[aldo_14]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4881526.stm

tsh.  Just when all the vets have buggered off for a drill in England, too.

[Shade]

Oh, for crying out loud... is your media going to start panicking over this too now? Ours has been going "OMG a dead seagull on a beach, OMG OMG we're doomed" for the last two months at least. It's getting to the point where there's a greater risk of dying from Birdflu Induced Depression^TM than to the disease itself (of course, the chance of contracting the disease borders on 0%, so it doesn't take much...). Still can't turn on the telly for more than 5 minutes without some blabberhead news anchor going at it again.

I'm starting to wish we could just have the epidemic already so we can get them to shut up about it...

[IceFire]

Oh, for crying out loud... is your media going to start panicking over this too now? Ours has been going "OMG a dead seagull on a beach, OMG OMG we're doomed" for the last two months at least. It's getting to the point where there's a greater risk of dying from Birdflu Induced Depression^TM than to the disease itself (of course, the chance of contracting the disease borders on 0%, so it doesn't take much...). Still can't turn on the telly for more than 5 minutes without some blabberhead news anchor going at it again.

I'm starting to wish we could just have the epidemic already so we can get them to shut up about it...

I definately understand the viewpoint...but there does need to be a very real and serious level of action taken on this.  I live in Toronto Canada...basically the epicenter of the SARS outbreak a few years ago.  Fortunately we have some very professional medical people in this province and with a bit of luck were able to keep the thing under control...but people were wandering about with facemasks in some places and the hospitals (I went to school and work near one) were in a very serious state of lockdown.

It wasn't a fantastic situation but it was reacted to very quickly and very strongly and it was prevented from being a major disaster.  Thats how these things have to be treated.  Fortunately BirdFlu is on the radar...public awareness is very high and hopefully that will be enough to let this thing die out in the bird population and not threaten human in any enhanced capacity.

[Shade]

Birdflu is actually now known to be unable to spread through the air between humans. Thing is, unlike normal flu, it infects cells which do not cause coughing, and on top of that the infection happens deeper in the lungs than for normal flu, which is one of the things that makes it so deadly. So basically, if it did mutate to spread like normal flu, it would also lose a fair bit of it's potency.

Finally, think on the history of it: How long has it been around in Asia? Several years at least, that we know of. People there live in much greater proximity to animals, have significantly less capable health services, and there are a lot more of both birds and people than in either europe or the americas. Yet not many people have been infected so far, and even fewer have died there. More people die every month from bee stings than have died to bird flu over the last several years. SARS was/is an entirely far greater threat than this.

Forgive me if I don't panic just yet. Precautions good, monitoring good, panic and overhyping the threat - bad. Right now they're just crying wolf when the wolf isn't there, and if one day in 10 years the wolf is there and they've been continuing this panic mongering all that time... well, you get the idea.

[aldo_14]

Whilst it is overblown (it's not been panicy-hyped over here yet, though), it is worth bearing in mind the last 2 flu pandemics were linked to Avian flu variants, and specifically of the HN5 or so type strains.

[Turnsky]

it's SARS all over again.

[Sandwich]

Israel had it. We responded faster than any nation to date IIRC, killed off over a million (again, IIRC) chickens, and nobody with opposable thumbs had gotten sick yet.

[Windrunner]

Israel had it. We responded faster than any nation to date IIRC, killed off over a million (again, IIRC) chickens, and nobody with opposable thumbs had gotten sick yet.

you bastards, how can you kill so many chickens,

[Grug]

Fueled by their hate of KFC.

[Nuke]

my opinion is if mankind managed to survive the black death, it can survive a media hyped made up disease like bird flu. and if it does indeed go bad, im sure theres a handfull of crazy shutins who will go outside when everyone is dead and will congragate, breed, and thus repopulate the world

[aldo_14]

my opinion is if mankind managed to survive the black death, it can survive a media hyped made up disease like bird flu. and if it does indeed go bad, im sure theres a handfull of crazy shutins who will go outside when everyone is dead and will congragate, breed, and thus repopulate the world

No-one has ever said it'd kill humanity, just several million people as previous avian flu epidemics did.

[Prophet]

Look it's very simple. This is just something the media likes to spread around to make some people nervous, even panic. No normal person knows why the media does this, but they just keep doing it. Somewhere in Asia there have been suspicions of birdfly killing people, but then again, so is many other disease. And look, still the people live there no matter what!

I am so ****ing sick of this birdflu (no pun indented). We have been hearing enought of it in Finland, god knows why. Must have been a seagull or two dead somewhere. Right, a good reason to panic. But you %?&*!$ have infected the HLP with the birdflu by bringing this ages old matter here!

PERKELE!

I won't be coming back here, ever. Because if I hear (/see) discussion about that infernal plague, I will die...

[karajorma]

it's SARS all over again.

If you're complaining about the media response then yes. If you're complaining about the medical response, well I'll personally beat the **** out of anyone who claims that the medical response to SARS was overblown. The media hyped it up all over the place but ironically enough all the governments concerned (with the exception of the Chinese one who stupidly covered things up) was pretty much exactly what needed to happen. The SARS outbreak pretty much dead ended as a result of the way it was handled.
 As a result we don't have yet another pathogen to have to worry about in our everyday life.

Avian flu is the same thing. Keep it contained in just the way that's happening now. The more creatures that carry this disease the large the chance becomes of one of them carrying a strain of the virus that mutates and is able to crossover. The best solution is to keep the pool of animals which has the virus as low as possible. The worry is not "Oh no this swan has H5N1 - Everyone will die!!!!!!111111" The worry is this bird will transmit the disease to other animals and within a few years there will be a natural reservoir of the disease from which human-human transmissible versions can arise.

It makes perfect sense to keep that reservoir as small as possible. Yes Asia is likely to be the place where the human-human transmissible version actually starts but why even make the west a risk?



The problem with bird flu is that the media realise that they can get more viewers if people are scared so they want to push the story and make people scared. The solution of course is education. People need  to understand that the government has to worry about things like this but that you don't have to.



Yet.

[Grug]

Look it's very simple. This is just something the media likes to spread around to make some people nervous, even panic. No normal person knows why the media does this, but they just keep doing it. Somewhere in Asia there have been suspicions of birdfly killing people, but then again, so is many other disease. And look, still the people live there no matter what!

I am so ****ing sick of this birdflu (no pun indented). We have been hearing enought of it in Finland, god knows why. Must have been a seagull or two dead somewhere. Right, a good reason to panic. But you %?&*!$ have infected the HLP with the birdflu by bringing this ages old matter here!

PERKELE!

I won't be coming back here, ever. Because if I hear (/see) discussion about that infernal plague, I will die...

Stop watching tv or media. Tis what I do.
Get near all my info off the net.

[achtung]

Stop watching tv or media. Tis what I do.
Get near all my info off the net.

If you're saying you get it off internet news pipelines, then what difference does it make?

[IPAndrews]

One thing is for sure, disposing of the corpses of your dead relatives is going to cost you in the form of a big council tax hike next year.

[aldo_14]

I think bird flu is the governments solution to the pension crisis.

[Shade]

Heh, I guess Finland is as badly hit by the media panic as we are. Perkele, indeed (looked it up ). Makes me feel ever so slightly better though knowing that it's not exclusively Danish media that have had the compulsure to constantly go on about this disease collectively imprinted upon their brain stem.

Maybe it's a Scandinavian thing, nothing else is wrong around here really so they're just hyping the best thing they've got. I mean, where else in the world would, for example, a solo car accident make country wide news? Seriously. Well, it does here, cause they've got nothing better to write about. And traffic deaths have been plummeting recently too, so soon they might not even have that... but of course then there will just be time for even more birdflu special bulletins about a dead seagull on a beech in Jutland which may or may not be infected, or may or may not just have died from old age, collision with an airliner, or who knows what else.

[castor]

I think Prophet is exaggerating a bit
I wouldn't say media has 'paniced' here -- it does repeat the same thing over and over again.. annoying, but the actual 'scenarios' that are presented are quite moderate.

[Sandwich]

I see it as the same kind of thing as the Y2K bug. Yes, it was real. Yes, it DID cause problems. But, BECAUSE of all the hype and near-panic, people were prodded into action and did their best to fix the bug before it would come into effect. Which is why the Y2K bug's effects were mild at best. Had people not taken preventive measures, it would have been a lot worse.