Not to freak Bosda out, but according to a Reuters report, the WHO has said that the Avian flu is more deadly than SARS:
So, the question is: how does the Avian flu differ from the regular flu? My understanding of regular flu vaccine is that the problem is identifying which strain to worry about. I assume that WHO scientists know what causes Avian flu, so if so, why not just cook up some vaccine?
IANAD and IANAMedical Researcher, and heck, I haven’t studied biology since high school, and I wasn’t even listening then.
As I understand it, avian flu as it currently exists doesn’t generally transmit from person to person. The people who have had it, AFAIK, all got it from direct contact with sick chickens. However, it could mutate into a flu virus that does spread from person to person, and that’s what they’re worried about. So the avian flu strain out there now isn’t exactly the strain that would cause a major epidemic. The mutated strain might be close enough to the current avian flu for a vaccine based on one to work against the other, or it might not.
One of the problems with the bird flu could be the mutation rate. If it’s high enough, then by the time you’ve cooked up your vaccine, it’s mutated enough to make the vaccine worthless.
Another problem could simply be the amount of hosts available to the bird flu. SARS was “easily” containable because the animal hosts were evidently not in widespread contact with human beings. This made it “easy” to clamp down on the outbreaks, and let the disease “burn itself out” rapidly. Birds are pretty widespread, and as much as car owners and city dwellers might like the idea, killing them enmasse, to limit the spread of the disease, isn’t an option.
Getting the necessary amount of vaccine produced and imunizing folks is going to be difficult as well. It took decades to wipe out small pox, and IIRC, we still haven’t wiped out polio, even though Bill Gates is throwing billions at the problem.
I don’t know whether they’ve identified the strains, but apparently, they’re already trying to cook up some vaccine. I watched a report about it, perhaps a couple weeks ago. They were interviewing some scientists (probably from the Pasteur institute) who were testing potential vaccines. I vaguely remember that they expected to find a reliable one relatively quickly (but I don’t remember at all how much time they estimated it could take), but even then, it will take months to produce it in large number, according to them.
Actually, I’ve been watching this very closely.
But I made a promise to myself, not to post in huge letters, or to scream about how this could destroy us all…
destroy us all…
destroy us all…
destroy us all…
destroy us all…
destroy us all…
Nah, 50,000,000 out of about 6,373,000,000 is just between 0.5 and 1% of the world’s population. Hardly anything to worry about.
OR
50,000,000!?! Holy Crap, that’s like the entire population of England! Maybe 28 Days Later was right?!?
Did you read the whole article you linked to? It mentions vaccines:
Flu vaccines take a long time to prepare. The virus has to be cultivated in eggs for months. In addition, it’s not quite as simple as knowing which strains are causing infection. They have to try to make a vaccine that will work against them and test it before they put it into production.
Eh, just put it in the mashed potatoes. It worked with the mammy-nuns.
No, I missed that; thought that they were just talking about some of the poultry killoffs (the second section begins and ends with discussions of livestocks, with the vaccine question dumped in the middle). Anyway, I don’t really get the “due to commercial reasons” bit. It would seem that at times public health ought to trump market considerations. And from a macroeconomic scale it would also seem that any costs would be more worthwhile than 50,000,000 dead plus healthcare costs associated with a pandemic.
Thanks for explaining why it takes so long to create a vaccine.
Huh. And just a little while ago I was shuddering over the thought of a new strain of virus that might kill huge numbers while posting in another thread…
Time for more Happy Brain Bleach.
The Great Influenza is a great book on the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and has a lot about the flu virus, how it mutates and behaves itself, and what the medical community of the time did to combat the disease. It’s fascinating reading - I’d had no idea that there were American cities digging mass graves for people in the 20th century for the flu.
Just read a NYT article about it…I know virtually nothing about hard epidemiology, but I didn’t find the article all that illuminating. Maybe the virus will recombine with human influenza strains…maybe it’ll mutate…maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt. There seem to be wildly different estimates about the virus’ actual lethality. I’m sure these guys are being responsible in warning us, but whatever change would be needed for the virus to kill tens of millions of people hasn’t happened yet.
I read The Great Influenza recently. It was really informative. I, too, would recommend it highly.
One thing the author emphasized is that in the influenza pandemic of 1918, many of the people who died were healthy young adults. Apparently that strain of flu kills healthy people via their own immune response–people with slightly less robust immune systems (middle aged adults, children) were actually more likely to survive.
As a healthy young adult, reading about that was really scary.
i’m very familiar with it.
I also located some graves in Murfreesboro’s Evergreen Cemetary from that period, that actually mention influenza.
Hard to believe that anything happened in Murfreesboro since the Civil War, but there you go…
Hell, I’ve lived in Murfreesboro and it’s hard to believe that anything happened there before, during, or after the Civil War.
In my home town in Ohio, during the Great Influenza outbreak, the town doctor slept in his car parked in the town square, so that residents of the tiny town (many of whom did not have electricity, muchless a telephone) could find him easily.