Growing Trend or Growing Coverage?

I wish that somehow we could get a statistical look at the Bird Flu situation. I would love to see a cumulative timeline that shows how many infections and fatalities have occured in the past few months/years. With numerous news sources it's getting difficult to really judge if the H5N1 thing is growing and at what rate.

Is it a growing infection rate or growing news coverage?

I didn't post a timeline, but I posted links to the more recent outbreaks, and almost all of the reports are of the bird flu in birds. To date there have been fewer than 80 deaths worldwide, and no real proof of human-to-human transmission.

Do I think it's a serious condition? Yes, any zoonosis can be. But this has all the hysteria of the SARS outbreak a few years ago (when SARS was going to be the worldwide plague that destroyed billions).

Frankly, I'm concerned that there will be so many of these "WOLF!" shrieks that when the REAL wolf shows up in the guise of an outbreak of a fairly common disease, it will be ignored because someone will have found yet another Dramatic Disease to scream about and all the attention will be focused there.

The growing sentiment against vaccines is also worrisome. There wasn't much made over the polio epidemic in the Amish... that's the sort of thing that can get out of hand in a population.

I think that there's more hype about Bird Flu, only because I don't remember that much being said about SARS.

I've noticed that it's slipping from the news gradually.

I feel that we are getting an underreported situation. There was a time when the bird-flu death count was up to 64. Then as more suspected deaths came up the news reports would say around 60. I believe I have seen reports of at least 12-18 new suspected deaths since the official count was 64, but in that time I saw the "official" tally drop to 62, and every MSM outlet reports that over 60 have died. My feeling is that the flu is probably much more widespread, and less deadly than reported. After all, the people in these countries suffer from many illnesses. The bird flu was only one more disease along with dengue fever and several other nasties. I bet that more than 300-400 people have had bird flu. It just went unreported because they either didn't show symptoms, recovered or misdiagnosed it as regular flu (they get that too you know ). That would
still represent a 20% death rate though. The real story isn't how many people have it or have died from it. The real story is that if it does start killing people from human transmission it will be a world-wide panic-fest.

When and if this makes the jump to person to person transmission, that is when we should really worry.. but this has been possible for a long time not only with this virus but others all the time.. why the media has jumped on this is pretty arbitrary but I think mainly its because it makes a good story and makes people afraid, so they watch. Typical fearmongering basically.

I don't think it's fearmonging but rather about being informed. How many times have we blamed our governments for not sharing information or for media blackouts. Now comes information that is being shared and the gov is being blamed for fearmonging? What gives?

Would you prefer the news to delay the information it does have and only give it out once it becomes transmissible between people?
It comes down to being informed and knowledgeable about the virus and the capabilities it has.

A friend of mine begged her father not to go duck hunting last weekend because she had heard about the Avian Flu and was afraid that her dad might contract it. We live in the US. How stupid was that?
This clearly demonstrates that people have selective hearing and this is a classic case of fearmongering. Had this same friend took the time to then investigate the stories further she would have come to understand that these are warnings of what may or may not come and that it certainly isn't in the US at this point.

Its really more a matter of how much a threat there is. If you are talking about how much of a threat to human health H5N1 is right now in terms of global threat to health, we should be talking about Malaria and Tuberculosis instead because those kill far more people every year than the most dire estimates of a Bird Flu Pandemic. But those only effect third world countries so we don't care. We would rather obsess over some potential threat to our wonderful western countries than care about that.

Ask and ye shall receive huh? This just turned up today at the WHO website, mind you this only represents laboratory confirmed cases.

Cumulative Number of Confirmed Human Cases of Avian Influenza A/(H5N1) Reported to WHO

[edit on 1-11-2005 by phoenixhasrisin]

Apparently the British government and authorites have been preparing for a year.