By Christopher Cross
For those of you who remember the movies titled The Birds. the current probability of the Bird Flu is a revolation in and of itself. However, CDC officials are about to try what could be a very controversial experiment: They want to alter a bird flu virus to see if it will infect humans. It's an attempt to simulate what is believed to have happened in past flu pandemics, where millions of people died worldwide. The world is 37 years overdue for the next pandemic and the current outbreaks of bird flu in Asia are worrisome to public health officials, both here and abroad.
Missouri health officials have come up with a prediction...should a bird flu pandemic come to the state. Based on a Centers for Disease Control computer model, up to two million residents would catch the flu and five to ten thousand would die.
According to the National Institute on Health (NIH):
In 1997, a type of flu found in poultry infected 18 people in Hong Kong and 6 of them died. As this bird flu spread to other fowl and moved into other areas of Southeast Asia, more human cases appeared. To date, 112 people have caught bird flu and more than half of them have died. This number may seem small compared to the thousands who die annually from flu-related complications, but for some health officials the bird flu deaths may be an early warning for a deadly worldwide outbreak. Fortunately, the bird flu doesn’t currently spread easily from person to person, but a change in the virus could soon make this possible. If this happens, an outbreak could quickly spread across the globe to become a pandemic. Because most people haven’t been exposed to bird flu and have no natural protection against it, millions could get sick and even die. The two most recent pandemics caused by a combination of bird and human flu viruses, in 1957 and 1968, killed more than 100,000 Americans. The 1918 flu pandemic caused more than half a million deaths in the U.S. and up to 50 million worldwide. Researchers can’t predict when or even if the bird flu in Southeast Asia could turn into a pandemic. But to be better prepared in case an outbreak begins, scientists are working to understand the virus, its impact and what can be done to prevent its spread. “The pressing questions are if and how we can contain an outbreak of [bird] flu at the source before it becomes a pandemic,” said Dr. Ira Longini, Jr. of Emory University, a member of a research group supported by NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) that’s using computers to investigate what we can do to stop an outbreak at the source. |
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