China Will Vaccinate 14 Billion Farm Birds

Discussion in 'Off-Topic Discussions' started by Laser200, Nov 16, 2005.

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  1. Laser200

    Laser200 Guest

    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 16, 2005
  2. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member

    And they can do it. I've seen more than one movie with Chinese running along treetops.
     
  3. Laser200

    Laser200 Guest

    Maybe they will use helicopters. :D
     
  4. DesElms

    DesElms New Member

    All the Chinese government would have to do is make another 1,306,313,812 doses available (a mere 9% increase), and it could vaccinate its entire human population, too.

    And, yes, yes... I realize that 14 billion veterinary-quality doses is quite different from 1 billion human-quality ones.

    But, theoretically, I'm just sayin'.

    I guess what brings it home to me is the program I watched on the Discovery Channel the other night -- a brand new one, obviously produced in just that last month or so -- which tells us, in clear and unambiguous terms, that when and if the avian flu becomes the world pandemic that experts are now warning; and when and if it hits the US in waves, as is predicted; and when and if bodies start stacking-up in morgues, as is predicted, they're saying that there will only be enough human vaccine for first responders and healthcare personnel; and that the rest of us are basically on our own.

    It begs the question: If China can figure out a way to produce 14 billion doses for its birds, why can't it produce a mere billion human-quality doses for its citizenry; and why can't the US produce a lousy 300 million for us? Just askin'.

    My paternal grandfather died in the great spanish flu pandemic back in 1919, leaving my then-four-year-old father without one of his own. In those days, it got so bad in some places in the US that, similar to what happened with the 16th century plague in Europe, wagons would slowly work their way down the main streets each day, stopping in front of whichever homes/buildings had a certain kind of flag tied to a fencepost or lightpost out front, indicating that yet another body needed to be pcked-up and hauled away. According to that Discovery Channel program I watched the other night, it's gonna' be just about that severe again... to the point where the program devoted a small amount of its time to telling viewers how best to stock food and water so they can stay home (and away from those infected) for up to two weeks at a time during the peaks of the multiple waves of flu that experts are now predicting could sweep across the US starting mid- to late-2006.

    Of course it's flu -- a virus, not a bacteria -- so antibiotics have no effect. The smartest thing one can do, it seems, is start working on getting very healthy right now so that when/if it hits, one's immune system is strong; and one's ability to fight it off without dying is optimized. Learning to sleep sitting-up, for example, so that gravity will help keep fluid accumulations in a part of the lung where they won't interfere as much with breathing; and using lots of expectorant -- even if it's only the over-the-counter kind -- so that said fluids may be more easily coughed-up and said lungs cleared (thereby helping to avert the onset of pneumonia), will, along with things like drinking lots of fluids and taking lots of vitamins, be about the only thing that anyone can do, it seems to me.

    [sigh] I can't wait. :rolleyes:
     
  5. Laser200

    Laser200 Guest

  6. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member

    Re: Re: China Will Vaccinate 14 Billion Farm Birds

    If The Weekly Standard won't cause you blindness, Michael Fumento adds some needed perspective to this flu hysteria.

    Fuss and Feathers
     
  7. gkillion

    gkillion New Member

    I just returned from China, and now I have an overwhelming urge to crap on someone's windshield.

    What do you suppose that means?:confused:
     
  8. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member

    You're a less than desirable neighbor. Worse if you can run along the treetops.
     
  9. DesElms

    DesElms New Member

    Either that, or you've decided to give the window-cleaning homeless guys (who clean people's automobile windshields -- whether they want it or not -- while they're sitting at stoplights) renewed purpose.
     
  10. gkillion

    gkillion New Member

    He better bring a BIG squeegee.
     
  11. DesElms

    DesElms New Member

    Re: Re: Re: China Will Vaccinate 14 Billion Farm Birds

    Liberals can appreciate The Weekly Standard, too, ya' know. Granted, we don't have much appreciation... but, hey... ;)

    Very impressive. Thanks for referring us to it. I particularly liked:
    • Another scenario is that somebody with human flu could contract avian flu at the same time and the two flus could "reassort" into a hybrid avian-human flu. The latter two epidemics in the 20th century were such hybrids. The World Health Organization has just reported that there is no evidence this has occurred with H5N1. The best means of reducing this likelihood is to vaccinate as many people as possible (especially in Southeast Asia) against human flu, thus reducing the potential number of "mixing vessels."
    which sort of exculpates my wonder about, and bolsters my argument for, the Chinese putting together a lousy 1.3 billion additional (human) doses, above. I also liked:
    • Still, there are those of great influence who would have us think a pandemic is just around the corner. Reassuringly, their explanations are unscientific. One is that "we're overdue" for a pandemic. Google "avian flu" and "pandemic" and "overdue," and you'll get over 40,000 hits. "In the 20th century there were three pandemics, which means an average of one every 30 years," explained one health official to the New York Times. "The last one was in 1968, so it's 37 years. Just on the basis of evolution, of how things go, we're overdue."

      Really? It was 39 years from the first pandemic to the second, but only 11 from the second to the third. Is that a pattern, or some white-jacketed yokel demonstrating his ability to do long division?
    Now that's writing! If this is your standard reading fare, decimon, I see where you get your quick wit and sarcastic/humorous sensibilities. ;)

    Continuing:
    • Ira Longini, a professor of biostatistics at Emory, has created with his colleagues a model of a 3,500-square-mile-area containing half a million people in rural Thailand where, if there is a pandemic, it's likely to start. He thinks health officials would have two weeks to a month to intervene with antivirals before the disease broke out of the cordon, because people in such areas don't tend to jump on jets to JFK.

      By hitting the outbreak at the source and not disseminating the drugs across a country, much less a planet, "We are putting the drug where the transmission is and not wasting it," Longini told USA Today. Unfortunately, the countries where the pandemic is most likely to emerge are not the ones stockpiling the drugs. By the time a pandemic reached the drug-rich countries, the mountain of pharmaceuticals might do nothing more than take the edge off the disease. "Several million courses sent to Thailand would be more effective than hoarding for nearly 300 million people" in the United States, Longini told the paper.
    Again, my earlier point. Continuing:
    • One panic button now being pushed repeatedly is that half of all persons contracting H5N1 die. "Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects," Laurie Garrett told ABC's Primetime, on the same show that featured Redlener's billion-death prediction. By comparison, the Spanish flu is believed to have killed 2.5 percent to 5 percent of its victims. The typical flu death rate is less than 1 percent.

      The cold-hearted reaction to these reports, paradoxically, is one of relief. A virus that kills its hosts so efficiently cannot easily propagate. (This is one of the reasons Garrett's predicted Ebola pandemic never materialized.) But in fact the reported mortality rate is problematic because of two types of "sample bias."

      First, all avian flu deaths so far have occurred in countries with medical systems that are dismal compared with ours. Would you choose a Cambodian hospital to treat your flu? Second, that more or less 50 percent death rate comes from those ill enough to require medical attention--the sickest of the sick. Our experience with normal influenza is that many who become infected have no symptoms at all, nary a sniffle. So we know the numerator, but without the denominator it's useless.

      [...]

      Certainly there's nothing special about bird flus to make them deadlier. Since 1997, four strains of avian flu have been confirmed in humans besides the notorious H5N1. One, H7N2, occurred in Virginia, causing 44 infections and no deaths. The 2003 Dutch outbreak infected 89 and killed one; H7N3 infected two Canadians, killing neither; H9N2 infected three people in Hong Kong and killed none. "With minimal medical intervention," says Emory's Ira Longini, meaning no flu vaccine, avian flu pandemic "mortality will probably be on the order of between 1 in a thousand to 1 in ten thousand." That's a far cry from 500 in 1,000.

      Ultimately, without an effective vaccine, the number of infections in the next pandemic will probably be along the same lines as that of the last two pandemics. (The U.S. government has already purchased over $150 million of vaccine, but it won't be ready until late next year at the earliest.) Deaths, however, would be vastly lower because we have so much better access to medicine. The World Health Organization estimate for deaths from an avian flu pandemic is a reasonable one: "between 2 million and 7.4 million people." Taking into account world population growth (a doubling from 1960 to 2000), that's in the same ballpark as the Asian and Hong Kong pandemics. Nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but neither does it evoke images of men pushing carts of corpses through city streets ringing bells and crying, "Bring out your dead!"

      [,,,]

      Among the few successful medicines doctors used during the Spanish flu were privately made vaccines for bacterial pneumonia. Today we have something called the pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine. One injection protects against 23 types of pneumococcal bacteria for a lifetime, so you don't have to wait until you're ill or even until there's a pandemic to be inoculated. Bacteria never develop resistance against it, as they do with antibiotics, and it will provide protection against any strain of flu, be it human or avian. A computer model in the Netherlands found that giving this vaccine to just 17 percent of the population prevented 3.5 percent of expected deaths directly and fully a fourth of all hospitalizations. Beds would be scarce during any pandemic and freeing them up would translate into better care for the sick and even more lives saved.

      Faced with a sudden shortage of flu vaccine last year caused by a bad batch, the Department of Health and Human Services prevailed upon Merck & Co. to triple its production of its pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine from 6 million to more than 17 million doses. "It could make a real difference to get this vaccine out to people," says Hayden. Chances are excellent this is the first you have heard of the pneumonia vaccine. Somehow this common sense measure has barely been mentioned in the voluminous coverage of flu pandemics--no doubt crowded out by the predictions of hundreds of millions of deaths.
    Great article, decimon. I've printed it and have given it its very own manilla file folder. Again, thank you.

    And maybe a hazmat suit, too. ;)
     
  12. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member

    Fumento is good for straight talk. Ronald Bailey is is as well and a good libertarian to boot. :)

    One thing to consider is that the threat of such a flu has always been there.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 18, 2005
  13. AGS

    AGS New Member

    this is good

    this is good that the bird will be treated in china ...now lets worry about the dogs being eaten ...
     
  14. Jack Tracey

    Jack Tracey New Member

    Laser!!!
    60 Minutes did a segment tonight on bird-flu. Did you see it?
    Jack
     
  15. Laser200

    Laser200 Guest

    No,

    but they are saying that Tamiflu is worthless. What did they say on 60 minutes?
     
  16. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Re: Re: China Will Vaccinate 14 Billion Farm Birds

    The problem is that in order to change from a strain that is transmitted bird-to-bird into a strain that's transmitted human-to-human, the bird flu virus will have to mutate. In which case it will probably be immunologically distinct. That means that vaccines prepared for the bird-strain that currently exists will likely be ineffective for whatever new human-strain emerges in the future.

    The Chinese are proposing to immunize domesticated poultry flocks, not every wild bird in China (which would be unrealistic). The reasoning is that human beings, particularly poultry farm workers, come into much closer contact with the domesticated birds than they do to wild birds. I believe that most of the human cases reported in Asia have been poultry farmers.

    The bird flu would still be out there in wild birds, but since humans don't come into close contact with them, there's less chance of the disease jumping into humans. Vaccinating domesticated bird flocks with a vaccine effective against the present avian form of the disease would reduce the reservoir of virus in closest proximity to man.
     
  17. Jack Tracey

    Jack Tracey New Member

  18. Laser200

    Laser200 Guest

    Sprinklers

    "China will vaccinate all domestic birds with a new type of cheap vaccine that can prevent both newcastle disease and avian influenza, or bird flu, through sprinkling,..."

    What is sprinkling?
    :rolleyes:
     
  19. Jack Tracey

    Jack Tracey New Member

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