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There are at least a dozen _known_ diseases that will just as gleefully sicken or even kill the human animal. Why we're so upset about the bird flu and what makes it special, I don't know, except of course that the entire subject is pushed into our faces and through our ears nonstop through the media. (Just to forestall some comments: The rabies virus could mutate too and become airborne for all we know. Gnade uns Gott should that ever happen).

I'm not sure why this is "interesting". The reason there is such an interest in the bird flu is due to the danger it poses. It's quite simple, actually. Due to a couple factors I won't get into here, the flu mutates very quickly. The obvious consequence of this is that it is constantly evading the human immune system. It also means that it can quickly mutate to forms that are far more deadly and far more transmissible than the flu normally is. Currently, the bird flu already has the "far more deadly" aspect. It kills roughly 50% of the people infected with it. As of right now, it still has trouble being transmitted, so it is not killing many people. However, due to the ease with which the flu mutates it is very simple for the bird flu to become highly infectious. So, we're a chance encounter away from a virus that could quickly kill millions of people in a single season. Moreover, there is a precedent for this: the 1918 flu. And that flu had a lower mortality rate than H5N1 currently has. Will H5N1 mutate to quickly spread among humans? We don't know. What we do know is that it most certainly will mutate, and that it has the ability to mutate into a pandemic form.

As for Tamiflu, your point only makes sense if Donald Rumsfeld controls the entire scientific and medical communities, as well as the worldwide press. I suggest that instead of reading conspiracy theory bulletin boards, you check out the Flu Wiki to find out more about the subject.

Please, MODERATE UP THE PARENT!

The blog entry to which the guy is pointing is by the apparently well-informed fellow who wrote a Flu Wiki entry on influenza in general.

Interesting passages spring out, such as:

"[...] On Thursday they closed at 239p and yesterday they added a further 11p to 250p.The improvement marks something of a revival for the company's shares, which have sunk from a high of nearly 400p reached in 2003. The shares came under pressure on concerns that once a key contract to supply smallpox vaccines to the US had been fulfilled its prospects were limited." (Quoted from Times Online).

"Translation: M2 vaccine didn't work by neutralizing the virus but required assistance of T-cells. This means it would be insufficient for routine protection against influenza viruses."

"Translation: This one's the kicker. Vaccination against M2e worked in pigs to produce a good antibody response. Unfortunately, it set off a reaction that killed the virus-challenged vaccinated pigs faster than the unvaccinated ones."

Please, MODERATE UP THE PARENT!

The blog entry to which the guy is pointing is by the apparently well-informed fellow who wrote a Flu Wiki entry on influenza in general.

Interesting passages spring out, such as:

"[...] On Thursday they closed at 239p and yesterday they added a further 11p to 250p.The improvement marks something of a revival for the company's shares, which have sunk from a high of nearly 400p reached in 2003. The shares came under pressure on concerns that once a key contract to supply smallpox vaccines to the US had been fulfilled its prospects were limited." (Quoted from Times Online).

"Translation: M2 vaccine didn't work by neutralizing the virus but required assistance of T-cells. This means it would be insufficient for routine protection against influenza viruses."

"Translation: This one's the kicker. Vaccination against M2e worked in pigs to produce a good antibody response. Unfortunately, it set off a reaction that killed the virus-challenged vaccinated pigs faster than the unvaccinated ones."

• White House on Pandemic Flu
• PandemicFlu.gov
• FluWikie

Actually, there is a very similar home treatment recommended here: http://www.fluwikie.com/uploads/Consequences/NewGu ideOct7b.pdf It's called Oral Rehydration Therapy, and I'm getting together the ingredients this week.

Another preparation that's recommended is that you have a surgical face mask to avoid breathing in the virus, and to avoid spreading it if you're infected but not showing symtoms. Here's a reference: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/infectioncont rol/maskguidance.htm

I've heard several speakers on this topic recently, including Dr. Michael Osterholm of Univ. of Minn., and it's just a matter of time before avian flu, specifically H5N1, comes to your town (and everybody's). Several city administrations that I'm familiar with (including Plymouth and Minneapolis, MN, and Alameda, CA) are making specific preparations, mainly around "how do we operate the city when 30-40% of our staff are out sick themselves or busy at home caring for their family members". Alameda is preparing centers to distribute vaccine, once one is available.

Here's an interview with Dr. Osterholm: http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/06/osterhol m-were-screwed.html

Once again, for the slower crowd: I'm talking about events that have a low probability for any given day, even though they are extremely high probability in the long run.

The people of New Orleans enjoyed a long period where their city wasn't hit by a major storm. A few people warned that they were are risk, but most people thought nothing worse than previous storms would hit. Of course New Orleans was at risk! The problem is that we don't deal with problems that seem unlikely to happen in a given year. New Orleans did not prepare enough.

We are in the same situation with bird flu. We don't know the exact odds, but we do have experts who think H5N1 looks like a potential problem. There are steps we can take to prepare (see fluwikie.com for suggestions). The downside of not preparing is enormous.

So what is the chance we'll be hit by a 1918-style (or worse) flu pandemic? No one knows. But I don't think that number is more than a couple of percent for a typical year. (This might not be a typical year, since H5N1 is spreading through the bird population, and people have died from it.) People don't want to worry about it because of the low probability of a pandemic for a given year, the uncertainty about that probability, and the hellacious experience of the 1918 flu. With something that scary, it is easier to just say that it isn't likely to happen.

It is important that we all take steps to prepare for a pandemic at the world, federal, state, local and personal level.

Experts like Robert G. Webster are worried about H5N1, so it makes sense to take some precautions.

The Great Influenza by John Barry will scare your socks off, and it is all historical fact.

A good source of information about a possible pandemic is fluwikie.com

The way the current H5N1 vaccine candidate is produced works around the "kills chicken eggs" problem.

BTW, this is not an issue with other "ordinary" influenzas. The H5N1 issue stems from its quite extraordinary lethality.

H5N1 vaccine starts with a "designer virus" containing enough elements of the H5N1 genome to provoke resistance when they are expressed as surface glycoproteins. But the "designer virus" has a much lower lethality and the chicken eggs mature to produce usable virus yields.

This trick was used a few years ago by NAIAD to produce a vaccine candidate for Ebola. Here is a short article on the design of the Ebola vaccine candidate, and the announcement of the beginning of human trials.

It should be mentioned in passing that the current H5N1 candidate is seriously flawed for a number of reasons. The most important of these is that it was designed using the strain prevalent in Vietnam in late 2004. The strain spreading like crazy across Eastern Europe right now, and moving into (oh, joy) the Middle East has a number of specific genetic and antigenic differences from the Vietnamese one. It is quite possible for the current candidate to fail quite badly to induce immunity to this new strain, should it be the one to finally go airborne H2H.

If you want more reading matter than you can handle on this subject, and reputable to boot, may I suggest two sites you folks should have been reading on a daily basis for the last six months:

Recombinomics

The Flu Wiki

The author of the Recombinomics site is a virologist who is one of the world's foremost experts on genetic recombination. I draw your attention to something that has gotten short shrift on Slashdot, which omission may shorten the lives of a few readers here - recombination and/or reassortment, NOT mutation, is how H5N1 is likely to achieve airborne human-human infectiousness.

The Flu Wiki has an editorial board which is very, very physician and virologist heavy. There is simply NFW that it will wander into the Wilderness Of Disrepute that Wikipedia now stands lost in.

Do your homework if you want to live. Verb sap.

The way the current H5N1 vaccine candidate is produced works around the "kills chicken eggs" problem.

BTW, this is not an issue with other "ordinary" influenzas. The H5N1 issue stems from its quite extraordinary lethality.

H5N1 vaccine starts with a "designer virus" containing enough elements of the H5N1 genome to provoke resistance when they are expressed as surface glycoproteins. But the "designer virus" has a much lower lethality and the chicken eggs mature to produce usable virus yields.

This trick was used a few years ago by NAIAD to produce a vaccine candidate for Ebola. Here is a short article on the design of the Ebola vaccine candidate, and the announcement of the beginning of human trials.

It should be mentioned in passing that the current H5N1 candidate is seriously flawed for a number of reasons. The most important of these is that it was designed using the strain prevalent in Vietnam in late 2004. The strain spreading like crazy across Eastern Europe right now, and moving into (oh, joy) the Middle East has a number of specific genetic and antigenic differences from the Vietnamese one. It is quite possible for the current candidate to fail quite badly to induce immunity to this new strain, should it be the one to finally go airborne H2H.

If you want more reading matter than you can handle on this subject, and reputable to boot, may I suggest two sites you folks should have been reading on a daily basis for the last six months:

Recombinomics

The Flu Wiki

The author of the Recombinomics site is a virologist who is one of the world's foremost experts on genetic recombination. I draw your attention to something that has gotten short shrift on Slashdot, which omission may shorten the lives of a few readers here - recombination and/or reassortment, NOT mutation, is how H5N1 is likely to achieve airborne human-human infectiousness.

The Flu Wiki has an editorial board which is very, very physician and virologist heavy. There is simply NFW that it will wander into the Wilderness Of Disrepute that Wikipedia now stands lost in.

Do your homework if you want to live. Verb sap.

I've been reading the Flu Wiki as mentioned in a previous post on /. but one question remains in my mind.

If we sucessfully ride out the pandemic at home or whatever without becoming infected, presumably we could still pick it up in the environment or in future seasonal flu outbreaks which contain H5N1. So is it going to take it's cut of us anyway no matter what we do?

In which case, I may aswell just continue as normal. No point losing your job if you survive and if you don't it won't matter :-(

Am I the only one, having a somewhat strong immune system, that is not in the least bit worried about a pandemic?

There's a Flu Wiki that's a good starting point for information about avian influenza. For people who want to follow the news more closely, they can wander over to this discussion board.

There's a Pandemic Flu Awareness Week going on at http://www.fluwikie.com - a public health experiment: can we prepare from the trenches? Can we have the best cooperative information (and personal and community plans) available? There are links to preparation done all over the world - have you asked people around you how they are going to cope if such a thing emerges?

http://www.fluwikie.com/ has this "pandemic flu awareness week"

I wonder if the internet would resist a flu pandemic. 30% people sick, more taking care of the sick ... Think Katrina x 1000 - who do you turn to for help?