The Coming Influenza Pandemic?

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

The Coming Influenza Pandemic?

Is a global influenza pandemic on the way that could kill millions of people? Are we going to relive the horror of 1918? If it happens, are we even remotely prepared to save ourselves? Scientists from around the world are concerned about bird flu...since 2004 our site has tracked news of H5N1 influenza from around the world.

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Links

• FluWiki online.
• Wikipedia on Influenza
• CDC Flu Page
• WHO Flu Page
• CDC Avian Influenza
• New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell on the search for the flu in permafrost
• New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell on Flu as our most deadly contagion
• The Planning and Politics behind the flu from Greenhammer
• Preparing for the Next Pandemic
• Michael T. Osterholm, Ph.D., M.P.H.
• New England Journal of Medicine, May 5, 2005
  
  
• Is there anything we can do to avoid this course? The answer is a qualified yes that depends on how everyone, from world leaders to local elected officials, decides to respond. We need bold and timely leadership at the highest levels of the governments in the developed world; these governments must recognize the economic, security, and health threats posed by the next influenza pandemic and invest accordingly. The resources needed must be considered in the light of the eventual costs of failing to invest in such an effort. The loss of human life even in a mild pandemic will be devastating, and the cost of a world economy in shambles for several years can only be imagined.
  
  
• ABC Primetime, September 2005
• "Right now in human beings, it kills 55 percent of the people it infects," says Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow on global health policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. "That makes it the most lethal flu we know of that has ever been on planet Earth affecting human beings."
  
  
• Dr. Robert Webster
• Society just can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. And I think we have to face that possibility," Webster said. "I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role.
  
  
• Dr. Robert Fedson
• "There is nothing in Darwinian evolution that says that our DNA has to survive compared to say the DNA of an earthworm. I mean Darwinian evolution is completely indifferent to which DNA happens to persist. We are not necessarily unique as a species as far as evolution is concerned and we can disappear like other species have already disappeared."

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