Jun

12

Indionesian Bird Flu Made Me Wobble

Filed Under Bird Flu 

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.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Indionesian Bird Flu Made Me Wobble”

  1. The blogs & Articles team. on June 12th, 2006 7:59 pm

    It is of course obvious that “the next influenza pandemic, whenever it comes along, will not be from the current H5N1 strain”.

    To enable human to human infection, the virus would have to mutate in to some thing other than the current H5N1 virus.

    However, be it H5N2 or H5N20, it would be essentially originating from the same H5N1 virus.

    Are you saying that you are sure that will not be the case?

  2. chris on June 12th, 2006 8:29 pm

    Thanks for your comments

    Actually reading back my blog post I realised that I had been inaccurate by saying that “the more convinced I am that bird flu will not be the next pandemic”.

    Unfortunately avian influenza aka “bird flu” has triggered the last influenza pandemics so I’ve changed my post to say H5N1 bird flu….

    I remembered this article about there being 150 possible avian flu candidate viruses for a pandemic, so to answer your question, no I am not sure that H5N1 won’t mutate into a human transmissable form, but also I am aware that other avian influenza viruses may also mutate into human lethality at some point in time and it may be one of them that initiates a pandemic.

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