Signs and Portents?

[Sindawe]

Remember the Influenza outbreak of 1918?
==========================
Bird flu could become a global threat to humans
-----------------------------------------------------
Experimental vaccine ordered in U.S., and disease researchers warn of potential for catastrophe after avian virus returns

By Jeremy Manier, Tribune staff reporter. Tribune staff reporters Andrew Martin and Rudolph Bush contributed to this report
Published March 9, 2005


Compared with other major diseases that menace humanity, bird flu can seem out of place: Only 60 known human cases have appeared in the last year. Yet public health officials now say the disease is a global threat.

<snip>

In just three months in early 2004, 120 million chickens and ducks in Southeast Asia died from the strain of flu or were destroyed to stop its spread. That's more than avian flu outbreaks had killed in the last four decades combined, according to a January report by the World Health Organization.

Even after widespread culling meant to stamp out the outbreak, avian flu has returned in force to Asian flocks this year, officials say. Many experts believe the disease is now endemic in the region.

That raises the risk to humans, who have no natural immunity to the bird flu strain. More than 70 percent of people infected with the virus have died. The longer the virus circulates, the greater the chances it will mutate into a form that can spread widely among people all around the world.

Full text here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...ll=chi-newsnationworld-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

Logon:
email: [email protected]
Password: thehighroad
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Political and gun related: Remember the description of what the fiction Super-Bug Capt. Tripps did in Stephans King's work? If this beastie jumps species and becomes airbone transmissable, how do you think it will impact our culture/politics?

 

[Joejojoba111]

Get your weekend cottage ready for more than a weekend... In the 1918-1919 season the Stanley cup was cancelled, too! Of course then it was because filling an arena with people would kill a certain percent of them...

Front page headline yesterday, somewhere in Asia a guy who had the avian flu transmitted it to his nurse. Sounds petty? Well it's pretty big, because it's the feared mutation of the flu from bird to bird and to person, to person to person. The first that they know of. 2 weeks you see a lot more of the cases there, and the beginnings over here, just a guess.



(Watch the potty mouth, please. --DMG)

 

[bogie]

Campers, welcome to the world of the sensational.

Influenza generally starts in birds. Then jumps to humans, usually over in China.

Has for a long time.

Will for a long time.

Musta been a slow conspiracy day.

 

[cloudkiller]

There are a couple of new...

variants of avian flu that have jumped to humans in recent years. They remain fairly difficult to spread but according to health officials they are ripe for mutation to a more contagious form. The fatality rate for those who actually did catch the disease was quite high.

There is areally good article in this month's Discover magazine about it. It is rather scary in fact.

 

[WT]

I'm not worried about it.

Only guys between the ages of 19 and 39 died outright from The Great Flu Epidemic. If I was in that age group, I'd make sure my will was up-to-date.

 

[Standing Wolf]

Learning about science from the Chicago Tribune is like learning about love at the barber shop: some of the facts might be right, but most of what you need to know just isn't there.

 

[Wildalaska]

AND YE SHALL BURN IN FIRE AND BRIMSTONE AND THE FILTH OF THY FORNICATIONS! LO, I AM WROTH AND SHALL CUT THROUGH YE LIKE A STILETTO THROUGH CHEESECAKE. REPENT, THINE DAY IS COME!

WildrealstretchtocallthisgunrelatedAlaska

 

[Joejojoba111]

WT what do you mean only guys 19-39 are affected? Afraid that does concern me!

BTW general info, people talk about how deadly and horrific World War One was, but the year after it ended there was the grea flu epidemic and it killed more people than the war!

 

[cracked butt]

The people who contract this disease are the same who live with chickens in their houses or work knee deep in infected duck poo every day. Humans can catch it, but not very easily. Its almost not contageous at all from human to human.

 

[Michigander]

We need bullets small enough to shoot those darn viruses! That's what we need.






isthatbetterWildAlaskanow?

 

[Joejojoba111]

Cracked - that's the significance of the nurse catching it from another man - human to human virus mutation. They were just waiting for this mutation, they knew it was a matter of time, and it can happen more than once resulting in more than one strain of human-human contagion.

Ironically those who catch the flu from chickes may be the lucky ones! During the Bubonic Plague people who lived near horses were better protected than most, because insects transmitted a version of the influenze from horses that was less deadly, but similar enough to build up anti-bodies.

 

[spacemanspiff]

so, llike, heres what i need you all to do. post lists of your guns and where exactly they are kept in your home. i'll also need your address. this is for when 80% of the population dies from the passing of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and i'll be coming behind them visiting the homes of the dead and collecting your cool toys so they dont fall into, ummmm, the wrong hands.

thanks guys! i'll be sure to take good care of all your toys.


spacemanihaveoftenthoughthowgreatitwouldbetowalkthroughadesertedtownandjustshootanythingiwantedspiff

 

[R.H. Lee]

Prolly guys over 39 had developed an immunity from some previous flu outbreak. I dunno about guys under 19. Hey, ya gotta go sometime. Why not while you're burning up with fever whilst experiencing projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea?

 

[Sindawe]

During the Bubonic Plague people who lived near horses were better protected than most, because insects transmitted a version of the influenze from horses that was less deadly, but similar enough to build up anti-bodies.

WHAT?! That statement does not make any sense. The Bubonic Plague is caused by the the bactera Yersinia pestis, while influenza is caused by an RNA virus. Two totally different beasties, and I don't think anti-bodies for one will be effective against the other.

Space: Right, like YOUR hands are the right ones for MY guns.

 

[Joejojoba111]

Sorry, all I remember was that horses had a less deadly version, and it could make you more immune to the real thing.

 

[Justin]

I'm not worried about it.

Only guys between the ages of 19 and 39 died outright from The Great Flu Epidemic. If I was in that age group, I'd make sure my will was up-to-date.

I've not seen any nooze that has said the new avian flu strains are particularly bad for the 19-39 set. The flu epidemic in the 1920's did attack younger folks more heavily than older, which was one of the strange things about it. But just because that particular strain killed younger people in larger numbers doesn't mean that a new strain of the avian flu would behave in the same way.

Personally, I think that we'll all be wiped out by a killer asteroid hitting Yellowstone and setting off the supervolcano before the avian flu finally makes the jump to humans.

 

[S Roper]

The reason young people were most affected was, strangely enough, because their immune systems were stronger. Their lungs filled with fluid when their body attempted to combat the virus.

 

[sfhogman]

Interesting book on the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...5/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-3218693-4960928

 

[Michigander]

Listening to WWI: The War at Home

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

In 1918, the influenza hit the United States and then the rest of the world with such swiftness that it sometimes went unnoticed until it had already passed. By mid-1919, it had killed more humans than any other disease in a similar period in the history of the world. In the United States a quarter of the population (25 million people or more) contracted the flu; 550,000 died. Internationally, between 20 million and 40 million people died in the influenza pandemic. The “flu†was unlike other diseases in the types of people it infected. Usually the greatest mortality from flu comes in the very young and the very old. But in 1918 [...] healthy men and women between the late teens and early thirties were the hardest hit. For this reason, even soldiers in excellent physical condition “fell like flies.†Medical experts, having recently achieved major victories over typhoid fever, tetanus, and malaria, were at a loss when it came to the Spanish influenza and its deadly companion, pneumonia. The oral histories that comprise this excursion demonstrate the lasting impact this disease had on Americans from Pennsylvania to Georgia and from Kentucky to Montana.

In September 1918, the nation's newspapers were filled with national news of politics—the U.S. Senate vote on the woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution; and socialist Eugene V. Debs's trial under the Espionage Act. Though there was great interest in the events of the Great War in Europe, military censorship kept most real news from the front lines— including the rising death toll from influenza in France, England, and Germany—off the front pages of America's newspapers. Only Spain (neutral at the time) reported a rising number of flu-related deaths. (For this reason, other European nations began calling the disease the “Spanish influenza.â€)

By the end of September, U.S. military and government officials could no longer deny the growing impact of the influenza outbreak on American soldiers and sailors overseas and at home. The U.S. Army already had sustained more than 9,000 cases of the flu as American troops passed it from camp to camp and across borders. A total of 43,000 American soldiers would die—nearly as many U.S. deaths as in all the battles in World War I.

The Spanish influenza was not limited to the United States and Europe. It took hold in North Africa as early as May, Russia in June, India in July, and then China, New Zealand, and the Philippines in the next few months. It would infect 40 percent of all Filipinos and kill 20 million people in India alone. No other disease until AIDS has spread across the globe to become a pandemic and devastate so many diverse and separate populations.

Philadelphia, the hardest hit of all U.S. cities, was struck in October 1918. By the end of the first week 700 residents were dead; 2,600 died by October 12, and the death toll continued to rise. Though no one group or neighborhood was spared, immigrant neighborhoods—where basic sanitation and overall health were poorest—were the hardest hit. Churches and schools were closed, yet the newspapers in Philadelphia, like those in Boston and other cities, still devoted their front pages primarily to news from the battle fronts of Europe. By November 2, the death toll in Philadelphia from the flu reached a staggering 12,162 people.

In the early 1980s, when historian Charles Hardy did interviews for the Philadelphia radio program “The Influenza Pandemic of 1918,†he was struck by the painful memories as many older Philadelphians recalled the inability of the city to care for the dead and dying. The city's population had swelled by 300,000 residents during the war, thanks to the city's booming economy. A third of them, like Clifford Adams, were African Americans from the South. Adams recalls that he was working in the railyard when he was struck with the flu. According to Adams, cemetery keepers could not keep up with the volume of the dead and the streets were crowded with funeral processions. Anna Lavin, a Jewish immigrant, tells morbid stories about families digging their own graves. Anne Van Dyke and Elizabeth Struchesky describe the recycling of caskets as bodies were dumped into garages to rot. Louise Abruchezze, an Italian immigrant, tells a gruesome tale of a neighbor who, distressed at the treatment of the corpse of a family member, begged the undertaker to “please, please, let me put him in a macaroni box!†(She explains that at that time, wooden boxes were used to hold twenty pounds of pasta.)

In a 1982 interview with Laurie Mercier, Loretta Jarussi of Bearcreek, Montana, describes how people would pass through that tiny town seemingly healthy, only to be reported dead two days later. Her father went undiagnosed for many weeks and had plans to go to a nearby hot springs to rest. She believes that her father's death was averted only because the son of the local doctor was an army doctor who recognized flu symptoms that others missed.

Teamus Bartley, a Kentucky coal miner, was interviewed at ninety-five years of age and vividly recalls the numbers of people dying in the coal camps each night. When he went to care for his brother each night he noticed a casket on nearly every porch. The mines were shut down for six weeks as miners were “a diggin' graves just as hard as they could†instead of going to work.

Clifford Lovins of Douglasville, Georgia, poignantly describes in a 1978 interview the tragic impact of influenza on his own family. He views both the personal and public nature of the pandemic through the fact that his mother and sister died from flu only four days apart. As a brother and son, he cared for his sister and mother; as a textile worker he cared for his stricken coworkers. Interwoven in his personal tale is the report of mills closing down and workers being paid by the owners not to run the looms but to care for sick coworkers.

Dr. Leila Denmark, also from Georgia, explains how it was not the flu itself that caused the most fatalities but rather the accompanying pneumonia. Outside Atlanta, farmers were particularly vulnerable as they continued to do farm labor during the coldest November that Georgia had experienced—the November that the influenza pandemic hit Georgia. the 1918 influenza “America's forgotten pandemic,†but these powerful interviews remind us that for the generation alive at the time of World War I, the flu was a terrifying force.

For more reading on the influenza pandemic, see Alfred W. Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (1989); Clifford M. Kuhn, Harlon E. Joye, and E. Bernard West, Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City (1990).

from: http://chnm.gmu.edu/features/voices/ww1flu/listeningtowwith.html

(emphais added)

 

[2nd Amendment]

It's really just a matter of time and, as is typical, doesn't require any Conspiracy Theory(tm). Bugs mutate and, sooner or later, a bad one will come along again. Our accelerating population density, especially in nations with poor or almost no medical infrastructure, and ever increasing speed of travel will see to it that we have a huge mess on our hands.

We've been lucky for quite a while and it certainly will happen again. OTOH I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it. Nor do I expect my earliest hint it's coming will come from the Trib.