• Search

• Recently Written

  • Do you want to buy a house now?
  • Debt consolidation loan pitfalls
  • Debt consolidation loans - why they can be a good idea
  • Pensions - the government proposes more damaging changes
  • House prices may fall according to the IMF
  • Conservatives to scrap Home Information Packs
  • Home information packs are forcing people to think about energy efficiency
  • Buy to let mortgages are still going strong
  • Gloomy news about house prices
  • The secret that can save you thousands of pounds when buying a new car

• Categories

  • Finance
  • Home Loans
  • Technology
  • Personal
  • Films
  
  

• Archives

  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006

• Blogroll

  • Money High Street
  • Money Beacon

• Admin

  • Login
  • XML Sitemap

China has just reported yet another outbreak of bird flu. This time in a northern province.

Last week a lorry driver contracted H5N1 bird flu in a town in the south of China, very close to Hong Kong, and China recently suffered an outbreak in a remote region to its East.

Of course China is a vast country, however there is much poverty amongst its rural population, so domestic poultry plays an important role in local economies. I’ve not been to China, but I imagine that rural people live in close proximity to their poultry as they do in other disadvantaged countries. The fact that China is suffering these outbreaks in a number of seperate areas, must be of real concern, as the lives of many rural people could be blighted by this diease.

Chinese officials are acting quickly to contain these outbreaks, but it seems that as they deal with one outbreak, another occurs somewhere else in the country.

Lets hope that they can contain these outbreaks effectively, but you can’t help wondering if we are seeing the start of bird flu becoming endemic throughout China.

Research shows that cats are susceptible to H5N1 bird flu and many have died from the disease in Asia.

I guess it was inevitable that the finger of suspicion would point to our feline friends - afterall they enjoy hunting and will find a dying bird easy prey. Having had a nibble at a bird riddled with the H5N1 virus, they then come into our home and decide that they want to be our friend again.

Their viral “treat” becomes our viral nightmare.

There is no vaccine to defend cats againt avian flu and, in the UK at least, no one is talking about a mass cull of cats (imagine the outcry if that was a reality), however the study does raise concerns about how mammals with close ties to humans can put us at risk from a potent virus such as H5N1.

I received an email from a visitor at SurvivingFlu.com today that got me thinking.

The sender of the email was asking for my views about stock-piling food and provisions for when the pandemic engulfs us.

It made me remember my thoughts in January of this year when I really did feel that the world was about to be hit by a bird flu pandemic.� Of course running SurvivingFlu means that I’ve learnt a huge amount more about avian influenza now and I’ve seen how it is spreading throughout the world.

The more I’ve learnt about bird flu over the last six months, the more convinced I’ve become that H5N1 bird flu will not be the next pandemic - its been around for a long time now and hasn’t made the evolutionary leap into a human transmissable killer.

Then along came the Indionesian cluster of bird flu cases.� It is likely that human transmission was playing a part there.

My confidence in our safety from the disease was shaken.� Maybe, I thought, this is the spark that could create a world wide pandemic.

However those seven cases were contained within a tight cluster and the surrounding population was not infected with H5N1.

So I did wobble, albeit briefly, but I still remain reasonably confident that the next influenza pandemic, whenever it comes along, will not be from the current H5N1 strain.