Set your Tivo- tonight at 9 pm EST, Wide Angle on PBS has a special on the Bird Flu.
Bird Flu
by John Cole| 19 Comments
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Bird Flu
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.
It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.
It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.
Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.
So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.
If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.
Let’s not be the monsters we hate.
Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.
Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?
No one could have predicted…
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.
If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!
Battle won, war still ongoing.
We are aware of all internet traditions.
And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.
Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.
Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity
Republicans in disarray!
Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?
Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.
New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.
“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.
We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.
If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.
Mr Furious
Jesus. I don’t think I want to.
Here’s John’s original post, and my spin off it.
If they want people to take this thing seriously, they should stop calling it the Bird Flu, and start calling it The Avian-Human Plague.
space
Channelling WH talking points from 2006:
• “Nobody could have imagined that it would be this deadly.”
• “We thought this would be an ‘ordinary’ flu.”
• “If we had known it would be this deadly, we would have moved heaven and earth to prepare for it.”
• “State and local officials did not order enough vaccines.”
• “There wasn’t enough vaccine because gov’t regulations (or threat of lawsuits) removed the profit incentive to produce more. We need deregulation (or pharma indemnification).”
• “It’s China’s fault. We didn’t want to ‘swat flies’ by preparing a medical response. We wanted to fight the flu over there so we wouldn’t have to fight it over here.”
BTW, best of luck to all of you. Apparently these pandemics are unusual in that they strike the young and healthy as well as the old and sick.
Mr Furious
As an aside—how many people really have TiVo? Is it as prevalent for everyone as it seems to be among bloggers, or are we ahead of the curve on tech-stuff and home entertainment?
Anybody else think TiVo is a life-altering experience? I love it.
KC
I just read this slate.com story on the bird flu that throws a little doubt on all the panick. I hope the author’s right. Regardless of what he says though, I’m still going to get my flu shot.
space
What is it with the GOP and failing to plan for contingencies? Whether it is global climate change, the failure of the N.O. levees, or a flu pandemic nothing is ever worth planning for. Even though an ounce of prevention is invariably worth a pound of cure.
So what if it isn’t 100% certain that it will strike? We are talking about a threat that has the potential to kill people on a scale that would make 9/11 deaths a rounding error.
Mr Furious
Pshaw. Planning is for pussies. You fight a pandemic with the vaccines you have…
summr
I definitely won’t be watching it. Reading Gina Kolata’s “Flu” (on the 1918 epidemic which killed almost 40 million) left me paranoid about every sniffle for quite a while. That epidemic affected mostly young people. Good thing is it reminded me to get a flu shot the year I read it and every year since.
Stormy70
Get the dual tuner and your life will be complete. Why would I watch a special on Bird Flu, when Nip Tuck has its season premiere?! Also, the season finale of Big Bro and the season premieres of SVU, Earl and The Office. There is something culturally wrong about you, John. It’s sex and violence time.
OK, Surface is my new guilty pleasure. Sea monsters coming down in meteors? What’s not to like?
John Cole
That is why I get paid the big bucks, stormy. I will watch it so you don’t have to…
Stormy70
I am grateful, I’ll worry about it next week after my fall lineup is in full effect. Oh, I forgot to mention Bones above.
goonie bird
I have bird flu and im growing feather im developing a beak and wings iimmm SQUARK SQUARK
Tim F
In the face of all this TV literacy you people make me feel like a redneck dropout. I have to petition my lab for more time.
Speaking as a scientist, folks can stop worrying about flu shots when it comes to avian flu. There isn’t a shot invented that will do much against that puppy.
The reason is simple – the avian flu hasn’t mutated or recombined yet to the point where it’ll spread rapidly among people, and you can’t immunize against something that doesn’t exist yet. The flu shot is a good idea but keep in mind that when army eggheads talk about fighting ‘the last war,’ that’s what they’re talking about.
Shygetz
Speaking as a scientist, Tim F is not exactly correct. Depending on the changes in avian flu, it may be possible to grant partial immunity (or perhaps even complete immunity) to the avian flu using the current avian flu virus. Similar to the smallpox vaccine, where a closely-related virus (the cowpox virus) was used to immunize against smallpox; or, for a more recent example, how in the flu vaccine, the vaccine often doesn’t just immunize against the three strains included, but also can help attenuate illnesses from other closely related strains with shared or closely-related antigens (immune targets). It’s not a guarantee, but it is a serious possibility that a vaccine could be developed today that would generate at least partial immunity or resistance to the avian flu variant(s) that eventually strikes us.
Krista
Shygetz – Good to know. It’s still damn creepy though. I’ll ask you, from your scientist’s perspective: how much of a threat do you honestly think this is?
Shygetz
Krista–Big. Enormous. Choose your superlative. We are underprepared (still), but people are starting to listen about it. Like most things, though, there is an element that doesn’t want to spend the money until they are absolutely certain that the threat is here. By that time, of course, it is too late.
ppGaz
You can take seriously the people who say, the question is not if, but when.
What they mean is that a deadly flu pandemic will happen. That is almost a certainty, for the simple reason that there is very little liklihood that it can be stopped. What is not certain is whether this H5N1 strain will be that deadly flu. During this flu’s metamorphosis into one which is contagious from human to human, it may also morph into a flu that is less deadly. Exactly what level of threat is represented by this flu when that happens will not be known until it happens.
What is known is that when it happens, there will be no vaccine ready for a long time. During that long time, worldwide spread will occur. If the strain is deadly, then that spread will be a human and economic disaster of major proportions. It will make Katrina and 9-11 together look like a tea party.
If this avian flu progression doesn’t turn out to be “the big one”, then another flu will, down the road.
That’s why the experts are telling you that it’s not if, but when.
We have, right now, a unique opportunity to advance preparedness for this event. Whether we take advantage of it or not, remains to be seen.
Shygetz
The best hope is not for vaccines, but for anti-viral medications to be used to slow the spread until vaccines can be manufactured and widely distributed. The WHO has done some yeoman’s work (considering their resources) in modeling how to identify an outbreak in the early stages and how to slow the spread of a pandemic enough to have a shot at immunization, especially in the urbanized, high-traffic areas that are most likely to be hit first and hardest (in America, think of all of the international travel hubs). So, we aren’t at step zero, but there is still a long way to go and an indeterminate amount of time to get there.
DougJ
Space, I think you left out a couple.
–“Let’s not play the blame game. It will be easier to determine what went wrong, if indeed anything went wrong, in a few months when most of us are dead.”
–“The media isn’t reporting all the *good news* about the avian flu. We will be saving billions of dollars in Social Security costs.”
–“A lot of the people the flu killed were very underprivileged, so this is working out quite well for them.”
Tim F
Immunizing against the current form of the virus may help by giving people partial immunity, but the current form of the virus does not travel that easily between people. Eventually the virus will have to change enough to cross that barrier, and when it does there’s no guarantee that the immunization will help.
IMO Shygetz, your second post says it all. We need to have social and medical interventions in place to slow the epidemic so that we’ll have enough time to cook up a vaccine against the real deal once it makes itself known.