According to a nurse I know and trust:
Medical practitioners in the United States are gearing up for a possible world flu epidemic, and H5N1 is on everyone's mind. A large flu epidemic, on the scale of the 1919 pandemic, would curtail essential services (utilities, fire and police protection, other) in developed states. One is left wondering what this would mean for states with less public health resources and less essential services personnel in the first place.
According to an article at HEALTH-Asia section of the IPS News Service:
As of Oct. 12, 2007, 331 human cases of avian flu in 12 countries in East Asia, Europe and Africa have been reported to the WHO. Of these, 203 have resulted in deaths. Indonesia has been the worst-hit with 87 deaths out of 109 cases, or a mortality rate of 80 percent.
Unresolved questions include at exactly what stage do humans get infected with avian flu — on handling the sick birds, or from eating birds that were sick and died?
There is not enough knowledge about individual human cases of avian flu which have occurred at different times of the year and in different places, Brown explained. Not even the incubation period among humans — which WHO officials put at between two to 10 days — is certain.
Since officials don't know how the disease is transmitted, and the incubation period looks sufficiently long, it would seem that this flu indeed has the possibility to be devastating–so far, with an 61% death rate (203 dead/331 sick x 100%) world-wide, it seems a powerful disease indeed.
Globalization existed before the word for it did
For those of us who would like to draw in our heads and forget about the rest of the world, things like Avian Flu / H5N1 are living proof that globalization exists whether we want it to or not. There's not a fence high enough, wide enough or finely meshed enough to keep out all the wild ducks and other bird species from travelling wherever we are.
Who's vulnerable:
If it's as bad as the worst-case scenario that medical experts are contemplating, then we’re all at risk. But as always, some are more vulnerable than others. In general, populations of very old and very young are the most likely to die from flu infections, as well as those who have compromised immune systems for other reasons.
For states, those which do not have good public health systems, including agricultural news agencies and extension systems are most likely to suffer prolonged effects of outbreak.
Central Asia
Events related to other well-publicized health care epidemics have shown that Central Asia's health system is somewhat unequal to the task of containing the spread of disease. Though HIV is hardly the same thing as H5N1, institutional deficits in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have been revealed through trials concerning the spread of AIDS/SIDA disease by medical means.
Yet even these states are better off than at least two others in Central Asia: Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which have been or are so isolated from the world community that they are not reporting avian flu incidence at all. This state of affairs means that neighbor states: Afghanistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, et cetera–are at further risk.
For those of you who are interested in contributing to research on this disease, and the spread of information world-wide, the World Health Organization of the United Nations is taking the point on this issue. And get your flu shot, will you? It’ll be November before you know it–and there you’ll be, giving the flu to everybody at work.
Previous posts on H5N1 at FPA Central Asia
World Health Organization H5N1 Graphs & Data, links, as of October 2007
