Word: viruses
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Poultry was on the lunch menu and on the agenda at World Health Organization (WHO) this week as animal and health experts from 100 countries discussed how to respond to the avian flu virus that has killed 65 people in Asia. The fear, of course, is that the H5N1 virus will kill millions more if it mutates into a form that can be transmitted from human to human-the WHO conservatively estimates that in this worst-case scenario, the virus will infect between one quarter and one third of the world's population, and kill between 2 million...
...failing to prepare: Over the past month alone, the number of governments that have put in place pandemic response plans has risen from 20 percent to 60 percent. "We've reached a greater consensus and clarity on what has to be done to control the spread of the H5N1 virus," Dr. David Nabarro, United Nations Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza told TIME. "If we continue to make inroads, we'll end up with a smaller and less virulent pandemic that we expected...
...while the TV cameras rolled, U.S. President Gerald Ford pushed up his sleeve and received his influenza vaccine. It wasn't an ordinary flu jab. In February of that year, an 18-year-old U.S. Army recruit had died of a swine flu virus, which scientists at the time believed was closely related to the virus that had caused the 1918 influenza pandemic. High-level disease experts worried that the new virus signaled the return of the 1918 flu, and barely a month after the soldier's death, Ford announced an unprecedented emergency plan to inoculate the entire American population...
...flip side to 1918, a reminder that there is always a risk of overreacting to a pandemic threat. But the decision to crash test a vaccination program was based on the best available science at the time. (We know now that the 1918 flu was an avian virus, not a swine one.) While the 1976 program was an expensive and embarrassing mistake, it also underscored just how difficult it is to decide how to prepare for an influenza pandemic, whose schedule and severity we have virtually no way of predicting. "No one really knows what's going to happen," says...
Everyone seems so alarmed by the outbreak of avian flu [Oct. 17]. Maybe it's time we stopped and looked at the way we raise animals. Seven to nine chickens crammed into a cage the size of a microwave oven is a virus time bomb waiting to explode. Caged chickens stand in their own feces and are never able to stretch their wings. Many have been debeaked, and some have chronic pain and infections. We should ban the inhumane standards of factory farming. I believe that avian flu is the quiet revenge of those millions of chickens, ducks and geese...