Disease could be worse than SARS

[rodbarnett]

HANOI -- Vietnam said yesterday it had detected 18 suspected cases of bird flu in humans, and that 13 victims had died.

And the World Health Organisation has warned it could become a bigger problem than SARS.
"Eighteen people have been found to have contracted influenza A, of whom 13 died, including 11 kids and two adults," Vietnam News Agency said

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,8399350%255E663,00.html

[displacedtexan]

1. Oh, great!

You know, I have a friend who's HIV+ who had to give his birds away because he could get some kind of infectious something from them.

[Robb]

2. That's it.

I'm duct taping the house. I'm boiling some water. I'm filling water balloons with vodka. I'm raising my own alert level to "Hurmmm?"

[bahrbearian]

3. What do you do with Ballons filled with Vodka? Just wondering.

[Voice_of_Europe]

7. Molotov cocktails??

He's a terrorist!!
Get him!!

[SoCalDem]

8. Vostok cocktails

:)

[xchrom]

4. this was on the news last night

scary, eh?

[gate of the sun]

5. more fearmongering if you ask me

ebola is alot worse than this bird flu and well you don't see if spreading shore to shore or anything...it sounds like hype to me and sick of all this really I am.

[SoCalDem]

6. I have a gut feeling that the profligate use of antibiotics

for everything, and the use of them in food production has left lots of us open for all kinds of "new" diseases..

And of course their knew-jerk reaction will probably be to "kill every bird" they can get in their gun sights..:(

[Voice_of_Europe]

9. No panic please...

All comes down to how infectuous, how fast and how dangerous a disease is.

The real problem would be something as infectious as a real flu and as certainly deadly as Ebola.
You infect yourself before the guy you gave i to you has symptoms himself, that makes it hard to keep the disease locally.

Ebola might be deadly, but it doesn't spread all that fast.
And it doesn't spread so easily like a flue

-Spread easy (somebody breathes at you? or blood contact?)
-Cycle fast (somebody who contracted it can pass it on within 1-2 days?)
-Death rate (how fast and certain you die?)

If humanity encounters a disease with all these factors against us, then we can say goodbye... but that hasn't happened yet...
even the great plagues didn't spread very fast and it was rat flee who spread it, not contact with sick people...

So don't panic...