Thread: Pandemic - A Nightmare Scenario

Another benefit of globalism....

from the nydailynews.com

A nightmare scenario

Should we sound the alarm for a worldwide epidemic that might not occur? There is no choice with the avian flu emerging from Asia. Last week's disclosure that an Indonesian man tested positive for the bird flu that has already killed more than 50 people in Southeast Asia was just the latest chilling news about the disease. Should it develop certain genetic changes, international health experts warn, bird flu could spark a global pandemic, infecting as much of a quarter of the world's population and killing as many as 180 million to 360 million people - at least seven times the number of AIDS deaths, all within a matter of weeks.

This is utterly different from ordinary flu, which kills between 1 million and 2 million people worldwide in a typical year. In the worst previous catastrophic pandemic, in 1918, more than 20 million died from the Spanish Flu. That's more than the number of people who died from the Black Death in the Middle Ages, and more people killed in 24 weeks than AIDS killed in 24 years.

There are three elements to a pandemic. First, a virus emerges from the pool of animal life that has never infected human beings, meaning no person has antibodies to fight it. Second, the virus has to make us seriously ill. Third, the virus must be capable of moving swiftly from human to human through coughing, sneezing or just a handshake.

For avian flu, the first two elements are already with us. Well over half the people who have contracted it have died. The question now is whether the virus will meet the third condition: mutating so that it can spread rapidly from human to human.

The new flu has already moved from chickens to other birds and on to pigs. The latter often serve as a vessel for mixing human and animal viruses because the receptors on the respiratory cells of pigs are similar to those of humans. This illustrates the dangers we face, because this mixture of bird flu and human flu, in an animal or a person, could cause the viruses to exchange genetic materials and create an entirely new viral strain capable of sustaining efficient human-to-human transmission.

That would be the tipping point to a pandemic.

Nobody knows just how close we might be to such a crisis, but experts are alarmed because we are singularly ill-prepared. Worldwide, we currently produce only about 300 million doses of flu vaccine a year to serve more than 6 billion people. A pandemic that began in Asia could race around the globe in days or weeks, given the number of airliners crisscrossing the oceans from Tokyo, Vietnam and Indonesia to New York, Los Angeles and London.

We should be doing a whole lot more.

First: We need operational blueprints to get various populations through one to three years of a pandemic. We must coordinate the responses of the medical community, of food providers, of transportation and of care for first responders from public health, law enforcement and emergency management at the international, federal, state and local levels.

Second: We must strengthen the World Health Organization so that it can be an accurate clearinghouse of information about the scope and location of the disease, should it begin to spread, and quell false rumors that could lead to global panic.

Third: We must track the human cases already documented so as to gain the very earliest warning of any transformation of the disease, and thus of an emerging pandemic. Days would be critical.

Fourth: The Bush administration must think of this as terrorism to the nth degree and immediately set up a senior-level emergency task force to develop a strategy. It could serve as a permanent framework for curtailing the spread of future infectious diseases.

Fifth: We must prioritize research money to develop a vaccine, expand the production of flu vaccine and stockpile antiviral medications. It would be irresponsible to begrudge time and money.

A pandemic could well bring global, national and regional economies to an abrupt halt in a world that relies on the speed and distribution of so many products. It could also lead many countries to impose useless but highly destructive quarantines that would disrupt trade, travel and production - something that has never happened with AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis. At home, many venues of human contact - schools, movie theaters, transportation hubs and businesses - would have to be shuttered.

Imagine the chaos. These killer viruses simply can't be isolated in any part of the world. If avian flu were allowed to develop into a pandemic, it would be a direct threat to our health, security and prosperity.

The word influenza derives from the Latin influentia, reflecting the belief at the time that epidemics were due to the influence of the stars. Today, we have moved far beyond that fantasy, but even so, the world is clearly not ready for an avian-flu pandemic. With the scientific consensus already shifting from if to when the next global outbreak takes place, we have no time to lose.

Originally published on June 20, 2005

With the scientific consensus already shifting from if to when the next global outbreak takes place, we have no time to lose.

OUTSTANDING POST SCARECROW. The medical implications of this issue are enourmous. I am talking black plaque big. Thousands, if not HUNDRED'S OF THOUSANDS, or MILLIONS of people could die, and quite frankly and sadly, WILL die from this problem. This is a very informative piece and it is right on point. When not if

WAKE UP!!!!

Scarecrow you brought up a great article and Good point SIXX! read more.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/s ... hub=Health
http://www.stevequayle.com/index1.html

For all the previous reports of dieases in the news including TB, bird flu ect click here:
http://www.stevequayle.com/News.alert/0 ... index.html

Pandemic could cause food shortages, expert warns
Canadian Press

An influenza pandemic would dramatically disrupt the processing and distribution of food supplies across the world, emptying grocery store shelves and creating crippling shortages for months, an expert warned Thursday.

Dr. Michael Osterholm suggested policy makers must start intensive planning to figure out how to ensure food supplies for their populations during a time when international travel may be grounded or severely cut back, when workers are too sick to process or deliver food and when people will be too fearful of disease to gather in restaurants.

Food and other essential goods like drugs and surgical masks will be available at best in limited supplies, Osterholm cautioned in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, which devoted a number of articles to the threat of pandemic influenza.

He saved his most flatly worded warning, however, for a news conference organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes the respected journal. In an interview from Washington following the briefing, he repeated his blunt message of how dire things would be if a pandemic starts in the short term.

"We're pretty much screwed right now if it happens tonight," said Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Osterholm said the "just-in-time" delivery model by which modern corporations operate means food distribution networks don't have warehouses brimming with months worth of inventory.

Most grocery store chains have only several days worth of their most popular commodities in warehouses, he explained, with perhaps 30 days worth of stock for less popular items.

He pointed to the short-term shortages that occur when winter storms threaten communities, then suggested people envisage the possibility of those shortages dragging on for somewhere between 18 months and three years as the expected successive waves of pandemic flu buffet the world.

"I think we'll have a very limited food supply," he said in the interview.

"As soon as you shut down both the global travel and trade . . . and (add to it) the very real potential to shut down over-land travel within a country, there are very few areas that will be hit as quickly as will be food, given the perishable nature of it."

Osterholm has been one of the most vocal proponents of the urgent need to prepare for a flu pandemic that could sicken at least a third of the world's population and kill many millions. However, he is not alone in fearing the world may be facing a pandemic, widely viewed as the single most disruptive and deadly infectious disease event known to humankind.

The lingering outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu strain that has decimated poultry stocks in wide swathes of Southeast Asia has influenza experts the world over losing sleep over the possibility the highly virulent virus will mutate or evolve to the point where it can spread to and among humans, starting a pandemic.

According to the official World Health Organization tally, at least 103 people have been infected with H5N1 influenza since December 2003 in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. That count doesn't include a farm worker in Indonesia who was recently confirmed to have been infected with - and recovered from - H5N1.

It also doesn't include six new cases which came to light this week in media reports from Vietnam. While Vietnamese authorities haven't notified WHO of the cases, the agency said in a statement Thursday the reports "appear to be accurate."

Official and unofficial tallies put the human death toll at 54 since December 2003.

Laurie Garrett, a fellow at the council, noted the unprecedented potential of a pandemic to wreak economic and political havoc.

"Frankly no models of social response to such a pandemic have managed to factor in fully the potential effect on human productivity," Garrett, a Pulitzer-prize winning former journalist and author of The Coming Plague, said in an article in the journal.

"It is therefore impossible to reckon accurately the potential global economic impact."

Osterholm said it is incumbent on governments to start identifying essential basic commodities and figuring out supply and delivery for a time when long-distance truckers may balk at travelling to affected communities and armed forces personnel may be too sick to fill in the gaps.

http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/lead-story6.htm

Flu pandemic looms, experts warn world
Many millions will die if Southeast Asian bird virus mutates to lethal form, spreads

Sabin Russell, Chronicle Medical Writer

A lineup of leading infectious disease experts warned Wednesday that the world is unprepared for the health and economic consequences of an outbreak of pandemic influenza that could spring from a lethal strain of bird flu now ravaging poultry flocks in Southeast Asia.

In commentaries published in the British science journal Nature, doctors used some of the strongest language yet to suggest that the bird flu virus known as H5N1 could mutate into a form easily transmitted among people, creating a strain capable of killing millions.

"This virus has the potential to trigger the next pandemic, which, judging from history, is well overdue,'' wrote Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. "Clearly, there is much to be accomplished, and time is of the essence.''

Flu pandemics are global outbreaks of virulent influenza caused by a viral strain so different from those of prior years that the human population has no natural resistance to it.

The 1918 Spanish flu was such a pandemic, and it killed an estimated 20 million to 100 million people around the globe. The H5N1 virus has worried flu experts since 1997, when it first appeared in the Hong Kong chicken markets as a lethal virus dubbed bird Ebola. After it infected 18 people, killing six of them, Chinese authorities ordered the slaughter of 1.5 million chickens, abruptly stopping the outbreak.

In December 2003, H5N1 re-emerged in Southeast Asia and has killed millions of birds and 53 people. Efforts to contain the virus by culling birds have failed. The virus is being spread by wild ducks, which carry the virus but don't die of it.

In an interview, Fauci said the purpose of the Nature commentaries is to draw more world attention to the problem. "The ingredients (for a pandemic) are starting to accumulate,'' he said. "This is a situation that might go away this season, but it's not going away forever.''

Fauci said that federal spending on influenza preparedness has increased to $419 million from $40 million over the past five years but concedes he is not satisfied with the United States' current level of readiness.

For example, even though an experimental H5N1 vaccine is being tested, the system for manufacturing it -- the same system that produces millions of ordinary flu shots -- is failure-prone. "Capacity needs to be built up,'' Fauci said.

Similarly, the federal government has stockpiled only enough Tamiflu, an antiviral drug that has shown promise against bird flu, to treat 2.3 million Americans. That is less than 1 percent of the population. Great Britain has ordered enough to cover 25 percent of its people.

"We're definitely going to increase the stockpile. That's for sure,'' Fauci said, calling it a top priority of the Department of Health and Human Services. Just how much drug the government wants, he wouldn't say.

Swiss pharmaceuticals maker Roche Inc. produces the entire world supply of the drug at a single European plant. Federal authorities have been negotiating with Roche to build a Tamiflu factory in the United States.

In another Nature commentary, famed virologist Dr. David Ho of New York's Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center argued that China needs to confront the emerging threat of bird flu openly. "The world, China included, must respond as if the next pandemic is imminent,'' he wrote. Ho estimated that up to 207,000 Americans could die in it. "What will the death toll be in China?" he asked.

Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, warned in his Nature paper of the economic consequences of a major pandemic.

"The world today is much more vulnerable to the collapse of trade than it was in 1918,'' he wrote. He dubbed the potential economic fallout "pandemic shock.''

Osterholm wrote that an H5N1 pandemic strain could rival the devastation of the 1918 pandemic. Industrialized nations reliant on "just in time" delivery of health care goods do not have enough medical supplies to care for the sick. "Nor are there detailed plans on how to handle the dead bodies whose numbers will soon outstrip our ability to process them,'' he wrote.

Osterholm said the world's leading economic powers need to confront the problem directly at the forthcoming G8 meeting in Scotland. He calculates that, with the world population swelled to 6.5 billion, a flu strain as lethal as the one in 1918 could kill 180 million to 360 million people worldwide.

Also an expert in terrorism, Osterholm observed that there were ample warning signs that an event such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was possible. Those warnings were fully recognized only after the fact.

"People like myself are often seen as scaremongers," he said, "but I'm afraid we are doing this all over again."

©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

I've heard this issue about the pademic a while back.

Not exactly sure if this is true or not.

There is nothing to wake up to on this one.

If the super bug hits somewhere, it WILL make it into this country, by airline, or a pedestrian.
Some America-hater will go out of their way to make sure that the bug hits us, in case we get lucky at first.

W.H.O. and the CDC are all obsessed about AIDS, and their gay-friendly agendas.

If the bug hits, you will either get lucky, or you wont.


-n

About all we as individuals can do is to be aware and make our families, friends, associates, etc. aware of the potential physical and economic danger.

It would certainly be prudent to have a good stock of non-perishable food items as a backup to the food supply disruption. Limiting travel and contact with people will be a difficult, but perhaps necessary component.

I am sure there are other potential safety measures that can be taken. I have seen pictures and film of Asians wearing surgical masks. I believe these viruses enter through the nose and mouth. Perhaps Sixx or another medical person can enlighten us as to what physical precautions could be taken. Surgical masks may become the fashion rage of the next decade and standard wear for people going out in public.

As I said in my tag line, another benefit of globalization. We have been relatively insulated from the worst of these diseases in this country. With millions of people pouring in from Latin America, tons of products and people coming from the far east, we are opening ourselves up more and more to the worst the world has to offer. Thank you, Free Traders!!!