World Health: Pandemics: Globalization of flu-infected birds step closer to human pandemic

I've been monitoring the spread of bird flu a bit, especially attending to a Turkish news source, Zaman Daily (both Turkish and English sections) with a webpage devoted entirely to monitoring that country's enlarging number of cases. The current estimate is that 50 Turks may be infested, and that the flu among birds has spread to Istanbul. Increasingly draconian measures are being taken. Germany is supporting Turkey in fiting bird flu, and that makes good sense because of the large Turkish-background population in Germany which, naturally, accounts for much/most of the travel between the two countries.



Yesterday, Voice of America carried word of an infected bird in France.

Today I see that BBC now reports another European core-country case of nonhuman bird flu, as Germany's Angela Merkel sends out a message that applies to the whole birdfull world, birds crossing every territorial barrier, affecting domestic species thru contact with wild species in their migratory patterns and wandering ways.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has termed as "serious" an outbreak of bird flu in the north of the country, as the lethal virus widens its global reach.

Speaking during a visit to the affected Baltic Sea island of Ruegen, Mrs Merkel said her government would do everything in its power to contain bird flu.

German soldiers are being sent to the area to help contain the outbreak, and nearby poultry stocks have been culled.

The lethal H5N1 strain has killed at least 90 people since 2003.

France, India and Iran are the latest countries to report the presence of the deadly virus in dead birds.

It can be caught by humans who handle infected birds, but it is not yet known to have passed between people.

Scientists have warned that if the virus mutates it could create a pandemic that could kill millions of people.

It seems to me that this mostly-birds disease, still rather species-specific, is not (yet) a sure thing for initiating a pandemic among humans. But draconian measures must be taken to stop it, as it could kill off the world's birdlife to a vast extent. To stop it, many birds must be exterminated in the short term, and especially domestic fowl and hunted fowl (like the infected wild duck/s in France) have to be targetted. Chickens, ducks, geese, and other cooped birds destined for the dining room table must be monitored, and probably enclosed in ways that absolutely isolate and quarantine them from visition to their otherwise open pens by various winged species. But I'm jumping from birds to insects perhaps. Strike various winged species, for now. Gotta' check that one out. At present, it is not known whether this flue can spread from a bird-infected human to another human. So, the major inter-species jump that is so significant in the history of human disease is still not understood in the case of bird flu. However, the current fear among epidemiological researchers is that flues have an incredible rate of mutation. The question becomes how soon before a mutation from a bird-based human-flu viral infections alogrithms itself to a mutated variety that is super-compatible for infecting another human, transmitting the bird-flue mutate into a human to human disease.

Chicken and turkey farmers in North America are probably already on hi-alert. But I haven't yet checked out the farmers' online trade journals nor the government agricultural ministries/departments. Pray to God their all ready to serve as sentinels, and will not lag behind as at first they did regarding Mad Cow disease. Still, I live in Toronto, and for all the danger dumped on us by SARS, daily life went on. Tourism dropped. People did die. People travelling between China and Toronto became suspect. The disease was said to have originated in caged civets, a wild catlike species used for delicacy dining in parts of China. Nowadays, we just don't hear much about SARS. Was that the one that mosquitoes spread to birds? Or was that yet another instance of the globalization of disease? - Anaximaximum

For an enlightening book on the history of the spread of diseases from other species to humans, you don't want to miss Jared Diamond's Germs, Guns, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997). Be warned: this scholarly work is strictly structured by evolutionary theory treated as an absolute and ultimate fact. The wise Christian reader can still gain a huge amount of information and thawtfulness from it, even those who are strict creationists in the "Young Earth" sense (which to me personally is just another theory, and a poor one at that). Rated: eee - A