure forward to
>> today's population, theoretically 1.6 million
>> Americans would die.
>> Suddenly the fear makes a bit more sense, right?
>>
>>
>> Wrong.
>>
>> There are four major differences between the 1918
>> scenario and any new
>> flu pandemic development:
>>
>> First -- and this one could actually make the death
>> toll higher -- is
>> the virus itself.
>>
>> No one knows how lethal H5N1 (or any animal
>> pathogen) would be if it
>> adapted to human hosts. Not knowing that makes it
>> impossible to
>> reliably predict the as-yet-unmutated virus'
>> mortality rate.
>>
>> At this point, the mortality rate among infected
>> humans is running
>> right at about 50 percent, but that hardly means
>> that is what it would
>> look like if the virus became human-to-human
>> communicable. Remember,
>> the virus needs to mutate before it is a threat to
>> humanity -- there
>> is no reason to expect it to mutate just once. Also,
>> in general, the
>> more communicable a disease becomes the lower its
>> mortality rate tends
>> to be. A virus -- like all life forms -- has a
>> vested interest in not
>> wiping out its host population.
>>
>> One of the features that made the 1918 panic so
>> unnerving is the "W"
>> nature of the mortality curve. For reasons unknown,
>> the virus proved
>> more effective than most at killing people in the
>> prime of their lives
>> -- those in the 15- to 44-year-old age brackets.
>> While there is no
>> reason to expect the next pandemic virus to not have
>> such a feature,
>> similarly there is no reason to expect the next
>> pandemic virus to
>> share that feature.
>>
>> Second, 1918 was not exactly a "typical" year.
>>
>> World War I, while coming to a close, was still
>> raging. The war was
>> unique in that it was fought largely in trenches,
>> among the least
>> sanitary of human habitats. Soldiers not only faced
>> degrading health
>> from their "quarters" in wartime, but even when they
>> were not fighting
>> at the front they were living in barracks. Such
>> conditions ensured
>> that they were: a) not in the best of health, and b)
>> constantly
>> exposed to whatever airborne diseases afflicted the
>> rest of their
>> unit.
>>
>> As such, the military circumstances and style of the
>> war ensured that
>> soldiers were not only extraordinarily susceptible
>> to catching the
>> flu, but also extraordinarily susceptible to dying
>> of it. Over half of
>> U.S. war dead in World War I -- some 65,000 men --
>> were the result not
>> of combat but of the flu pandemic.
>>
>> And it should be no surprise that in 1918,
>> circulation of military
>> personnel was the leading vector for infecting
>> civilian populations
>> the world over. Nevertheless, while the United
>> States is obviously
>> involved in a war in 2005, it is not involved in
>> anything close to
>> trench warfare, and the total percentage of the U.S.
>> population
>> involved in Iraq and Afghanistan -- 0.005 percent --
>> is middling
>> compared to the 2.0 percent involvement in World War
>> I.
>>
>> Third, health and nutrition levels have radically
>> changed in the past
>> 87 years. Though fears of obesity and insufficient
>> school lunch
>> nutrition are all the rage in the media, no one
>> would seriously
>> postulate that overall American health today is in
>> worse shape than it
>> was in 1918. The healthier a person is going into a
>> sickness, the
>> better his or her chances are of emerging from it.
>> Sometimes it really
>> is just that simple.
>>
>> Indeed, a huge consideration in any modern-day
>> pandemic is
>> availability of and access to medical care. Poorer
>> people tend to live
>> in closer quarters and are more likely to have
>> occupations (military,
>> services, construction, etc.) in which they
>> regularly encounter large
>> numbers of people. According to a 1931 study of the
>> 1918 flu pandemic
>> by the U.S. Public Health Service, the poor were
>> about 20 percent to
>> 30 percent more likely to contract the flu, and
>> overall mortality
>> rates of the "well-to-do" were less than half that
>> of the "poor" and
>> "very poor."
>>
>> But the fourth factor, which will pull some of the
>> strength out of
>> any new pandemic, is even more basic than starting
>> health:
>> antibiotics. The 1918 pandemic virus was similar to
>> the more standard
>> influenza virus in that the majority of those who
>> perished died not
>> from the primary attack of the flu but from
>> secondary infections --
>> typically bacteria or fungal -- that triggered
>> pneumonia. While
>> antibiotics are hardly a silver bullet and they are
>> useless against
>> viruses, they raise the simple possibility of
>> treatment for bacterial
>> or fungal illnesses. Penicillin -- the first
>> commercialized antibiotic
>> -- was not discovered until 1929, 11 years too late
>> to help when panic
>> gripped the world in 1918.
>>
>>
>>
To: Henry Niman who wrote (2837) 10/24/2005 11:01:16 PM
From: johnflipflopper Respond to of 3069
There has been human to human transmission of H5N1 since the beginning of 2004.
where is it ? in pittsburg ? in your dream ? in ligand lake ?
More Bird Flu in Russia, UN Says Keep Focus on Asia
By REUTERS
Published: October 24, 2005
Filed at 10:37 p.m. ET
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia confirmed more bird flu cases on Monday, raising fears it could spread over Europe, but a U.N. official said the best way to stop it was for donors to pay up and fight it where it began, among Asian fowl.
Skip to next paragraph The latest case in Russia killed 12 hens at a private dacha in Tambov, 400 km (250 miles) southeast of Moscow, last week. Authorities culled 53 ducks and hens and imposed a quarantine.
Tests confirmed it was the H5N1 avian flu strain which can infect humans, though not yet pass between them, officials said.
The European Union was poised to ban all imports of captive wild birds after a parrot died of H5N1 in quarantine in Britain.
More dead birds were found and taken for tests in Germany, Croatia, Hungary and Portugal as suspect cases multiplied.
But the numbers involved in Europe are still small and no humans there have been infected, unlike Asia where 61 people died after close contact with infected birds.
A World Health Organization official from Asia said Europe still had good prospects of stopping H5N1 reaching its tame bird population because it had reacted faster and more openly.
``There is an excellent chance for Europe to contain the Asian flu,'' said Shigeru Omi.
The U.N. food agency's head said the world must focus on Asia, and on stopping the virus passing between birds, as the best way to prevent the nightmare scenario of it mixing with a human strain to cause pandemic deadly flu.
``Too much time has gone by and even now we seem to focus more on addressing a possible pandemic which is spread from human to human,'' said Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
``It's good to be ready should this happen. But for the time being we have 140 million birds killed or dying or have died because of avian influenza, with $10 billion of costs ... and it is still there (in Asia) that we are having contamination to human beings,'' he told Reuters in an interview in Canada.
He said the FAO had helped develop a $175 million strategy to control H5N1, which surfaced in South Korea two years ago, and had received pledges of $30 million in aid -- but donors had not yet handed over a single cent.
WESTWARDS
U.S. health officials, meanwhile, said on Monday they feared counterfeiters would try to cash in on the demand for Tamiflu, one of the few drugs that can treat bird flu, and said they were putting into effect measures to prevent this.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it would work to help researchers and companies develop new flu drugs that might treat H5N1 and to work quickly to approve them.
Carried by migratory birds, H5N1 has now moved west as far as European Russia, Turkey and Romania.
``If, as we think, migratory birds will be one of the ways by which avian influenza is spreading around the world we can expect ... the problem in the Near East, in East and West Africa and naturally in North America and South America,'' said Diouf.
Croatia said it would cull more poultry after finding two more dead wild swans suspected of having an avian flu strain in a rural area where flu was found last week. The strain has yet to be identified.
Several geese and seagulls found dead north of Lisbon, in a fishing port where migrating birds are common, were being tested for flu, Portugal said.
German officials said on Monday night that 25 geese and ducks had been found dead in a pond near the town of Neuwied, close to the former German capital Bonn. Tests would be carried out on Tuesday to determine whether they had died of bird flu.
Countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have taken steps to try to stop migrating birds mixing with domestic fowl.
To close one possible channel of infection, the European Commission proposed a temporary ban on imports of wild fowl as pets. Veterinary experts will decide on Tuesday.
Fernand Sauer, director of public health and risk assessment at the European Commission, said confusion between different types of influenza was to blame for an exaggerated fear in Europe about the risks, which had reached hysteria.
Countries that have already suffered from flu outbreaks were redoubling their efforts to stop its return.
North Korea said mechanisms were in place to eliminate ``any slight symptoms in time,'' using its experience from an outbreak of a different strain earlier this year when more than 200,000 chickens were destroyed and 1.1 million poultry vaccinated.
A report that China would close its borders if it detected human-to-human transmission of bird flu unsettled Hong Kong stocks, with shares in hotels, retailers and airlines sliding.
An Australian firm said on Monday it was confident a vaccine it was testing in humans could protect against a pandemic form of the H5N1 virus unless it undergoes major genetic changes.
CSL Ltd, the world's largest maker of blood plasma products, has begun human vaccine trials using different dosages and hopes to know results by February.
More Articles in International >
To: Henry Niman who wrote (2837) 10/26/2005 11:26:27 PM
From: johnflipflopper Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 3069
As it is said a liar is always a liar: henry niman -- once was a drowned liar in lake ligand and now lied about human to human bird flu case !!!!
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