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October 09, 2004
Bird Flu - Maybe not so safe after all
Just when the article on BoingBoing got me feeling pretty good about the bird flu, here comes Tim Bishop's rebuttal:
Is a perfect storm brewing now? I don't know, but it is possible. We have no vaccine that works against the bird flu at the moment. If the bird flu did get established in humans, we would have to use the oldest public health tactics we have, isolation and quarantine. Given what a relatively hard to communicate illness (SARS) did to the people and economies of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canada, it is easy to imagine the bird flu doing much, much worse. Millions of people died in 1918 from the Spanish Influenza, and nobody was travelling by airplane then.
While I don't think there is any reason to panic, nor to avoid travel to Asia, the fact remains that if the bird flu gets established in humans, there is a significant chance of a major pandemic, at least that's what Dr. Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization's regional director for the western Pacific, has said:
"So far there are no cases of human-to-human transmission, but if the situation continues a long time, there is a high possibility that we will have [them]," Omi said at a news conference ahead of next week's western Pacific regional annual meeting in Shanghai.
"Unless intensified efforts are made to halt the spread of the virus, a pandemic is very likely to occur," Omi added.
What can be done now? Pressure our government to provide the economic incentives for private companies to look for a vaccine. According to WHO:
At the beginning of April 2004, WHO made the prototype seed strain for an H5N1 vaccine available to manufacturers. To date, only two of the world's roughly 12 major companies producing influenza vaccines have taken work on a pandemic vaccine significantly forward.
hoo boy.
Posted by oren at October 9, 2004 08:07 AM