Stephen said:
Please correct me if I'm wrong ... and so on ...
Again, if anyone has a reliable source to show that I'm wrong here, please let me know. I'm not here to puncture balloons, but to learn myself. I just don't want to "learn" sensationalized fantasy.
Stephen, this is the second time in less than 24 hours you've seemingly "called me out" to prove myself to you. What the heck, I've got NOTHING better to do
, so I will do so again here so you don't have to go to the trouble of doing your own follow-up.
Your silver platter, sir:
Michael Osterholm (various topics):
pbs interview on bioterrorism ...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plague/interviews/osterholm.html
featured speaker at a university function held in cooperation with a Nobel Laureate organization, topic, bioterrorism (before it was fashionable to speak of it) ...
http://www.augsburg.edu/about/news-archive/sat_seminars.html
this recent article on the flu, written for the insurance industry is by Osterholm and a co-author (see the mini bio at the end of the article ... Steve Quayle he is not)
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BJK/is_5_16/ai_n13650575 ...
A wicked strain: the projected number of U.S. deaths as a result of an influenza pandemic is more than 1.7 million over an 18-month period. Nearly half of those victims will be between the ages of 15 and 44. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate the economic impact to the United States at $71.3 billion to $166.5 billion
Risk & Insurance,
April 15, 2005 by
Michael T. Osterholm,
Erik Rasmussen
Save a personal copy of this article and quickly find it again with Furl.net. It's free!
Save it.
Since 1580, there have been 31 instances where new influenza viruses have emerged from their natural reservoir--wild aquatic birds--and through genetic reassortment in intermediary hosts such as pigs, have "jumped" to human populations with marked increases in human deaths. This change in ability to kill humans is related to a lack of any protective immunity and genetic factors of the virus. The end result in an increase in the number of deaths in healthy individuals between the ages of 18 and 30.
In the last century, the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1919 killed 50 million to 100 million people. Of those, about 500,000 were in the United States. Although the number of deaths is often noted as being between 20 million and 40 million, more recent critical analyses support the higher number. The Asian flu pandemic in 1957 and the Hong Kong flu in 1968 each caused an estimated 2 million to 8 million deaths. Based on the current situation with avian influenza (a strain called H5N1) in Southeast Asia, influenza experts worldwide believe the conditions are "very ripe" for another pandemic to occur within the next several years. Although the bird strains of influenza virus have not yet genetically reassorted to result in human-to-human transmission of the virus, this is all that remains before another pandemic will occur. To date, 43 human eases of H5N1 infection in Vietnam and Thailand have occurred as a result of direct exposure to infected birds; 28 have died. The patients have many similarities to the patient age and disease severity of the 1918-1919 pandemic. The projected number of deaths as a result of another influenza pandemic, based on the 1918 data, is more than 1.7 million in the United States over an 18-month period (see table). The most staggering figure from this estimate is that nearly 50 percent of those deaths will occur among people between the ages of 15 and 44. This segment of the population is typically considered to be the group that is least affected by influenza.
The World Health Organization estimates that between one-quarter and one-third of the world's population will become infected by an influenza pandemic, causing between 16 million and 21 million deaths worldwide. Recently, a senior WHO official in Southeast Asia indicated that between 30 million and 100 million people would die worldwide with the future pandemic. When people hear projected death tolls in the millions from the influenza, many simply dismiss the predictions as far-fetched doomsday scenarios. In today's society, we tend to believe that modern medicine can conquer or control anything. Despite medical advances since the 1918 influenza pandemic, medical science is still unable to cope with the severe disease associated with influenza and many will die within 48 hours of the onset of the disease.
The 2004 flu vaccine shortage in the United States demonstrated the vulnerabilities in the vaccine production and distribution system. The public health and health-care delivery systems were unprepared, rationing was implemented and the public was disturbed by the shortages, providing only a snapshot of the situation and ensuing panic that could result from a larger epidemic.
Regardless of which risk model you use, an influenza pandemic will result in the biggest insurance loss ever--bigger than even the World Trade Center disaster. An extremely conservative estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using the lowest of estimates of pandemic-associated deaths, determined the overall economic impact to the United States at $71.3 billion to $166.5 billion, not including disruption to commerce and society.
It's hard not to get fixated on the numbers, especially when forecasting models that vary so widely. The issue is that when a pandemic occurs, large numbers of people will be ill quickly. Many will need medical care and a hospital bed. A panicked population will be afraid to go outside, let alone to work or go overseas.
Global trade will slow to a standstill. In addition to direct health costs, indirect costs resulting from lost productivity when large numbers of workers are out sick or die will be significant. Replacing those lost permanently to the workforce will cause economic disruption and might add considerable costs to the overall national economic loss. Vaccination and ant/viral drugs can reduce influenza morbidity and mortality, but their initial availability will be extremely limited. The large-scale production of a new pandemic vaccine, if even possible, will take several months.
Influenza experts from around the world warn that the international vaccine system is inadequate and that hospitals lack surge capacity. They believe pandemic preparedness efforts are moving too slowly and that governments and vaccine companies are dismissing the potential disaster as merely hypothetical. At the same time, the WHO is urging preparations for a pandemic as a matter of national security.
Projected Influenza-AssociatedDeaths in the United StatesBased on the 1918-1919 ExperienceAge in Years Projected Deaths<5 113,3005-14 74,55315-24 214,58225-34 378,63935-44 268,60245-54 43,94855-65 123,451>65 4,313,689Total 11,763,664Source: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human ServicesRELATED ARTICLE: Identifying the symptoms of a persistent pest.
Each year the world experiences the annual influenza season in their respective winter seasons, December through March in the northern hemisphere, and June through September in the southern hemisphere.
Influenza is a contagious respiratory illness caused by a family of viruses. The influenza virus spreads in respiratory droplets from coughing and sneezing as well as touching something with the virus on it and then touching one's mouth or eyes.
Influenza usually starts suddenly and typically includes the following symptoms; high fever, headache, tiredness, cough, sore throat, runny nose and body aches. Occasionally diarrhea and vomiting occur, though these symptoms are more common in children. (For more information on influenza, including pandemic influenza, log on to
www.cidrap. umn.edu.)
Complications stemming from influenza include bacterial pneumonia, dehydration and worsening of some chronic conditions such as congestive heart failure, asthma and diabetes.
Each year, an estimated 36,000 Americans die of influenza or complications from infection. Most deaths tend to be in the very young or elderly populations.
The best way to prevent influenza is get a flu shot each year. However, because the normally circulating influenza viruses are constantly undergoing slight genetic changes (i.e. antigenic drift) we need to make a new influenza vaccine each year.
It typically takes approximately eight months from identifying the new strains of the virus to incorporating them into the vaccine, to the final production of the reformulated vaccine. Currently on a worldwide basis, there is only industry capacity to produce about 330 million doses of vaccine each year. To increase this capacity will take a major investment.
MICHAEL T. OSTERHOLM is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy associate director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Center for Food Protection and Defense and professor at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health.
ERIK RASMUSSEN is vice president of risk management for ING Re's Group Life, Accident and Health Reinsurance operation in Minneapolis. He can be reached at
erik.rasmussen@ing-re.com.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Axon Group
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
There's plenty more to be found on Osterholm simply by typing his name into your favorite search engine.
In fact, type in "osterholm" and "bunker" and you'll get scores of results from his famous quote earlier this year. Here is just one such reference from a doctor's site that has a pretty scary perspective taking in other reputable sources as well ... (note that he calls Osterholm our nation's top expert) ...
http://www.drgreger.org/june2005.html
... The global mortality from the 1918 pandemic has recently been revised upwards to as many as 100 million people dead.[52] Experts fear this new virus may turn out many times more deadly. "This is the worst flu virus I have ever seen or worked with or read about," one virology chair who has been studying avian influenza strains for decades told a reporter. "We have to prepare as if we're going to war and the public needs to understand that clearly... if this does happen, and I fully expect it will, there will be no place for any of us to hide. Not in the United States or in Europe or in a bunker somewhere. The virus is a very promiscuous and efficient killer."[53] The top Russian virologist offers a potential death count: "Up to one billion people could die around the whole world in six months... We are half a step away from a worldwide pandemic catastrophe."[54]
Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the U.S. Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, is probably our nation's top expert. He continues to make attempts to describe the ensuing unimaginable horror. He suggests people consider the devastation of the recent tsunamis in South Asia: "Duplicate it in every major urban centre and rural community around the planet simultaneously, add in the paralyzing fear and panic of contagion, and we begin to get some sense of the potential of pandemic influenza.[55] An influenza pandemic of even moderate impact will result in the biggest single human disaster ever--far greater than AIDS, 9/11, all wars in the 20th century and the recent tsunami combined. It has the potential to redirect world history as the Black Death redirected European history in the 14th century."[56]
Nature is considered by many to be the most prestigious scientific journal in the world. They commissioned their senior reporter in Paris to write a fictional yet realistic account of how the pandemic could be expected to unfold. Writing as a blogger in December 2005, it's fiction, but not fantasy. Read it in full at
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050523/full/435400a.html.
According to the top experts in the world, these bird flu scenarios are not just Chicken Little stories. "We're not crying wolf," swears Canada's top expert, head of the national microbiology lab. "There is a wolf. We just don't know when it's coming."[57] The head of the CDC's International Emerging Infections Program in Thailand agrees: "The world just has no idea what it's going to see if this thing comes," he said, but then stopped. "When, really. It's when. I don't think we can afford the luxury of the word 'if' anymore. We are past 'if's."[58]
So what can we do? Almost all of the antibiotics ever created only work against bacteria. There are a few classes of drugs, including drugs like amantidine, that work against certain viruses as well. But the present bird flu virus has already evolved resistance to this first generation of antivirals. How? "The Chinese have been incorporating amantadine in their chicken feed, so we have lost that as a treatment," notes one U.S. flu expert.[59]
Scientists are pinning their hopes on oseltamavir (also known as Tamiflu), the best prospect in the latest generation of antiflu drugs. Unfortunately, there is not enough to go around. Made from star anise, a plant in limited global supply, there is now a two-year waiting list for new orders.[60] And the orders, of course, are coming from dozens of rich Western countries who are attempting to stockpile the drug,[61] not the poor countries like Vietnam where any pandemic is likely to start.
"The only effective way to stop a global pandemic is to stop it in Southeast Asia," writes the editorial board of the journal of the Canadian Medical Association. "Although likely to have only a limited effect, stockpiles of oseltamavir need to be created throughout Southeast Asia." Scientists reason that if the human outbreak can be caught early enough, maybe they could even stop it. Once the pandemic hits, writes one leader in the field, "School closure, quarantine, travel restrictions and so on are unlikely to be more effective than a garden hose in a forest fire."[62]
It's like a spark and a squirt gun, describes the director of the U.S. National Vaccine Program. "If you aim properly you can get the spark and be done with it. If you miss, though, the fire is going to spread and there is nothing you can do to stop it."[63] When a senior public-health official was asked if he could imagine the developed world sending its resources to combat the flu in Southeast Asia, the reply was, "Who are you kidding?"[64]
The Western world is continuing in its "narcissistic planning,"[65] ignoring pleas from the World Health Organization to pour resources into Southeast Asia.[66] The U.K., for example, is spending $700 million to stockpile antiviral drugs. That's ten times the entire health budget for Vietnam. In Cambodia, the total annual budget for a campaign to encourage citizens to report suspected cases of bird flu is about $3000.[67]
Once the outbreak spreads globally, though, stockpiles in rich countries will provide no more than a pandemic "speed bump."[68] Canada, for example, has ordered 20 million doses although they suspect they'd need more than 200 million.[69] Who's going to have access to the limited supply? Priority for prophylactic treatment goes first to "key decision makers."[70] The current U.S. stockpile would treat less than 2 percent of the population.[71] Some scientists are advocating it just be sold over the counter and let whomever can afford it have access.[72]
From the editorial board of one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, "If the greatest pandemic in history is indeed on the horizon, that threat must be met by the most comprehensive public-health plan ever devised."[73] If one reads the behind-the-scenes policy journals like Foreign Affairs, though, senior officials admit that planning for what they call "the most catastrophic outbreak in human history" is "abysmally inadequate."[74] Realizing that given the current political situation the prospects for preventing the pandemic are practically nonexistent, chief scientists like Osterholm are going to the business community to at least work on providing an infrastructure for survivors of what is being predicted in policy journals as the "shutdown of the global economic system."[75]
Speaking to a conference of agricultural bankers, Osterholm laid it all out: "This is going to be the most catastrophic thing in my lifetime. 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."[76]
If we can't stop a human outbreak once it's started, can we stop a human outbreak in the first place? The WHO advises that "[p]revention of... avian influenza in humans is best achieved by controlling infection in poultry." [77] At this stage though, with over a hundred million birds dead so far and confirmed spread into migratory wild bird populations, this prospect seems similarly untenable. [78]
Asia provides a veritable genetic-reassortment laboratory for the virus--the mix of an unprecedented number of people, pigs, and poultry. "It is sobering to realize," Osterholm writes, "that in 1968, when the most recent influenza pandemic occurred, the virus emerged in a China that had a human population of 790 million, a pig population of 5.2 million, and a poultry population of 12.3 million; today, these populations number 1.3 billion, 508 million, and 13 billion, respectively. Similar changes have occurred in the human and animal populations of other Asian countries, creating an incredible mixing vessel for viruses."[79] In that kind of environment, New Yorker reporter Michael Specter wrote that "one sneeze from a pig could be enough to start a pandemic."
Large commercial poultry operations provide an ideal spawning ground for new pandemic strains. Tens of thousands of broiler-type chickens are crammed into large sheds. Because they live in their own manure, the virus has an opportunity to be excreted in the feces and then breathed in or swallowed by the thousands of other birds, allowing the virus to rapidly and repeatedly circulate. With so many birds to mutate within and pass back and forth, low virulence strains can readily turn into deadly ones.[80]
Describing another deadly animal-to-human virus that arose in Asia, this one in 1999, the Thai Minister of Public Health explains: "A hundred years ago, the Nipah virus would have simply emerged and died out; instead it was transmitted to pigs and amplified. With modern agriculture, the pigs are transported long distances to slaughter. And the virus goes with them." And countries trying to protect their poultry industries have covered up their outbreaks, making it that much more difficult to stem the tide early.[81]
Charun Boonyarithikarn is another senior Thai public-health officer. "Chickens used to live in our backyards," he told a New Yorker reporter. "They didn't travel much. Now, throughout the world, farms have become factories. Millions of chickens are shipped huge distances every day. We can't stop every chicken or duck or pig. And they offer millions of opportunities for pathogens to find a niche."
Dr Samuel Jutzi of the Food and Agriculture Organization told the conference: "There is an increasing risk of avian influenza spread that no poultry-keeping country can afford to ignore."[82] Vietnam has already banned duck and goose farming, but this may be a case of too little too late.[83] Another pandemic may force humanity to realize that it may have to give up the habit of raising birds completely.
In response to the February 28, 2005 lead New Yorker story on the threat of bird flu, staff writer Michael Specter was asked if, based on his research, we would "have to rethink such things as large-scale poultry farming?" He replied Well, I can't imagine a better prescription for killing large numbers of animals with a single disease than packing tens of thousands of them into factory farms where they are lucky if they have fifteen inches of personal space. Still, the economic incentives toward factory production of food are huge--we want cheap meat. So it's going to be very difficult to change."[89] So what does the poultry industry think about the possibility of its own industry leading to a worldwide epidemic that kills millions of people? The Executive Editor of Poultry magazine wrote an editorial on that very subject in its last issue: "The prospect of a virulent flu to which we have absolutely no resistance is frightening. However, to me, the threat is much greater to the poultry industry. I'm not as worried about the U.S. human population dying from bird flu as I am that there will be no chicken to eat."[84]
So I'll rephrase my questions/concerns--I do know I've seen reputable sources discussing the airborne capabilities and long-life of flu virus in the wild. It may or may not be an important issue in THE dreaded flu pandemic, but it certainly seems the true experts are saying there's not really much that can be done once the virus starts spreading (and maybe even before it starts spreading).
