Last night on NPR I heard a piece about this new subculture that's popped up. they're called "flu preppers" and they are all about getting thru the impending bird flu pandemic. I'm old enough to remember when neighbors were building bomb shelters and outfitting their basements as emergency shlters in case Kurschev (sp?) and the Russians called Kennedy's bluff during the Cuban missle crisis and this sounds alot like that. Maybe a bit kooky but it provokes a question in me...
What do hobbyists and providers think about this posssible pandemic and what, if any, behaviors would/have you changed to take precautions for this. refuse to see foreign hobbyists? Take down your backyard bird feeders? cut back on touring? cancel your southseas/indonesia vacation? stay our of asian restaurants? Take a vacation from hobbying/providing? Nothing at all?
What are your thoughts about this stuff?
D7
Just got a combo flu shot/B12 when I had my STD tests done here.
All the Tamiflu in the world won't stop a ever changing virulent bird flu.
http://aim-med.org/index.html
I swear, the title of your post was my grandmother's favorite saying.
. . . to stop breeding poultry -- chicken and ducks -- until all is clear. But I haven't heard anyone suggest that yet.
We don't have to eat chicken. Have the chicken farmers raise pigs. But then we might have a swine flu epidemic. 
I got better things to concern myself with than the latest popular nosophobia. Fuck the dental dams and such I'm look'n for some unbridled Asian & Greek this weekend.
Quit fucking chickens, people. Kids these days...
Also, their music? It's just noise.
If it goes in the same pattern as the 1919 pandemic did, it will probably run it's course over nine months and be gone. With the worldwide networks we have, it will probably travel globally the way '19 flu did through the US.
It's not going to be like "The Stand" or even approach it, but at it's peak, it's going to feel
like it's going to kill the whole world.
Precautions like handwashing will ultimately help very little. It's airborne.
I'm told that gargling with salt water is actually more effective against it than most people think, but gargling won't help you once you have the flu.
The best precaution is to live alone indoors for 9 months or till there's a vaccine. For most of us, that has as a higher chance of killing us than the flu does.
Almost any precaution you could take with the hobby will be ineffective, including not hobbying. With an airborne virus, sexual contact doesn't matter, and there will be too many other vectors. It will run it's course, and either your number will come up, or it won't.
-- Modified on 11/12/2005 1:39:12 AM
Unless you're 2 or 72, or live in a third-world country, you're probably not going to die from any flu. It's the bacterial infections that kill, not the flu. The flu just leaves you vulnerable to the other infections.
In 1919, they didn't have antibiotics. Pneumonia killed lots of people. That's typically how you die from the flu.
The media isn't going to tell you this, because a non-story doesn't help sell advertising.
The avian flu is taken seriously by the healthcare community because of analogies with the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919. Estimates of global mortality ranged from 25-50 million.
This Spanish flu epidemic was different than the conventional ones we're familiar with, because of its high mortality rate (~2.5%) and that so many of it's victims were young adults and in good health. A recent Science article characterized the virulent response to a 'cytokine storm' (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/21/124340/10), one in which there is an overreaction by the immune system, leading to shock and death. Although it is true with the typical influenza virus that secondary bacterial infections cause pneumonia, either viruses or bacteria may cause pneumonia. It seems likely that the virus responsible for the Spanish flu pandemic was capable of causing pneumonia without a secondary bacterial infection. There was a recent Nova-PBS on the Spanish flu which noted that an apparently healthy man could board a trolley in S.F. with a slight cough, and be dead by his scheduled stop.
Our most advanced recombinant studies on preserved lung tissues have shown that the Spanish influenza virus was caused by the H1N1 strain, which is related to the one (H5N1) that is now prevalent in infected birds. As noted above, the mortality rate was ~2.5% for the Spanish flu virus, while the estimated human mortality rate for the H5N1 virus is ~50%. However, the actual numbers of dead patients are probably too low to establish he true mortality rates.
As far as I know, there is no record of human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 strain. For this to happen, the virus must mutate (i.e., evolution through genetic recombination in infected patients) to a more transmissible form.
Although the Roche drug Tamiflu might be useful as a prophylactic, there is only a narrow time-window for administration.
One other note. Our system for delivering conventional vaccines is now in tatters. My understanding is that there are now substantial shortages this year, which mirrors the problems that we had last year, when shortfalls then were caused by quality control problems by the 'sole' vendor, Chiron. So, I wouldn't be too sanguine about the U.S. development and delivery of an effective vaccine to the avian bird form, anytime soon.
-- Modified on 11/13/2005 10:57:36 PM
-- Modified on 11/13/2005 11:04:03 PM
by qualified medical people states that when the number of people who die from a contagious disease reaches 40, it usually means that an epidemic is not for off. 40 sounds like nothing, but supposedly it is the magic number that leads to pandemics.