« What’s the State of Your Air? | Main | ** UPDATE – Bird Flu ** »
May 12, 2006
How Serious a Threat is the Bird Flu?
It seems that every week the news media reports on something related to a possible influenza (flu) pandemic. Hollywood officially added to the flurry of fear on May 9th when ABC aired a movie called “Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America.” The movie follows an outbreak of the H5N1 avian (bird) flu virus from a Hong Kong market through its mutation into a pandemic virus that spreads rapidly around the world. Obviously this was a movie designed to entertain rather than a documentary based on a real world event.
Could this happen? Influenza pandemics have claimed millions of lives in the past, so this is something that is being taken very seriously by governments and health officials around the world. One thing to keep in mind is that the next influenza pandemic could be substantially less severe than what the movie depicts or than what occurred in 1918. Science has come a long way since the early 1900s. Both the influenza pandemics of 1957/58 and 1968/69 caused so much less illness and death than the earlier pandemic, many Americans at that time were unaware that a pandemic was underway.
This is not to say that we are taking the threat lightly. The government is currently stockpiling enough antivirals to treat 25% of the U.S. population should a pandemic occur in the U.S. This figure was based on historical data. While an exact vaccine can be developed only once a strain is identified, a pre-pandemic H5N1 vaccine has been produced that may offer some level of immune protection should the H5N1 virus mutate into a pandemic strain.
Although the federal government through the CDC and other agencies will take a leadership role, much of the responsibility for planning and action is at the state and local levels. Take an interest in whether your state and local health departments have developed plans for a pandemic flu outbreak. Click here to see what’s going on in your local area.
What do you need to know right now?
- There is no avian flu pandemic in humans anywhere in the world at this time.
- The H5N1 avian influenza has not yet appeared in the U.S., and in countries in which it has appeared it is almost exclusively a disease of birds.
- Should the H5N1 virus appear in the U.S., it does not mean the start of a pandemic.
- Congress has approved funding for the Department of Health and Human Services to make significant financial investments to improve the technology for vaccine development and to ensure rapid availability of the vaccine for the population in the event of a pandemic.
- Visit www.pandemicflu.gov for more information on the avian flu and to find out what you can do to protect yourself and what local communities and businesses can do to in the event of a pandemic.
Remember....don’t panic. Be informed and prepared.
Posted by lungblogposter at May 12, 2006 01:22 PM
