<p><a href=“http://www2.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200601/tows_past_20060124.jhtml[/url]”>http://www2.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200601/tows_past_20060124.jhtml</a></p>
<p>Ya know, I feel like I should be more concerned than I am. I hear what Dr. Osterholm is saying about bird flu and what we need to do to prepare, but will I follow his advice, go out and stockpile 5-6 weeks worth of groceries, etc.? Probably not. Maybe I am just sticking my head in the sand. I’m not one who “prepared” for Y2K, either. My sister, on the other hand, has been e-mailing me about her fear of bird flu for the past couple of months. I’ve got a great immune system, which according to the good doctor, makes one even more at risk because it drives the immune systems of the healthy into overdrive. According to him, the pandemic of the early 1900’s saw mostly 20-40 year olds dying. An unbelievalbe 55% of pregnant women died. This thing sounds scary enough … so why am I not terribly concerned?</p>
<p>I find it interesting that we are so paniced about bird flu, yet, well AIDS is NOW killing millions, and so is smoking. </p>
<p>But, hey, hype and panic are a good thing, the pharmesutical companies will make a bundle</p>
<p>I agree with City. Right now for everyday people Bird Flu is something to keep an eye on–that’s it. Would Bird Flu be a terrible epidemic if it struck? Absolutely. But we’re not there yet. Let’s stop getting ahead of ourselves and concentrate our worry, time, and effort on the AIDS epidemic, which we know is infecting, hurting, and killing people around the world everyday.</p>
<p>(student)</p>
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<p>There is a big difference in the fright factor produced by a bird flu epidemic and that produced by either smoking or HIV. For both smoking or HIV, you can reduce the risk to very near zero based on your own behavior (i.e. don’t smoke and don’t share needles or have unprotected sex). For the flu, short of becoming a hermit in the woods, you can’t.</p>
<p>Or stated another way: for AIDS (or smoking-related diseases) you have to go get it; for influenza, it can come get you. And that’s a much more frightening prospect.</p>
<p>What about people in countries not as developed as the US who have no idea how to stop being infected with HIV? Education and outreach is a huge problem in, say, Africa where most people aren’t able to read pamphlets, ask doctors for information, or buy condoms at a local drugstore.</p>
<p>I doubt it is lack or information. It is culture and customs that are outmoded and dangerous.
While I’m not too worried yet about bird flu, I have near zero worry about AIDS and smoking related cancer in my life.</p>
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<p>I’m not quite sure what your question is, but if some populations are so backward and cut off from the news media and/or public health officials that they haven’t heard about ways to prevent the transmission of HIV, then they probably haven’t heard about the potential bird flu threat either.</p>
<p>From doctors and outreach workers I’ve talked to who work in Africa, it sounds like information and education is one of their largest problems. My point was that instead of spending so much time concerning ourselves with the possible, we should do our best to deal with what we know is a problem–regardless of whether we ourselves are at risk (I myself am at practically zero HIV risk, and I don’t smoke).</p>
<p>I’m also cynical about the media – if it bleeds, it leads.</p>
<p>Here’s another thing to get people all het up about and hopefully boost ratings…</p>
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<p>That sounds great, but the first duty of public health officials in the US is to protect the public health in the US. We’ll do what we can for Africa, and there are in fact multi-million dollar initiatives focused on exactly that, but that can’t be the first priority.</p>
<p>If the bird flu outbreak does come and Americans start dying, when citizens ask why there is no vaccine and no stockpiles of ant-viral drugs, saying “Sorry, but we spent all the money on HIV pamphlets for Africa” will not be an acceptable answer.</p>
<p>There’s a difference between the public health officials for the US, who’s job is to work to protect US citizens, and ordinary parents, students, and others. I think that for common Americans, HIV/AIDS is a bigger problem to think about than Bird Flu. If Bird Flu does mutate and spread to the US, then people should of course focus on that. For the time being, though, with only some handfuls of bird to human transmissions–none in the US–regular people like us ought to pay more attention to what’s affecting us now and less to what may affect us later. I wasn’t talking about public health officials; they should obviously do their job to protect the people in the US. But my post on the Parent Cafe board on CC about some Oprah episode wasn’t really focused on them.</p>
<p>I’m currently working on a review, of “The Monster at our Door” by Mike Davis. It’s a history of type-A viruses and specifically Avian Flu. I would recommend it to anybody interested in the subject. </p>
<p>My review will be out next week.</p>
<p>If I believed every scare book that came out in the last 30 years, I’d be in a cave somewhere in Wyoming. The real scares are the ones that you never see coming. I’m still waiting for that Dow 20,000. Or was it 2,000??</p>
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<p>Okay, but it is the public health officials and the research that they fund that actually gets anything done. Whether the average person on the street frets about bird flu or instead frets about AIDS in Africa won’t make one bit of difference for either disease. It’s where the action gets taken and where the money gets spent that counts. And right now, making sure that the US is prepared to deal with a deadly flu epidemic is of very high priority in the US.</p>
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<p>Then it will be too late. Developing the proper vaccine and producing millions of doses and stockpiling the anti-viral drugs takes many months, months during which millions of Americans could die. I agree that, on a global scale, AIDS in Africa is a much bigger health problem now, but in the US that will be of very little comfort if the flu epidemic comes.</p>
<p>AIDS certainly is the scourge of the moment. HIV isn’t going away. Like the other great plagues such as tuberculosis or malaria, it will still be there waiting for us after the bird flu gets sorted out. For all the death HIV has wrought in the last 35 years, it’s got a long way to go to catch up with the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. Bird flu has the potential to do 1918 all over again, maybe even worse. I think that is something worth focusing on.</p>
<p>In my personal experience, the worst effect of the current bird flu panic is the customers in my pet shop who think they shouldn’t buy a bird </p>
<p>(all raised in the US by the way, and all vet checked before coming into Connecticut)</p>
<p>because it might give them bird flu. A little education might help. On the other hand … maybe I don’t want to sell these people a bird or anything else.</p>
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We almost had to go turkey-less at Thanksgiving because my sister had herself in such a tizzy, convinced that we might get sick. I told her I was eating a turkey for Thanksgiving come hell, high water, or bird flu. If I spent all my time worrying about what might happen, I’d have no time to do anything else. I’ll cross the bird flu bridge when or if it happens.</p>
<p>Splashmom,</p>
<p>I admire your spunk, my friend! I confess that for Y2K, I had bottles and bottles of water stored, hand-cranked flashlights, stockpiles of food, oil for lamps, solar-powered radio, etc etc. (Think it is because I was a single mom then, and wanted to “protect” my chicks. 
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I remember reading that the best things to stockpile were chocolate, coffee and toilet paper because everyone would want to barter them. What a world. I am not moving store-ward over Avian flu, however, because no one has a date set for it to “hit.” I bet if we knew the exact date and time, should there ever be a time, there would be a traffic jam on the way to WalMart like we had for Bonnaroo.</p>
<p>Bird flu scares me, a little, enough to be glad that they are stockpiling vaccines and Tamiflu, and developing strategies to isolate and contain the virus if at all possible. Not sure if any of that will work, but I’m also not sure that bird flu will remain as terribly virulent once it gets into the general human population - Coureur knows better than I, but viruses usually mutate to less virulence, they can reproduce better that way. But, the first country it hits - that will be bad, worse than anything we have ever seen.</p>
<p>Coranged, I’m not sure why you think Africans (in general) don’t know how to avoid getting AIDS. The Tanzanians I met there were very clear on how to avoid AIDS. When my then-14-year-old daughter fell and cut her knee quite badly while we were there (avoiding a charging elephant, believe it or not), the guides were NOT willing to have anything to do with her blood. It was the same blood precautions we teachers are taught; clean it up with bleach, etc. The basic precautions against AIDS (abstinence, faithfulness, condoms) were on billboards all over the country. </p>
<p>Oh, and the literacy rate of those Tanzanians under 24 is 91%. (<a href=“http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_detail.cfm?IndicatorID=41&Country=TZ[/url]”>http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_detail.cfm?IndicatorID=41&Country=TZ</a>)</p>
<p>Yes, that’s just one country, but… it’s a matter of what that country’s government has chosen to do.</p>
<p>I’m not sure, however, why you think the ability to read is key to learning basic health precautions. </p>
<p>Bird flu has the potential to be a worldwide problem not because of reading skills, health $$, or whatever, but because such a virus has not been seen since 1917-1918 and very few people have any immunity to it. Immunity and natural resistance are what stops flu viruses.</p>
<p>That and handwashing. </p>
<p>If you read any disease history (my favorite title is “Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria?”), you find that pandemic diseases commonly sweep through populations, even in modern times. AIDS is an example; so is measles in 1957 (which was so widespread that it is assumed that everyone born before 1957 is immune and needn’t be vaccinated). Until 1958 (when an eradication push began) 2 million people each year got smallpox. Around that number still get malaria and TB.</p>
<p>If you want to look at some truly horrifying pictures, check out this link on pandemic diseases in history: <a href=“http://uhavax.hartford.edu/bugl/histepi.htm[/url]”>http://uhavax.hartford.edu/bugl/histepi.htm</a></p>