Health

White House Tests Readiness For Pandemic Bird Flu

December 13, 2005 ⋅  E-Mail Article ⋅  Print Article ⋅ Post a comment

Some say that talk of a bird flu outbreak is outrageous; others fear it will be of cataclysmic proportions. So what is the real answer? What is being done to combat this potential threat to humanity?

What you don’t know about ABF can’t hurt you, it can kill you. Have you heard of ABF?
Scientists call it H5N1. Medical professionals refer to it as Avian Influenza the new flu pandemic. News papers refer to it as ABF the Asian Bird Flu. Irregardless of what you call it this is an emerging and potentially devastating threat facing all of humanity.
You may be thinking to yourself, “Why worry about the Asian flu when we live half way around the world?” Why, because Metro Airport has surpassed New York and San Diego as the number one hub for Asians traveling abroad into western cultures and many health professionals believe this is where the first western outbreak of the flu will occur.

Fears of a pandemic have increased as a virus infecting millions of birds has spread throughout Asia and parts of Europe. While bird flu has not yet appeared in the United States, or spread from person to person, officials worry it could mutate and — because humans have no immunity to it — become as contagious globally as the annual flu.

Picture a mother holding her child in her arms helpless to bring any relief to her son or daughter, the skin warm the breath hot, nothing can be done to quiet the cries of the child. Your own aged mother or father sitting in their chair for hour’s motionless yet sweating beyond belief losing the energy to carry on every hour that seems to goes by. There is no reliable cure for this ailment, there is no relief, doctors have no idea how the 7% who survive this flu managed to.

You may be now asking yourself how does a flu become pandemic, and how dangerous is this virus? To begin with, when a new highly infectious form of a flu virus is formed it can rapidly infect a large number of people. Consider the fact there is no vaccine to prevent the viral infection, now also consider the fact there is no cure for the viral infection, what can you conclude from these two considerations? You get the result that this is an illness that can rapidly spread around the world and cause widespread loss of life. An example is the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 which caused an estimated 40-50 million deaths worldwide.

The ABF virus has killed more than 9.5 million poultry since late 2003 in Indonesia alone. Asian countries are the main source of Asian Bird Flu and the only area in the world where there has been a noted documentation of bird flu being transferred between unsuspecting humans. Because this flu has now began being found in migratory birds and waterfowl the ability for it to spread and become a pandemic virus has grown tenfold.
Make no mistake the bird flu is deadly
And it is growing and evolving.

Some of you may now be thinking o.k., it is a threat but what pill can I take, what medicine do the doctors now have for this? The current state of defense against the virus does not look promising and the outlook for surviving the flu is even more dire.
Most people who catch bird flu immediately become very ill and die.
The bird flu virus can occasionally jump between species and infect people who have been in close contact with infected birds.

How can bird flu and human flu viruses merge?
There are two ways in which a bird flu virus could merge with a human flu virus, creating a new virus that can be easily passed between humans:
In humans - if a person who already has flu comes into close contact with birds who have highly pathogenic bird flu, there is a tiny chance that the person could become infected with the bird flu virus. If this happens, the person would now be carrying both the human flu virus and the bird flu virus. The two viruses could meet in the person’s body and swap genes with each other.
In pigs - pigs are susceptible to both human and bird flu viruses. If a pig became infected with both viruses at the same time, it could act as a “mixing vessel”, allowing the two viruses to swap genes and produce a new virus.
When a bird is infected with bird flu, it sheds the flu virus in its faeces, saliva and mucus. Other birds become infected by eating or inhaling the virus.
The virus can infect people who are in close contact with infected birds - for example by people inhaling dried faeces that have become trampled into dust or stuck to the feathers or other parts of the body of the infected bird.

Most health professionals feel we are not doing enough to prepare for this devastating virus. Dr. Jacobs has advised in the September edition of the Good Health Newsletter, “that because the virus changes each year the vaccine composition changes and attempting to match changes in the circulating virus due to antigenic drift has become nearly impossible.” World Health Organization doctors have advised it is almost impossible to keep up at this moment. There is currently no vaccine to prevent bird flu in humans. Currently available vaccines are not effective against the H5N1 strain of the virus. Scientists are working on developing a vaccine, but it is difficult because the virus frequently changes.

White House tests readiness for pandemic flu

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