Hi Sharon, I know that you are interested in Avian Flu. One of my friends forwarded this site to me and I thought it might interest you. The bulletin board/site covers a broad swath on the subject, but a lot of it looks to be "locally" oriented, too. FWIW. Chuck
From Mr. Howell Wynne, Jackson, Michigan, January 2008 Comments to: howellwynne@yahoo.com
Last night I listened to Coast to Coast and Art Bell...for a little over two hours... I found the interview to be mature, relaxed, non- sensational, etc. The parallel of the Bird Flu to the so called Spanish Flu, now accepted as the Bird Flu of that time by many folks, seemed quite fascinating to me. Basically it torches the middle age group -those who basically work (keeping the infrastructure going - you know, electricity - without it there is no fuel, no food, no generators for hospitals, etc.).
Also interesting is the fact that those who live the "most rural type lives" are most likely to survive. One, they are used to medical problems and death, and two, and more importantly, they know how to live off the land (haul water, plant gardens, kill chickens, etc.). Some countries have planned for mass graves..usually a stadium of sorts. Once filled it is set afire.
I guess the tasks before each of us is...... are we mentally ready to deal with death, first of any kind, secondly of a loved one, thirdly of a child, and lastly, of us and or all our children in a gruesome way? I do not have the answer.
I do know that we all need to chill out, respect each other more, and love each other every day. It happened in 1918, and it could happen again - except in 1918 most all people lived on farms and were better able to survive for the reasons previously mentioned.
What can we do? Cover sneezes, cover sneezes, cover sneezes....wash hands, wash hands, wash hands. The other thing is somehow to let yourself and your children know that, for what ever reason (and hopefully not that they did something wrong and now God is going to punish them)...let them know that occasionally tragic happens and it may happen again.
Never loose faith with Hope. Whether here on earth or after death. Hope is all any one person has. My sermon of the year...thank you for your time.
The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, and the Emerging Bird Flu Pandemic
Mankind's most devastating recorded global epidemic, and its latest close call
URL: http://www.ninthday.com/spanish_flu.htm
As their lungs filled … the patients became short of breath and increasingly cyanotic. After gasping for several hours they became delirious and incontinent, and many died struggling to clear their airways of a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed from their nose and mouth. It was a dreadful business.
--Isaac Starr, 3rd year medical student, University of Pennsylvania, 1918.
By the fall of 1918 a strain of influenza seemingly no different from that of previous years suddenly turned so deadly, and engendered such a state of panic and chaos in communities across the globe, that many people believed the world was coming to an end. It struck with amazing speed, often killing its victims within just hours of the first signs of infection. So fast did the 1918 strain overwhelm the body's natural defenses, that the usual cause of death in influenza patients---a secondary infection of lethal pneumonia---oftentimes never had a chance to establish itself. Instead, the virus caused an uncontrollable hemorrhaging that filled the lungs, and patients would drown in their own body fluids.
Micrograph of flu virus. Surface proteins visible on periphery
Not only was the Spanish Flu strikingly virulent, but it displayed an unusual preference in its choice of victims---tending to select young healthy adults over those with weakened immune systems, as in the very young, the very old, and the infirm. The normal age distribution for flu mortality was completely reversed, and had the effect of gouging from society's infrastructure the bulk of those responsible for its day to day maintenance. No wonder people thought the social order was breaking down. It very nearly did.
But at the close of the First World War, when Spanish Flu appeared, the world was a very different place. Since then, outstanding advances in our knowledge of the germ world have been made, adding dramatically to our repertoire of medical wizardry. Surely what happened back then couldn't happen again.
Or could it?
During the 1918-1919 fall period the number of Americans who died from influenza is estimated at 675,000. Of those, almost 200,000 deaths were recorded in the month of October 1918 alone. Worldwide, the mortality figure for the full pandemic is believed to stand somewhere between 30 to 40 million. So, with the world population today having more than tripled in the intervening years, what is to stop a modern flu pandemic from claiming upwards of 100 million lives? The answer, it seems, is nothing at all.
H5N1 variety of influenza responsible for the bird flu pandemic
Today, of course, we have vaccines and antiviral drugs. But in the Third World, at least, these combatants are in very short supply. In India, where the Spanish Flu is thought to have culled more than 10 million from the population, public health care is still notoriously deficient. In China, with a population one third larger again, the situation is not much better. Even for developed countries, where vaccines are readily available, the fraction of the population that routinely subjects itself to inoculation generally hovers around 10 percent. In the event that the public were to receive adequate warnings of an impending pandemic, it's likely of course that this number could be significantly increased. But even then, it may not matter. By their nature pandemics tend to take us by surprise. The next influenza strain that ravages the human population will probably not be the one we were planning to encounter.
If all this seems a little alarmist in nature, consider for a moment the initial bird flu controversy that Robert Webster, chairman of the Department of Virology and Molecular Biology at Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, has called The Hong Kong Incident.
In 1997 epidemiologists and public health officials from around the world got their first glimpse¹ of an entirely new variety of human influenza. Known as subtype H5N1 for the surface proteins which the virus carries, the new strain had only ever previously been observed in birds. Ominously, the effect of H5N1 on poultry had earned it the evocative title of "Chicken Ebola." And when it surfaced in the human population of Hong Kong in 1997 it proved to be almost as deadly.
“History does not entrust the care of freedom to the weak or timid.”~Dwight D. Eisenhower Copyright 2007-2008TALK CITIZEN ™ is a trademark of LobaTek Incorporated
as researched by Howell Wynne
