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Something to Really Scare You


BoomerPete

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What should we really be scared about?

Rogue Nations? ... Terrorists? ... Nukes? ... Terrorists with Nukes? ... AIDS/HIV?

Nope ... Turns out that relative to the above (the most lethal of which has been AIDS btw) what we should be really concerned about is ...

Bird Flu.

Read on:

IHT Article: Tens of Millions Could Die From Flu

Tens of millions could die from flu

By Keith Bradsher The New York Times Tuesday, November 30, 2004

HONG KONG A global pandemic of avian influenza is "very, very likely" and could kill tens of millions of people worldwide, a top World Health Organization official said Monday.

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Governments should be prepared to close schools, office buildings and factories in case of a pandemic, and should work out emergency staffing to prevent a breakdown in basic public services like electricity and transport, said Dr. Shigeru Omi, the organization's regional director for Asia and the Pacific.

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Such arrangements may be needed if the disease infects 25 to 30 percent of the world's population, Omi said. That is the World Health Organization's estimate for what could happen if the disease - found mainly in chickens, ducks and other birds - develops the ability to spread easily from person to person.

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Deaths associated with the rapid spread of a new form of influenza would be high, he said. "We are talking at least 2 to 7 million, maybe more - 20 million or 50 million, or in the worst case, 100" million, he said.

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While many influenza experts have discussed similar figures privately, Omi's remarks represented the first time a top public health official had given such an estimate in public. But his remarks on the likelihood that the disease would start spreading easily went beyond the assessment of many scientists, who say that too little is known about the virus to gauge the odds that it will become readily transmissible.

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Dr. Malik Peiris, a top influenza researcher at Hong Kong University, said that Omi's range of potential fatalities was realistic and consistent with current research into the A(H5N1) avian influenza virus. The biggest questions, he said, were whether the disease would develop the ability to spread easily from person to person and, if it did, whether it would retain its current deadliness.

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"H5N1 in its present form has a pretty lethal effect on humans," he said.

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A few analysts have suggested that the death toll could be considerably higher. Dr. Henry Niman, a medical researcher in Pittsburgh who criticizes the World Health Organization as being too conservative, said that with more than 70 percent of the human victims of the disease dying so far, the death toll could exceed one billion if the disease were to spread rapidly among people.

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But Omi and Peiris each pointed out that the high death rate recorded so far might be overstated, because people with less severe cases of the disease might not be diagnosed as having it.

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Peiris also pointed out that one likely way for the disease to acquire the ability to pass easily from person to person - the acquisition of human influenza genetic material by the virus - could also reduce the death rate to the range described by Omi. "If the virus reassorts and picks up human influenza genes, then it's quite possible the severity could be limited," Peiris said.

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The World Health Organization, a Geneva-based UN agency, has reported 44 confirmed human cases of A(H5N1), 32 of whom have died, a 72.7 percent rate. The organization has identified only one case of probable human-to-human transmission - a mother who cradled her dying daughter all night - while the rest of the cases appeared to have been acquired directly from animals.

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Researchers have been struggling to determine how and whether the disease might develop the ability to spread easily from person to person through the air the same way human influenza viruses do. Omi said that it was becoming more and more likely that the virus would develop the ability to spread among people for several reasons.

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The virus has proved highly versatile in mixing genetic material with other viruses, he said. The disease has recently developed the ability to survive in domesticated ducks and be excreted in large quantities without making the ducks sick, making it hard for farmers to know which birds to cull.

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Omi declined to predict when the virus might spread to people, but noted that winter was the most dangerous time for influenza viruses and that human cases had already started appearing this autumn, whereas last winter they did not start to appear until January.

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