The Coming Influenza Pandemic?

1 Comments:

At 5:40 PM,  Wulfgang said...

Orange;

Any surprise that the official Chinese Health Ministry spokesman, Mao Qun’an has rejected the Lancet study that suspects limit human-to-human transmission from the father/son case in Nanjing last December ? China denies everything that might be construed negative or reflect badly on its communist totalitarian government. They denied the emergence of the Fujian strain of H5N1, they then finally acknowledged it nearly a year later. They have never to my knowledge, even admitted they had a porcine epidemic that ravaged their swine industry over the last two years and never once provided details or samples of the illness to the outside world. In 2002 an outbreak of what is believed to be severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), otherwise known as “Yellow Pneumonia”, began in the Guangdong province of China, which borders Hong Kong (sound familiar ?). The People's Republic of China (PRC) notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about this outbreak on February 10th after with holding and initially denying the disease, then subsequently reported 305 cases including 5 deaths; it was later reported that the outbreak in Guangdong had peaked in mid-February, but that appeared to be false, as later 806 infections and 34 deaths were reported.

The fact that the government is officially denying the Lancet study, tells me it is probably an accurate assessment of limited human-to-human transmission, and that there are probably a heck-of-a-lot more unacknowledged or unknown cases occurring there.

I see from your Reuters UK article about school closings during a pandemic, that confusion and lack of national and state uniform policy on the subject, still reigns supreme. This is still after the incontrovertible fact that US cities that closed schools promptly during the great epidemic of 1918, had 50% fewer deaths. I sense that there will be a major crisis everywhere on this subject: initially there will be refusal to close schools until it is too late and the damage is well underway; then I can see panicky parents toting their children to the worksite (in desperation), infecting others. Even without a pandemic, we have to order sick workers (aka morons) to stay home and not to infect the workplace: I had to do this on four separate occasions over the last six months.

Just imagine the impact on everyone once the school systems are shut down. Near chaos.

Wulfgang

 

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