Word: h5n1
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Quite a bit would have to go wrong before it came to that. Even if the virus, H5N1, mutates into a strain that can jump from person to person, it's not inevitable that it will make it into Australia from Southeast Asia, says CMO Horvath, chairman of the National Influenza Pandemic Action Committee (NIPAC). It's likely the first cases of person-to-person transmission in Asia would occur in clusters, where local authorities, working alongside the World Health Organization and AusAID, would try to contain the virus by quarantining the sick and giving them - and those...
...better prospect is a vaccine, which the government has commissioned the Melbourne-based biopharmaceutical company CSL to fast-track. CSL will soon begin clinical trials on a prototype vaccine based on H5N1. With this head start, the company would be capable of producing enough vaccine to inoculate every Australian in a minimum of three months from the time a pandemic started and the exact strain was identified. If a pandemic does break out, authorities would hope that H5N1 was the culprit, since CSL's project is to some extent based on that premise. "This is a good scientific gamble," says...
...H5N1 does make it to Australia - about a 10% chance, according to government assessments - then it's more likely to happen within months than weeks, Horvath says. As to when the threat will be deemed over and people can get back to worrying about more mundane crises, "I have no idea," the CMO says. "But my colleagues in the (veterinary) world don't think this threat is going to abate in the foreseeable future." In the case of an avian-flu pandemic, it's unlikely that the waiting would be the worst part...
...Ministry of Agriculture did announce last week that it would begin culling infected birds, as Thailand and Vietnam do, rather than simply vaccinating them. (Vaccinated poultry may continue to spread the H5N1 virus.) But while the government insists it's doing all it can to control the disease, some are taking preparations into their own hands. One Australian bank has drawn up its own contingency plans for an outbreak and is stocking up on the antiviral drug Tamiflu. When it comes to keeping bird flu at bay, says a bank executive, "We have no faith in the government...
With a laboratory death rate of more than 50 percent and a very significant chance of a international outbreak of the disease, H5N1 avian influenza has caused significant fear throughout the globe. This is also considering that the last global pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919, caused more deaths than World War I combat: an estimated 20 to 40 million people throughout the world died from...