Bird Flu Hits Europe, A possible Pandemic?
 

This could be big.

What do you think?

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/avian/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4338490.stm

KFC is going to cost thousands per bucket :(

get out of the way e-gold, here's e-chicken, the currency of the future :)

So far unless people have contact with living infected chickens, the chances are slim to get the bird flu, since there is no evidence yet of human to human transmission.

But if the virus mutates (as scientist fear could happen) then it could get very ugly. The last bird flu pandemia killed at least 50 million people worldwide.

The problem is this :

The more people who get infected, the more chances the virus will mutate and learn how to infect and start a pandemic..

Right now, H5N1 is endemic in Asia. And thanks the migratory birds, the virus is spreading across the globe. Infecting birds and killing them and giving more chances to infect people.. You get the idea.

buy shares in roche now

lol

I'm not worried about this at all...

The disease has not even mutated to transmit to humans yet....

So at this point the only millions dieing are birds.. Ducks, Geese, and Chickens..

If we just stay proactive and don't fuck around this will not blow out of proportion like people think it will..

I've seen plenty of reports on the precautions some large farms are taking, soaking their feet in bleach when walking in and out of buildings.. etc..

What we're lacking is education on this subject worldwide.. Hopefully people will pick up the fact soon that they need to watch out and not be as clumsy when it comes to cross contamination.

This is an extremely serious situation that is not going to go away and the governments of the world need to get a handle on getting vaccines for everyone pronto.

the sky is falling the sky is falling

4th time this year.

You can't create a vaccine yet. The pandemic strain does not exist. Once the pandemic starts, it's going to take 3-4 months to get a sample. Then 4-6 months to mass produce it. And there won't be enough vaccines for everyone in the U.S.

The first batch will be for Washington, the army, the hospitals.. etc.

cnn got some interesting video on this subject

I hate birds.
 

They shit on my car and now they are trying to kill us.

Well, Turkey is NOT in europe...

They've been talking about an avian pandemic flu virus (rearrange the words as you see fit) for over eight years now, I believe. Enough already.

Romania and germany are

Romania isn't :) Not yet.. thanks God..

Oops.. Looks like you are wrong. :1orglaugh

Bird flu virus detected in Romania

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/news...archived=False

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romania confirmed on Thursday that a strain of bird flu had been detected in samples from local ducks and said it was buying thousands of doses of the Tamiflu antiviral drug as a precautionary measure.

Romania's chief veterinarian, Ion Agafitei, told Reuters that scientists had detected an H5 avian influenza virus in samples taken from ducks found in the Danube delta.

"We eventually isolated the avian flu virus in the samples taken from the three ducks," Agafitei said.

Romanian authorities said they sent the samples to a British laboratory on Thursday to find out whether the virus was the H5N1 strain, which has killed more than 60 people in Asia since 2003. Final test results are expected on Friday.

EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said a strain of the disease found in Turkey had been identified as H5N1.

Experts fear H5N1 could mutate into a virus which spreads easily among humans, creating a pandemic that might kill millions.

The Danube delta contains Europe's largest wetlands and is a major migratory area for wild birds coming from Russia, Scandinavia, Poland and Germany. The birds mainly move to warmer areas in North Africa including the Nile delta for winter.

TAMIFLU ORDERS

A further 15,000 Romanian birds were due to be slaughtered on Thursday.

"We have so far culled 3,000 poultry and we will continue to do so at a rapid pace," said Mihai Carciumaru, the mayor of Ceamurlia de Jos in the Danube delta, where three infected ducks were found last week.

Romania asked the Swiss firm Roche Holding AG to provide 45,000 doses of the Tamiflu antiviral drug as a precautionary move to fight a possible spread to humans.

"We asked for 45,000 doses of Tamiflu which will arrive in the coming 10 days to Romania," Health Minister Eugen Nicolaescu said. "This is just a precautionary move against bird flu.

The World Health Organization had offered 1,000 doses at no cost and these were due to arrive at the weekend, he added.

The European Commission confirmed the Romanian findings and said it would ban Romanian poultry imports.

"Given that it has been confirmed that the virus is present in Romania, the Commission will now adopt the same measures already taken for Turkey last Monday, that is to say a ban on imports of live birds, poultry meat and other poultry products," the Commission said in a statement.

The Commission said its experts had detected the H5 virus strain in two samples taken at a farm in the Danube delta.

"Further tests are necessary to ascertain if the virus in question is the H5N1 strain," it added.

Britain's chief vet said on Thursday that she expected the test results to be known on Friday.

(Additional reporting by Martin Dokoupil)

Hi, I'm saying Romania is not in Europe. Wanna wrestle over it? I have a pool of oil if you're interested.

What I find worrying is that the latest studies indicate that the current bird flu virus is taking an evolutionary path similar to that followed by the 1918 Spanish Flu. If evolution actually favours such a direction of development, which is a distinct possibility, we're royally fucked.

Romania is in Europe. I don't give a damn about you smoking crack.

NEWS
EU official warns of deadly flu pandemic

EU officials are already preparing for the possibility that a global flu epidemic, which could cause up to 30 million deaths, might break out in the next few years, Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection Markos Kyprianou said during a press conference in Athens yesterday.

The Cypriot commissioner said that efforts had been made to coordinate and make authorities and pharmaceutical companies across Europe aware of the potential danger of a lethal flu pandemic repeating imminently, based on a cycle of 30 to 35 years.

Pandemics occur when a new strain of flu virus, to which humans have no immunity, emerges. The most recent one, the Hong Kong flu, killed around a million people worldwide in 1968. The worst episode ever recorded was the Spanish flu pandemic which killed up to an estimated 60 million people between 1918 and 1919.

you know whats really funny is the irony of the vaccine creation...

All influenza vaccines are cultivated in fertilized chicken eggs....

Cultivating a vaccine in the egg to fight against the thing that lays the egg...to me spells trouble.....not only in terms of genetic resistance, but the amount of eggs needed to sustain a viable vaccine...

chickens become infected -> get killed - > lower egg crop - > less vaccine - > more chicken die...etc..etc...

You really want to worry? Worry about the stock of chickens that specifically lay eggs for vaccine creation. If that crop becomes infected.....then Houston...we will have a serious problem....

All I know is if that shit hits the U.S I'm going to the local marina and borrowing someone's sail boat and I'm taking myself a nice voyage out to sea..

Sounds like a plan. Except you'll have no Internet.

It will either be nothing or it will become really big.

Fuck, I mean in EUROPEAN UNION.. :Oh crap

ah ok, was gonna send you a map

we need to killl all the chickens then let em watch sum porn and mate all day

just buy some tamaflu and sent it to me, i live in europe

:thumbsup :thumbsup

I think the Bush administration effort to get us all to stop thinking about indictments and start thinking about the Plague must be working.

How does this fit into Intelligent Design Theory?

Is an omnipotent deity going to mutate the virus so it can go human to human?

He's culling his herd, maybe.

read a little more on subject my friend, it is the very nature of a pandemic to cross to human to human, happen 3-4 times per century

and in other news:

THE SKY IS FALLING!!! THE. SKY. IS. FALLING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHH HHHHHHHH!!!!

Bigger possibility to die from a car accident when driving for a vaccine, than die from the flu. Think about it b4 you panic :winkwink:

At this point yes.. but if this shit starts going crazy then it could very easily nail your ass.. They say every person on the planet breathed in the 1819(year?) flu and half of them died.

Today stuff like is is much more likely to spread faster and would kill millions if it did start spreading on a mass scale.

Based on historical patterns, influenza pandemics can be expected to occur, on average, three to four times each century when new virus subtypes emerge and are readily transmitted from person to person. However, the occurrence of influenza pandemics is unpredictable. In the 20th century, the great influenza pandemic of 1918?1919, which caused an estimated 40 to 50 million deaths worldwide, was followed by pandemics in 1957?1958 and 1968?1969.

Experts agree that another influenza pandemic is inevitable and possibly imminent.

Most influenza experts also agree that the prompt culling of Hong Kong?s entire poultry population in 1997 probably averted a pandemic.

This is from WHO

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/facts..._influenza/en/

<groan>

I am well aware of that, my friend. I have some science training. I understand evolution theory, at least at an undergraduate level.

I was just trying to ridicule the intelligent design evangelists.

At least Elli got it!

:thumbsup

"Intelligent Design" is the theory that biology is too complex to have evolved through evolution, and must therefore have been guided by some "intelligent designer". It is creationism without the explicit mention of God.

He was making a joke about that.

Funny the way some folks are laughing at the potential threat of this situation.

87 years ago the Spanish Flu killed 25 million people in only 6 months. Including 500,000 in the US and 200,000 in the UK so it doesn't just hit 3rd world countries only.

Yah, the fake terrorist threat on NYC a week or so ago didn't last more than a day.

I'd be willing to bet all of them are dead.

i will go back to cleaning my lens now,

me bad

LOL.. excellent point.. although anyone religious enough to believe it will just say we deserve it for allowing gay marriage and abortions.

There isn't much an individual can do about it right now

Yes you can :

Preparing for the upcoming pandemic

good info there