Pandemic Watch: Bird Flu
The World Health Organization continues to monitor occurrences of bird flu, primarily occurring in Thailand and Viet Nam. Between the two nations they've monitored 44 infections, 32 of which were terminal. This is a mortality rate of 72.7%. Consider that SARS, which caused travel restrictions and some virtual quarantines in 2003, has a mortality rate of about 15 percent.
On the positive side, the disease is - as the name suggests - primarily a bird to bird malady, jumping occasionally to humans. Also, at the moment there's no solid evidence of human to human transmissions, though they are monitoring two cases where the infected do not appear to have come in contact with infected poultry. On the other hand, viruses mutate, and as with any cold you've ever had they tend to become part of an organism they've infected, passing from cell generation to cell generation, and could possibly be triggered to reactivate.
Approximately 120 million chickens have either died from the disease or been killed to stop the spread, but WHO has projected that if a bird flu pandemic does occur they've estimated from two million to seven million fatalities, and have some projections taking it as high as one hundred million. Here's the referenced article.
The larger story, of course, is that WHO is on the watch for what is essentially inevitable: a pandemic. Considering that the 20th century's pandemic (if one doesn't count AIDS) was the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed between 20-40 million people, took place in an age that had yet to see the advent of international airline travel, not to mention with an overall substantially lower population density, grim estimates for the next pandemic are understandable.
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