Speculation

[Hotwater]

Please use this thread for conjecture.

[David_Lohr]

I heard from a friend in Holland that the police station in Zoetermeer has been quarantined. According to my friend, a prisoner who originated from Ghana was carrying a deadly virus and infected the police station. My friend does not know if it is the Bird Flu.

Does anyone on here have any information regarding this?

[sogviamask]

I got interested in this subject when my employer started a Tamiflu purchase program, like as in stockpiling. What the Hell for? Yeah, so I guess in preparation for flu outbreak. We like many other companies are a global company, and therefore probably on the front lines of rapid infection possibilities. So I was curious, and probed further. Not liking what I found.

The most catastrophic pandemic that we know of was the 1918 pandemic. I found it intriguing that the most deaths occurred among the 20-40 age group, those that were considered in good health. These people essentially drowned to death from their own secretions, a side effect of a highly combative immune system attempting to fight the infection off. Awful. No official numbers, but upwards of 20 million world wide or more.

I'm gonna say since we haven't seen one since 1968 where 1million casualties resulted, that this next one's gonna be a whopper. Estimates of 150million are common. I'll go double that just for the sake of argument, and today's highly mobile society. Think of how many people a business traveller comes into contact within 72 hours? How many people do they come in contact with? I'm gonna say 300million sounds about right.

I think it would be so bad that we will be hard pressed to prevent total anarchy. Martial law will be imposed. Neighborhoods will develop quasi tribal social systems to defend geographical boundaries from looters attempting to take advantage of the sheer magnitude of chaos that will result.

This will be doomsday folks. Not because it will actually be in reality, but it will be simply because of the amplification factor that the media will play in this catastrophe. If media people actually go to work in this situation, and televise what is going on, this will increase the physiological effects from the mass psychological effect. The perception that it's really worse than it is will make it worse than it is. This is something that we must take into consideration in preparation for such an outbreak. Like the experts say, it's not if, but when.

Stock up on your hand sanitizer, 3M N100 face masks, latex or nitrile gloves, and some extra ammo to defend your home.

[Veeduck]

The C.D.C. has a Pandemic Severity Index with 5 category levels: category 1 pandemics being most mild, equivalent to seasonal flu and a low case fatality rate (CFR < 0.1%; with hundreds of thousands dead worldwide) and category 5 being reserved for the most severe "worst-case" scenario pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish flu (CFR ≥ 2%; with 40-100 million dead worldwide). The 1957 Asian Flu (1-4 million dead worldwide) and 1968 Hong Kong Flu (1-2 million dead worldwide) were category 2 pandemics (CFR of 0.1% to 0.5%).

The W.H.O. has a pandemic alert system divided into 6 phases, and says H5N1 is still in phase 3 (very limited person-to-person transmission). When there is evidence of increased person-to-person transmission for H5N1, then it will enter phase 4, but this hasn't happened yet, despite occasional clusters of infection among family members and care-givers. If H5N1 ever acquires efficient and sustained person-to-person transmission, then it will have entered phase 6 and a new pandemic will have begun.

The W.H.O. has used a relatively conservative estimate for a potential H5N1 pandemic – from 2 million to 7.4 million deaths – because it provides a useful and plausible planning target. This estimate is based on the comparatively mild 1957 pandemic. Estimates based on a more virulent virus, closer to the one seen in 1918, have been made and are much higher. However, the 1918 pandemic was considered exceptional, and now we have vaccines, antivirals, and antibiotics (the latter to stop secondary bacterial infections that were the actual cause of death for many victims in 1918-19).

The high CFR suggests that the pathogenicity of H5N1 may be similar to (or more severe than) the 1918 H1N1 pandemic strain. If it acquires person-to-person transmission gradually by adaptive mutation (antigenic drift), then it could remain highly pathogenic (category 5). But if it acquires person-to-person transmission quickly by re-assortment (antigenic shift) in pigs or humans, then the resulting hybrid will probably be of intermediate pathogenicity (category 3 or 4). In other words, I think it would be a severe pandemic (with a CFR of 0.5% to 1.5%; with 5-20 million dead worldwide), but not a worst-case scenario such as Spanish Flu was.

Various strains of H5N1 have been infecting birds for a long time without crossing over to humans. Low pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 (LPAI H5N1), also called "North American" H5N1, commonly occurs in wild birds. The first U.S. outbreak of high pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI H5N1 - bird flu) occurred in 1924, and it never spread among humans. A second HPAI outbreak in the U.S. (this time H5N2) occurred in 1983, and it also didn't spread person-to-person.

This inability to establish itself within the human population is probably because the HA of H5N1 virus can only attach to receptors located deep in the lungs of humans (in and around the alveoli). Therefore, the virus is not easily expelled by coughing and sneezing (the usual route of transmission), and requires close, prolonged contact with infected patients and thus limiting person-to-person transmission.

If the H5N1 virus mixes with another influenza virus of H1, H2, or H3 subtype in a co-infected person (H1 or H3 subtype in pig), it could re-assort to swap out it's H5 for an HA that can bind more widely distributed receptors, and therefore become capable of spreading from person-to-person. But then it would no longer be H5N1, and a portion of the human population already has antibodies to H1, H3 (and to a lesser extent, H2).

The biggest worry is that H5N1 will re-assort with swine flu (H3N2) that is resistant to the standard antiviral drugs amantadine and rimantadine, since drug-resistant flu strains are endemic in pigs. If that happened to create a hybrid with the high pathogenicity of HPAI H5N1 and the drug-resistance of swine flu, then we could soon face a pandemic of category 3 or 4 (or even 5).

[The R]

bump

[The R]

Originally Posted by sogviamask

I got interested in this subject when my employer started a Tamiflu purchase program, like as in stockpiling. What the Hell for? Yeah, so I guess in preparation for flu outbreak. We like many other companies are a global company, and therefore probably on the front lines of rapid infection possibilities. So I was curious, and probed further. Not liking what I found.

The most catastrophic pandemic that we know of was the 1918 pandemic. I found it intriguing that the most deaths occurred among the 20-40 age group, those that were considered in good health. These people essentially drowned to death from their own secretions, a side effect of a highly combative immune system attempting to fight the infection off. Awful. No official numbers, but upwards of 20 million world wide or more.

I'm gonna say since we haven't seen one since 1968 where 1million casualties resulted, that this next one's gonna be a whopper. Estimates of 150million are common. I'll go double that just for the sake of argument, and today's highly mobile society. Think of how many people a business traveller comes into contact within 72 hours? How many people do they come in contact with? I'm gonna say 300million sounds about right.

I think it would be so bad that we will be hard pressed to prevent total anarchy. Martial law will be imposed. Neighborhoods will develop quasi tribal social systems to defend geographical boundaries from looters attempting to take advantage of the sheer magnitude of chaos that will result.

This will be doomsday folks. Not because it will actually be in reality, but it will be simply because of the amplification factor that the media will play in this catastrophe. If media people actually go to work in this situation, and televise what is going on, this will increase the physiological effects from the mass psychological effect. The perception that it's really worse than it is will make it worse than it is. This is something that we must take into consideration in preparation for such an outbreak. Like the experts say, it's not if, but when.

Stock up on your hand sanitizer, 3M N100 face masks, latex or nitrile gloves, and some extra ammo to defend your home.

No doubt.....that bird flu is REAL scary. LOL, maybe we could just move near Mary the preacher shooter from TN, she could shoot intruders and flying varmints.