katallison (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
katallison) wrote2004-11-15 09:53 pm
katallison) wrote2004-11-15 09:53 pm
(no subject)
Scary fucking shit. And, for once, not overtly political.
Animal diseases emerging in foreign countries are on course to threaten U.S. families, agriculture and the economy in ways that we've never seen, epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said Monday in Minneapolis.
Osterholm, who is associate director of the National Center for Food Protection and Defense for Homeland Security, told a national conference of agricultural bankers that he believes the bird flu epidemic in Southeast Asia will become a lethal pandemic.
Last week, the World Health Organization sounded a similar alert, urging preparations for such a pandemic as a matter of national security. And on Monday, researchers at the National Institutes of Health announced initiatives to step up research to stave off an outbreak and develop a response should it hit.
Osterholm projected that a pandemic could kill about 30,000 Minnesotans, 1.7 million Americans and 177 million people worldwide in its first year. The world is unprepared, with inadequate amounts of vaccine or even face masks, he and other experts say.
If the bird flu virus mutates into one that spreads easily among hogs and people, that would slam travel to a halt and cripple the economy, he said.
"This is going to be the most catastrophic thing in my lifetime," Osterholm said. "When this situation unfolds, we will shut down global markets overnight. There will not be movement of goods; there will not be movement of people. This will last for at least a year, maybe two."
Other new threats linked to agriculture include new mosquito-borne diseases that have yet to enter the United States, he said. And since the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said, little has been done to protect the nation's food and water supplies from terrorists.
Americans are familiar with West Nile disease, which arrived in 1999 from Africa, surfacing on the East Coast of the United States. Carried within this country by two types of mosquitoes, it's infected about 20,000 people, killing 500. Physicians are now seeing stroke-like attacks with permanent paralysis among young people who contracted it, he said.
More than 100,000 horses have been infected, and many have died.
Now, another mosquito-borne disease, Rift Valley Fever, is spreading across Africa and Egypt and most recently through Yemen. Once the virus arrives in the United States -- possibly through cargo holds -- it could be spread by 10 kinds of mosquitoes, including sand flies, Osterholm said.
Only about 1 percent of people infected will get sick, but half of them will die with hemorrhagic fevers, he said. One out of 10 Rift Valley cases will damage the victim's retinas, leaving them partially or fully blind.
The disease kills 10 to 70 percent of calves, but fewer than 10 percent of adult cattle. It kills 20 to 30 percent of sheep and goats, Osterholm said.
Hitting healthiest the hardest
Research on the 1918 flu pandemic indicates that such a virus hits hardest in the healthiest people, often between the ages 18 to 35, he said. That's because the genetic coding of the virus causes it to turn the immune system against the body, with healthy people under the greatest attack from their own strong systems, he said.
The world is unprepared for a "bird flu" pandemic, Osterholm warned.
"Even the vaccine that we have takes six to eight months, if we can get it to work," he said. "So we're going to be confronting this situation without vaccines."
The World Health Organization shares those concerns, recently warning that production capacity for a pandemic vaccine will be "vastly inadequate," unless more companies begin producing it in far greater numbers.
In Geneva last week, about 50 representatives of drug companies, governments, and vaccine licensing agencies met to discuss what can be done to prevent this next coming flu pandemic, which experts such as Osterholm say is inevitable.
The U.S. government is now purchasing 2 million doses of a vaccine for the H5N1 virus, a lethal strain of bird flu, made by Aventis Pasteur.
That volume would protect 1 million people -- who would take two doses of the vaccine, months apart -- rather than the 1.7 million projected to fatally contract it across the nation in the first year of a pandemic, Osterholm said.
J. Edwin Gilchrist, vice president of Community Bank Inc. of Rohan, Mont., was among nearly 600 members of the American Bankers Association who listened to Osterholm Monday. Gilchrist and other bankers said they found the message frightening.
"If that pandemic hits, and we have deaths resulting from it, people are going to start pointing fingers and saying 'Why didn't you do something?' " Gilchrist said, noting the recent flu vaccine shortage. "We've got to get Congress' attention and focus on this, because it has huge economic potential for this country -- both positively and negatively."
Gilchrist, who serves on an advisory committee for his national bankers' organization, said he will discuss the situation with senators and congressional representatives.
He agrees with Osterholm, Gilchrist said, that the potential impact of such an epidemic on the economy and public health "is going to be far greater than anything we've ever seen."
For the record, Osterholm is a highly-renowned epidemiologist, with a long track record of public service, who's always struck me as a level-headed and sane kind of guy. When he says the potential bird flu epidemic could be "the most catastrophic thing in my lifetime," keep in mind he's someone who has been for many years deeply involved in in dealing with AIDS and the consequences thereof.
OK, I'm sufficiently freaked now, and should go to bed.
Animal diseases emerging in foreign countries are on course to threaten U.S. families, agriculture and the economy in ways that we've never seen, epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said Monday in Minneapolis.
Osterholm, who is associate director of the National Center for Food Protection and Defense for Homeland Security, told a national conference of agricultural bankers that he believes the bird flu epidemic in Southeast Asia will become a lethal pandemic.
Last week, the World Health Organization sounded a similar alert, urging preparations for such a pandemic as a matter of national security. And on Monday, researchers at the National Institutes of Health announced initiatives to step up research to stave off an outbreak and develop a response should it hit.
Osterholm projected that a pandemic could kill about 30,000 Minnesotans, 1.7 million Americans and 177 million people worldwide in its first year. The world is unprepared, with inadequate amounts of vaccine or even face masks, he and other experts say.
If the bird flu virus mutates into one that spreads easily among hogs and people, that would slam travel to a halt and cripple the economy, he said.
"This is going to be the most catastrophic thing in my lifetime," Osterholm said. "When this situation unfolds, we will shut down global markets overnight. There will not be movement of goods; there will not be movement of people. This will last for at least a year, maybe two."
Other new threats linked to agriculture include new mosquito-borne diseases that have yet to enter the United States, he said. And since the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said, little has been done to protect the nation's food and water supplies from terrorists.
Americans are familiar with West Nile disease, which arrived in 1999 from Africa, surfacing on the East Coast of the United States. Carried within this country by two types of mosquitoes, it's infected about 20,000 people, killing 500. Physicians are now seeing stroke-like attacks with permanent paralysis among young people who contracted it, he said.
More than 100,000 horses have been infected, and many have died.
Now, another mosquito-borne disease, Rift Valley Fever, is spreading across Africa and Egypt and most recently through Yemen. Once the virus arrives in the United States -- possibly through cargo holds -- it could be spread by 10 kinds of mosquitoes, including sand flies, Osterholm said.
Only about 1 percent of people infected will get sick, but half of them will die with hemorrhagic fevers, he said. One out of 10 Rift Valley cases will damage the victim's retinas, leaving them partially or fully blind.
The disease kills 10 to 70 percent of calves, but fewer than 10 percent of adult cattle. It kills 20 to 30 percent of sheep and goats, Osterholm said.
Hitting healthiest the hardest
Research on the 1918 flu pandemic indicates that such a virus hits hardest in the healthiest people, often between the ages 18 to 35, he said. That's because the genetic coding of the virus causes it to turn the immune system against the body, with healthy people under the greatest attack from their own strong systems, he said.
The world is unprepared for a "bird flu" pandemic, Osterholm warned.
"Even the vaccine that we have takes six to eight months, if we can get it to work," he said. "So we're going to be confronting this situation without vaccines."
The World Health Organization shares those concerns, recently warning that production capacity for a pandemic vaccine will be "vastly inadequate," unless more companies begin producing it in far greater numbers.
In Geneva last week, about 50 representatives of drug companies, governments, and vaccine licensing agencies met to discuss what can be done to prevent this next coming flu pandemic, which experts such as Osterholm say is inevitable.
The U.S. government is now purchasing 2 million doses of a vaccine for the H5N1 virus, a lethal strain of bird flu, made by Aventis Pasteur.
That volume would protect 1 million people -- who would take two doses of the vaccine, months apart -- rather than the 1.7 million projected to fatally contract it across the nation in the first year of a pandemic, Osterholm said.
J. Edwin Gilchrist, vice president of Community Bank Inc. of Rohan, Mont., was among nearly 600 members of the American Bankers Association who listened to Osterholm Monday. Gilchrist and other bankers said they found the message frightening.
"If that pandemic hits, and we have deaths resulting from it, people are going to start pointing fingers and saying 'Why didn't you do something?' " Gilchrist said, noting the recent flu vaccine shortage. "We've got to get Congress' attention and focus on this, because it has huge economic potential for this country -- both positively and negatively."
Gilchrist, who serves on an advisory committee for his national bankers' organization, said he will discuss the situation with senators and congressional representatives.
He agrees with Osterholm, Gilchrist said, that the potential impact of such an epidemic on the economy and public health "is going to be far greater than anything we've ever seen."
For the record, Osterholm is a highly-renowned epidemiologist, with a long track record of public service, who's always struck me as a level-headed and sane kind of guy. When he says the potential bird flu epidemic could be "the most catastrophic thing in my lifetime," keep in mind he's someone who has been for many years deeply involved in in dealing with AIDS and the consequences thereof.
OK, I'm sufficiently freaked now, and should go to bed.
no subject
I hope you can get a good night of sleep, regardless of foreboding. (http://www.livejournal.com/users/thepouncer/35822.html)
no subject
Bird flu in neighbouring countries meant chicken became next to impossible to get, except for frozen from Brazil, and we had no eggs for a while, then had them flown in from Australia. And SARS meant everything was just - closed or quiet. You get used to wearing a mask and thermometer checks at every building pretty quickly, and you learn to wash your hands all the time and be paranoid about the flu. It wasn't that it killed so many people, but that it *could* have, we were just lucky.
no subject
I've always said that nature will ultimately take care of herself, and I still believe that. AIDS would normally have been the agent, but it moves too slowly, and we're too technologically adept at sidestepping it these days. A disease with a great many vectors... that's what will ultimately cut the population back to manageable levels on earth. Probably end global warming for the foreseeable future, too.
no subject
Big if. And it looks like your level-headed, sane guy is predicating most of the fear-mongering in this article on that.
And we have bird flu here (Netherlands, Europe) and I don't know if it's the same strain, but I can tell you it's a problem but not a disaster. And mostly among birds. And we're *really* densely populated, so. Though we do have good hygiene, I must admit.
Honestly, this article looks to me like a ploy for more research money into vaccines. With safety concerns about vaccines (and there should be, the research done on animals makes it quite clear that even vaccines aren't a panacea: vaccines do *not* always convey immunity, and they *do* carry risks, which makes the decision on whether the risk is worth it come out different then previously assumed) the people highly invested in vaccines & the research behind their development are spotlighting all the reasons why vaccines are really important, no really.
no subject
And yes, we aren't really prepared for another pandemic like 1918; who is? Seriously, it killed more people in one year than the Black Death did in 4. So many people died in the US that bodies were literally stacking up in the streets in some cities.
However, the CDC was founded to study such ailments and to track outbreaks around the world. I'm confident that there are plans in place for dealing with the worst case scenario. On top of that, hospitals around the country have been conducting worst-case-scenario drills in the event of a terrorist attack. They are creating disaster plans for how to handle huge numbers of incoming patients at once.
There may not be 'sufficient' vaccines in place but that doesn't mean there are none. Research in Japan has demonstrated that by only vaccinating school children they can effectively reduce the total number of influenza cases in an entire community.
Medical science really has come a long way in the last century: in 1918 people seemed to die more of a pneumonia that resulted from the flu than the flu itself. They basically *drowned.* We now have much more effective ways of treating such symptoms, even if we don't know how to prevent the flu itself.
If you are interested, Gina Kolata wrote a great book about the 1918 pandemic. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It. I was impressed by the how it was a well-researched and documented history while remaining a page-turner. It was a highly enjoyable read.
I guess what I'm saying is, while the guy is probably telling the truth, the way he is doing it pissed me off. He's clearly saying, 'Be afraid! Be very afraid!' and I don't have the energy to fear *all* the what-ifs right now. Frankly, my energy is all wrapped up in political paranoia and all of its attendant what-if scenarios. *g*
no subject
And some of it is just mother nature being a bitch and dealing with out of control populations her own way.
I'm just old enough to remember polio vaccinations given in sugar cubes.
Scary.
no subject
For a good general look at Osterholm, see
this interview (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W8X-46DKT8K-T&_coverDate=08%2F01%2F2002&_alid=220657476&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=6666&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000029718&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=582538&md5=a141de58237243163416aaa0e0fbbf39) from The Lancet.
no subject
We ate the deer meat and didn't die.