March 31 Flu Update
Egypt has three new human cases in the same day. All are 7 years of age or under.Bird flu has re-emerged in Vietnam in ducks.
ProMed on Vietnam and Bangladesh.
ProMed on human cases in China and Egypt.
Kuwait is culling 1.5M birds. Bird flu has devastated egg production.
From Indonesia (via an alert reader), this article on the seeming randomness of the flu disease. The lack of a pattern is confusing people there. But, do we think it really is random?
Russian war on bird flu.
A district in Bangladesh says it has no avian cases.
In Scotland, half of all casualty units (ERs) do not have Tamiflu.
posted by Orange @ 9:41 AM
1 Comments:
Orange;
And the news about more Egyptian cases involving youngsters, still keeps rolling in nearly every week. With the virus spread in 20 of its 28 governorates, and no drastic procedures in place to eradicate it in their poultry, the outlook is looking dismal. They really need to take some extreme measures, like the Kuwaiti’s, bite the bullet, and start cleaning their house, if they every want to get ahead of the game.
Let’s all hope the Bangladeshi’s can get their current situation under control also. I noticed in the ProMed article, that movement of chickens has only been banned, “outside a 3.9 sq mile area around the affected farms”. I would have thought, at minimum, we would be talking, say, a couple of hundred square miles, in order to get serious. As a side note, I also noticed that ProMed is still reporting that China is conducting investigations to “ continue to identify the source of the sixteen year-old victim’s exposure”. Of course, there will be no conclusion to the source of his death, and the case will drop off into oblivion in a few more days.
I really believe the government of Kuwait proceeded correctly in culling the incredible number of birds, 1.5 million, in approximately three days. While this will indeed, temporarily at least, nearly decimate their laying hens and egg production, I have a feeling that they now will implement the extreme bio-security measures required in their commercial poultry operations in the future, to keep virus free. Fortunately, this is one country that can well afford to take this action and remedy its contamination.
Indonesia. This is like watching the Titanic sinking. I have a feeling one hundred years from now that many books will be written about this country and how it allowed H5N1 to become endemic, while its government did little or nothing. FlaMedic has an excellent commentary on the situation, from a medical perspective, in his blog today. All I can say is that when they fail to conduct any medical autopsies or forensic type pathological follow up studies on the patients – what do they expect ? What they call “randomness”, is simply another facet of their lack of comprehension (I’m going to be real nice here, since it’s Sunday).
At some point, they are going to have to understand that their antiquated religious custom of immediate burial within 24 hours of death, is going to have to overwritten, in order to allow for proper medical studies and organ pathology analysis, to save lives.
I’m quite sure Allah will understand.
This is a case of one of these two situations:
“Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs” (Ludwig Von Mises); or,irregardless whether it's Sunday,
“Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think”. (Arthur Shopenhauer)
Wulfgang
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