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"Bush's entire administration is scared out of their minds over the very real, very serious possibility"
That is NOT a fact, that's an interpretation or a conclusion. I don't care who told you that it was true. And you can also stop making insinuations about what I do and don't believe. You don't know what I think. I already looked for tamiflu a month ago and was told it wasn't available yet this year.
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Theaca: A fact is just knowledge we trust enough to act on. It's fact to me. Much like the copernican model of the universe is fact to most people. Why are you so angry? My entire motivation here has been to help other people and all you've done is try to create controversy.
I've made no insinuations whatsoever about what you do and don't believe. All I've done is give a warning, based on information I trust. You have no reason to believe it, but I felt morally obligated to disseminate the information. Unfortunately, I feel a higher moral obligation to protect the identity of the person who fed me the information in the first place, which leaves me unable to furnish proof for you.
quote:I already looked for tamiflu a month ago and was told it wasn't available yet this year.
I'm sorry to say that whoever told you this was sadly misinformed, since I obtained mine almost exactly a month ago from Target. And if you already recognize the danger posed by H5N1, why are you being so trivial about this?
Actually, don't bother answering, I'm ignoring your posts in this thread because it's taking a lot of my willpower (and backspacing) to keep from saying something nasty.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Go right ahead and say something nastier. If you can read the minds of the entire Bush administration you can probably read my mind too. And tamiflu is one of those seasonal drugs that not all pharmacies carry in the summertime so I'm not surprised you found it and I didn't.
Posts: 1014 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Buying a drug that might help sounds comforting, but I haven't heard or seen any evidence it actually helps. In fact, the news articles always seem to state that. Does anyone here know if it helps or not? I'll put my trust in Hatrack over the news guys any day.
What I've read: It might help, if taken during the first onset of symptoms.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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I halfway expect the flu to be resistant by the time I get it. I'm going to try not to catch it at all, and if I fail at that, I'm hoping my immune system will take care of it.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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I just spent some time reading about Tamiflu. If this is the big savior, I'm not encouraged. I sure can't go asking for a flu vaccine, because even in a normal season, it's reserved for the elderly and people with chronic conditions. I'm a healthy young male in his 20s. I've read reports that historically, the worst pandemics disproportionately affected my age group: the healthy adult people who usually don't get sick. My mother read a book about flu pandemics and has told me this as well. Of course, every flu virus is a little different. I can always hope.
All I can do at this point is NOT worry about it, and just hope it's not as bad as the experts predict. If the pandemic does happen, I can maintain my healthy habits, wash my hands with paranoid obsession, and maybe wear a mask.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Yeah, I'm in the age group for getting very sick as well. Of course, our age group was sitting around in trenches last time there was a horrible pandemic. I don't know how much of a factor that was. Were young people disproportionally affected in the milder pandemics mid-century?
I also find encouraging the fact that in 1918, a lot of people still had diseases such as tuberculosis, things which are no longer as widespread. Of course, HIV will probably make people much more susceptible. And I suspect that the third world will be hit very hard.
A regular flu vaccine won't protect you from H5N1--there's no vaccine for that publicly available at this time.
Chances are you won't die from the flu. You might want to start stocking some food and water, though, because services might get disrupted.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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Yeah, I was just thinking through a possible preparation list. Basic, obvious stuff. Water, like you said. But my water is from the tap, I think. What if the water treatment plant has problems due to staffing or supply disruptions? Yeah, water, might be useful. Food, obviously, because the grocery store depends on nightly deliveries.
A computer game, because if my workplace closes, I'll need my solitary entertainment.
Yeah, worrying won't help, all I can do is plan.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Two have already been confirmed, the third is being sent for testing, and there's a fourth in the hospital. They are all from the same family, and were playing with a head from a dead chicken like a ball, so seems unlikely to be person-to-person spread yet, but they're testing for that, too.
Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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MSN homepage had this article that puts the flu hitting the US in as few as six months to a year. I haven't read this whole thread (it's so large and full of information) but skimmed most of it. Here's the link
A friend of mine said that the government suggested having a 6 month store of food and water (of course she couldn't remember her source). In cursory searches, I couldn't find anywhere the government suggests that but maybe someone here, who is more informed, knows?
Personally, I don't think it ever hurts to be prepared and I'd rather err on the side of doing what I can in advance for my family in case of any emergency.
Posts: 697 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Tatiana, a few pages ago, you said that you have information written up that you'd be willing to share for an enrichment meeting. We are having a food storage and emergency preparedness enrichment meeting in April and I would love a condensed version (5 mins) to share. My email is in my profile. Thanks.
Posts: 697 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Okay, great! Let me look it up! I'll try to email it to you by this weekend latest!
I'm so glad you're going to do this. I talked to the enrichment people at my ward and they were like <blank look>.
I really wish there was some way to email the church leadership in Salt Lake and ask them if they've considered a special message about bird flu preparedness.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Interesting stuff, ElJay and sweetaboo! I didn't see those before. Doesn't it warm your heart to hear Michael Chertoff tell us it's all under control? Just like in New Orleans with Katrina, yep. I'm sure they'll take gooooood care of us.
It's going to make people a lot more aware if birds begin to get it in this country in six months, but the real danger is after it mutates to a form that's easily transmisslble from human to human. There are reasons for believing it might easily pick up the genes to do that, but of course nobody is sure. But if that happens, no matter where in the world it starts (and it probably will start in Asia), there won't be anywhere in the world that's safe. The human-transmissible form will be able to sweep the whole world within a month or two. Even people in remote Alaskan villages got it (the flu pandemic then) from the postman in 1918.
So, in a way, if it comes here to the U.S. it will be better because people may begin to take it more seriously. The risk is just as severe either way, but maybe if birds start dying here, then people will pay more attention and begin to prepare themselves, mentally as well as physically.
Having six month or a year supply of food and water is a very good idea for disaster planning in any event, sweetaboo. It comes in handy in a number of circumstances, such as periods of unemployment, as well as various infrastructure breakdowns and natural disasters. It is a form of savings that's sort of the ultimate cash, food. Of course, you have to learn a lot of ways to prepare dried beans, since you need to rotate it out for it to stay good. I have about nine months supply of dried beans and rice saved up now, and probably six months of water at a gallon a day a person. It takes a while to build up a good store. I usually just toss a bag or two of beans and rice in my cart each time I go to the store, and every gatorade, soda, or bottled water bottle I empty gets filled from the tap and put in the basement. Start now and you will have a decent sized store built up fairly soon. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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This is incredibly good news. Elias Corey deserves high praise for both his work and his decision not to patent it.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:“This means that individual actions are perhaps the most important element of our preparedness and response activities,” Townsend said. The homeland security expert said the plan will rely on individuals exercising some common sense if illness begins to take hold in their towns – avoiding trips to shopping malls or canceling vacations, for instance.
While this is VERY true, I can't help but think this is partly the administration preparing us because FEMA doesn't have the funds, management, or planning in place to deal with this.
Noemon, while it's great that it hasn't been patented yet, I'm afraid some pharmaceutical company will swoop in and try to patent the process the same way that Microsoft patented the Apple drop down menu that Apple "borrowed" from Xerox. That patent became part of Windows which made Gates and Allen two of the richest men in the world.
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Yeah, that occurred to me too, JNSB. Not sure how to combat that.
Everything I've read suggests that measures like the ones Homeland Security is recommending will be unlikely to do much of anything to help contain the spread of the virus. Quarantine is useful in preventing or containing epidemic only at an illness's point of origin; I imagine that a half-hearted "try not to go out so much approach wouldn't do a thing.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Noemon, that's great news about the new process for making Tamiflu! I hope it gets cranked up in time.
sweetbaboo, I never emailed you that information! I got busy and forgot. I'm so sorry! If you can still use it, I will gather it together and send. All the information and the links are in this thread, particularly on the first page. But I had put it into the form of notes for a talk, and I can get that into electronic form for people to use, if there's a need.
My talk was basically in five parts.
1. Ask about family stories, journals, or anything else people might know about the 1918 flu, as a way to introduce flu pandemics. Tell a little about the 1918 pandemic, or fill in information gaps left by what people in the group relate.
2. Sketch why it's a danger, why scientists are sure there will be another flu pandemic sometime, and why conditions make it look very imminent now.
3. Tell why the health care infrastructure will be totally overwhelmed and unable to help at all. Tell how crucial services, power, water, food, etc. might be impacted during peak times.
4. Tell how we can prepare to help ourselves. Basically, food storage, water storage, storage of sick-foods, Tamiflu, face masks, medicines for survivors, limiting public contact during high risk times, networks of contacts for emergency supplies. Planning who will check on grandma, and so on.
5. Open floor for questions.
That's more than a five minute talk, right there. If you only have 5 minutes, perhaps just cover items 4 and 5, get email addresses, and email links to people who want more information.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Well, it's time to bump this thread, and the latest news is not at all good.
There are a zillion sites that sell Tamiflu on the web, but I have no reason at all to believe any of them are real. I expect they sell counterfeit drug that has no effectiveness. Can anyone come up with any evidence otherwise? Or does anyone know of a reliable source?
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I assumed that you were going to be posting information about that Indonesian family where family members caught bird flu from each other. At least one strain of it is now human to human transmissible, although apparently still not *easily* transmissible.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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The Poultry Page is an excellent source of bird flu information! They surpass the others in that they are always factual, informative, and clear.
My assessment is that this is simply a confirmation of what we've strongly suspected from other cases, that human to human transmission is occurring in isolated cases. This is the stage below a full pandemic alert. So long as clusters are self-limiting, it shows we still have some time, though it could be months, or it could be years.
One thing I find encouraging is that reassortment does not seem to be the mechanism by which pandemic strains are formed. At least, the 1918 strain was shown to have formed by mutation rather than reassortment, and it's been confirmed by genetic testing of all the H5N1 strains that are out there now, that none of them have formed by reassortment. Reassortment must not be as easy as it seems at first look. That means it may take mutation, probably several mutations, before a pandemic strain could come about.
Let's hope and pray that the crucial mutations necessary to make H5N1 easily transmissible person to person are a long time coming, or never do. Or if they do, that they are accompanied by a huge decrease in mortality. It's certainly not comforting that 6 out of 7 people in this cluster died. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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So far we are still at level 3 on the pandemic alert scale, which is good news, but some people feel we are tipping over into level 4.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Here is a good family planning checklist. None of it should be unfamiliar to LDS families, who should have all that stuff on hand already. But it's always a good idea to doublecheck the list to be sure you've thought of everything, and improve any deficiences you might have.
When people keep everything they need on hand always, it helps prevent any runs on supplies at times of crisis.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I'm preparing by scheduling a trip to a public place for every night in the next year where I will be sure to share drinks, food, and sloppy kisses with every person in the room.
Posts: 4753 | Registered: May 2002
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"Bird Flu Virus May Need Significant Mutation for Human Pandemic
July 31 (Bloomberg) -- Scientists failed in multiple attempts to make a more contagious form of the H5N1 bird flu, suggesting the virus may have to undergo massive change to cause a human pandemic.
After mixing genes from human and bird influenzas in a way researchers have projected might lead to a pandemic, the virus remained hard to spread said researchers led by Taronna Maines, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientist. The study was conducted on ferrets, which are at least as susceptible to flu as people, the scientists said in a report released today. "
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Please don't congratulate yourself yet and tempt fate. It's one encouraging thing in the midst of many. Still, I'm delighted. We may have time to actually be ready now.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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It is very hard for a virus to mutate to the point where the species barrier collapses. Thank God.
I never said it wouldn't, but I did say it was less of a probability than was being suggested. I am sure they are working hard on it in case it turns out to be the exception rather than the rule.
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I still say we need better flu vaccine production methods. Pandemics have happened before, and they will almost certainly happen again. It doesn't matter if we dodged a bullet this time...eventually, something's gonna jump the barrier. Besides, even the seasonal flu is reason enough to work on better vaccines. Remember how there was a shortage a few years ago because a large batch of vaccine got spoiled and there wasn't enough time before flu season to make more? If we can produce it faster, that wouldn't be such an issue. Also, it would be great to have a broader vaccine so we wouldn't have to guess every year which ones to put in the vaccine.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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We totally haven't dodged the bullet yet, just have a bit of encouraging news is all. Influenza has jumped the species barrier again and again throughout human history. A few times a century is normal, and last century there were 3. We were very lucky that the last two of those were not as deadly as most new flus are.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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"A bird flu vaccine cultured in laboratory-grown cells and not chicken eggs like traditional vaccines is being tested at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
The new method allows for the production of larger quantities of vaccine because drug companies would not be limited by the supply of specialized chicken eggs used for the manufacture of traditional flu vaccines."
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Excellent. I hope this production method will also be used someday for regular flu vaccine. As I've said, this will help prevent shortages if vaccine batches become spoiled somehow.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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It's flu season again! I will be relieved and excited if we go another winter with no pandemic. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I'm not sure that pandemic flu is limited to the typical flu season. My understanding is that it could hit any time of the year.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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More encouraging news! An article in USA Today says an experimental vaccine has proved effective against more than one strain of H5N1. Now if we could just get the world's population vaccinated with it before the pandemic hits!
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Yes, so far we've been quite lucky that it's not become a pandemic. Not considered a high threat? I only wish! Yes it's still a very big threat. The CDC, the WHO, and every medical body I know of considers it a huge threat still. The amount we don't know about how the genetic changes arise that lead to a form that's easily transmissible human to human is enormous, though. So there's certainly room to hope we continue to dodge the bullet for a few more years.
Here's the U.S. Government's pandemic flu site. There is a lot of good info here too. World Health Organization's avian flu site with additional information. There's a great timeline here that came out this month Basically, the virus has spread in wild and domestic birds as far as Western Europe, and human cases have occurred in Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. So far human to human transmission is still rare and limited.
Basically we're in phase 3 of the pandemic scale, meaning limited human-to-human transmission. We've been very lucky in having this time (so far) to prepare. If we can get pre-vaccinations through clinical trials, overcome the production hurdles, and actually pre-vaccinate a significant portion of the human species before the virus mutates or reassorts to gain easy human-to-human transmissibility, then we can consider ourselves out of major danger from this pathogen. That's a big if, and our efforts don't need to be relaxed.
Thinking something is safe because so far it hasn't caused big problems is an idea that needs a pithy name. I know that the Soviet nuclear industry had this feeling pre-Chernobyl, NASA had this feeling pre-Challenger, and Davis-Besse nuclear plant felt this way about their boric acid deposits before they discovered the football sized hole in their reactor head in 2002. It's something we're specifically taught as a mental fallacy in our accident analysis courses.
It's also inapplicable in this case, (that no big problems have happened yet), where we have the history of pandemic flu in 1918 and before to refer to. Indeed, throughout recorded history, pandemic flu has struck with severity every century or so. In this time of widespread literacy and written records, disasters should not have to happen in every generation to be taken seriously.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Not really, although it is something to work on to be sure.
Comparing this to 1918 isn't really accurate, either. We have better treatments, better production facilities, and a better medical understanding of how things work.
It is far more rare for something to mutate and become dangerous than it is for it to fail to do so. There is always a risk, of course, but the species barrior isn't tissue thin, thank God.
It is a threat, and one that needs to be watched, but it is hardly the level of threat you seem to think it is.
That doesn't mean we can't prepare, though. I hope they continue to press on with the necessary research. Even if this threat nevers matures, research done to prevent it might increase our over all knowledge base, which is never a bad thing. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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And tamiflu is one of those seasonal drugs that not all pharmacies carry in the summertime so I'm not surprised you found it and I didn't.
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I got busy and forgot. I'm so sorry! If you can still use it, I will gather it together and send. All the information and the links are in this thread, particularly on the first page. But I had put it into the form of notes for a talk, and I can get that into electronic form for people to use, if there's a need.![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
