bird flu (Page 8)

The World Health Organization (WHO) is concerned that they caused too much international alarm with their recent statement that bird flu could kill as many as 150 million people. Scientific predictions of bird flu deaths have ranged from less than two million to as much as 360 million, but there’s no way to know how lethal the pandemic will be until it begins. One thing scientists do agree on is that there WILL be a pandemic.

Emma Ross reports in canada.com that Dr. David Nabarro mentioned the high number at a UN news conference recently. Now WHO’s flu expert Dick Thompson has announced that it’s necessary to put Nabarro’s remarks in the proper context. WHO thinks bird flu will kill an absolute maximum of 7.4 million people, most of whom will be in Asian countries. read more

We recently posted an article advising all our readers to keep the prescription drug Tamiflu on hand to fight the symptoms of bird flu. But viruses mutate constantly, and bird flu is no exception. It may already be too late, because avian flu is becoming resistant to Tamiflu, despite the fact that it’s being stockpiled by countries all over the world.

Unlike most other flu viruses, which affect the respiratory tract, the H5N1 bird flu virus leads to pneumonia symptoms. A person with a strong immune system can fight these off, but a surprising number of seemingly healthy people have succumbed to pneumonia, especially when hospitalized.
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Chinese authorities report that a mystery disease has killed17 people from villages around Ziyang and Neijiang. Atpresent, 12 more people are in critical condition and 27 arestable. 2 have recovered.

It appears that all of the farmers had butchered sick pigsor sheep before coming down with the illness.

The World Health Organization said that there is at presentno sign of a massive outbreak of the disease, and thatChinese authorities are saying that it is not beingtransmitted from human to human.

The symptoms are fatigue, fever, nausea, vomiting, coma anddeath. The victims have all been farmers, and did not appearto have had contact with each other.
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One of the first cases of bird flu in poultry in the UnitedStates has been found in ducks living on a pond in New YorkState. This has caused South Korea to halt the importationof poultry from New York. Bird flu originated and isepidemic in Asia. While the strain of bird flu infecting theducks is not a virus that can infect humans, it coulddevelop into one.

The strain infecting the New York ducks is called H7N2. Somevarieties of the H7 virus can be easily transmitted from onehuman to another, but so far, it usually causes only a mildcase of the flu.
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