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Birds and Flu
Posted by Raven on July 31st, 2005
My blog friend Rick Moran has yet another excellent post -this is about Bird Flu pandemic. An article in today’s WaPo has Rick concerned, and others should be as well. If this thing goes wild, the world will be in for the test of our times in regard to the survival of human beings. Nations would have to make choices that would not be fair to everyone. People would become animals in a mad game of survival vs. death.
In order to contain the outbreak, the federal government will have to assume enormous powers, ordering the closing of schools, office buildings, factories, malls – anywhere and anyplace that large numbers of people congregate. The simple chore of shopping for food will become a nightmare as strict limits will be placed on the number of people that will be allowed in a store at any one time.
No one is prepared for this type of thing. I can envision an outbreak taking days for the CDC to even recognize; by then it would be too late.
The strain on the public health system will be overwhelming. Hospitals will be filled to capacity. Workers on the front line of the epidemic – doctors, nurses, and other health care workers – will be hardest hit straining the ability of hospitals to deliver even basic services.
How do we know this? Because the US and the rest of the world went through a flu pandemic before; the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. That worldwide calamity killed more than 30 million people, 675,000 in the United States alone. By contrast, on average 36,000 deaths are attributed to flu each year in the United States.
The world isn’t prepared for a variety of pandemic type flu. Small pox and the ebola’s are another set of diseases that would wipe out entire populations within weeks. It’s a serious concern for some, and it should be taken more serious to everyone. These diseases are not like the common cold, or really even like the actual real flu epidemic we get each year. Bird Flu and similar diseases are deadly for everyone. Unlike the AIDS virus, this stuff kills within hours. There is no cure. And there are little remedies available for prevention. Most people would have the virus within their system long before they had any sypmtoms. It would spread before anyone even knew they had a problem.
Given the massive change in population density worldwide plus the advent of international air travel the World Health Organization is estimating that a Bird Flu pandemic could kill 300 million worldwide. Even their pie-in-the-sky best case scenario where the world is given another year or two to prepare places the number of dead at 7 million.
I would put that number up a lot higher. It would be of epic proportions. 300 million seems low.
