Bird Flu - recent facts

October 9th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

HealthNewsBlog ran an article recently about facts on Bird Flu gathered by Reuters. I thought they were worth a repeat, so I list a few here, but go to the link above to read the remainder.

Fact 1 and very important to me - there has been no pandemic. Though I guess there could be one, only 201 people in third world countries have died (132 in Viet Nam and Indonesia). Terrible and unfortunate but compared to deaths from say malaria, insignificant.

There have been 329 people infected since 2003. So, 2/3 died but 1/3 lived. Its a bad problem, but how many of these people were diagnosed post-mortem?

H5N1 has been around since it was identified in Scotland in 1959. Why the pandemic worry now? Maybe no one had a billion dollars of medicine to sell to world governments to stockpile just in case.

H7N7 is a bird virus that resulted in 30 million birds being destroyed in Europe in years past. It is a disaster for poultry farmers, but not on a world scale.

Check out HealthNewsBlog for the rest of the interesting facts on Bird Flu.

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