19-02-2005 13:17									#1
	Bush to Cut NIH Budget - Solves Social Security dilemma. Increase Your PM Length

The 2006 Budget includes a cut in NIH (National Institutes of Health) of 2.1%, which in inflation adjusted terms will probably be closer to 5%. This leaves it at $28 billion. Another story in the last two weeks looked at human infections of bird flu in Asia last year. If I recall the numbers correctly, there were 44 cases and 35 fatalities - 80%.

That's exceeds bubonic plague, and is more in line with smallpox for unexposed populations, i.e. initial exposures in North America. The only disease I know of that's worse is Ebola (and AIDS, but that is an entirely different dynamic/transmission vector). Even if it's cut in half, that still would put it at a 40% fatality rate, well in line with the Black Plague (the fatality rate is why I say this solves the Social Security problem, though that assumes it will target older populations more heavily - which might not be a safe assumption with Avian flu as in the 1918 pandemic).

The disease is out there, it's highly contagious (among birds, and it will be in humans once it jumps), and the world is just going on with business as usual. Unless we get lucky and it takes over a decade to break out of Asia, and we have some new biotech advances in the interim, this will be a catastrophe. No crash programs to develop a rapid flu vaccine development/deployment cycle, no preparation of public health measures to shut down movement in the case of an outbreak aka the old quarantine sytems, etc. Are any countries out there doing anything to prepare and maybe ameliorate an outbreak?

	19-02-2005 13:27									#2
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Yikes... so I guess flu epidemics like the 1919 one aren't really things of the past then?

	19-02-2005 13:39									#3
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No. But as Toronto showed a couple of years ago, you really need well-funded government agencies to prevent pandemics.

Nice one George.

	19-02-2005 13:43									#4
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Even if there is an outbreak bird flu can be maintained through old fashioned quorintine. Anything with that high of a fatality rate will burn itself out quickly if confined.

	19-02-2005 13:55									#5
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Oerdin - look at the last part of my post. The United States has steadily dismantled the public laws permitting quarantine. When SARS broke out, many people commented that an old fashioned quarantine no longer has the necessary laws nor the necessary procedures in place to be imposed. China has a more advanced quarantine ability than the USA.

	19-02-2005 13:58									#6
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quote: Even if there is an outbreak bird flu can be maintained through old fashioned quorintine. Anything with that high of a fatality rate will burn itself out quickly if confined.

Who's going to pay for that? The private sector? You must be joking. Public health authorities is vital to the security and well being of Americans. More so now than ever, given the ease with which diseases can make it around the world.

What if the Public Health authorities in Toronto had been underfunded like the water quality people? In the latter case people died and a whole community got ill. That was bad enough, but what if SARS had made it into the general population and become an epidemic. We are talking about a mass panic, millions seriously ill and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Toronto alone.

	19-02-2005 14:25									#7
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We got VERY lucky with SARS. Unbelievably so. If the infection had been just a little slower, so there were more vector's lose in the general population once preventitive measures were being taken....

	19-02-2005 16:31									#8
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4270755.stm

some links and more info on that bbc link.
I think there are plenty of scientists looking into the problem though(just based on my impression from news articles etc - not sure of any actual numbers) - so we might at some point get that cure?
In that report it talked about 50 odd known deaths from avian flu - that doesn't seem that many?

	19-02-2005 17:57									#9
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It sounds like a real life biological version of 'Kill The Poor' by the Dead Kennedys...

	19-02-2005 20:31									#10
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The bird flu is always out there. Every so often, a random mutation makes it easily trasmissible to humans, and then millions of us die. We combat this threat through our flue vaccination program. That's about all we can do, unless we decided to exterminate all birds.

	20-02-2005 02:53									#11
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quote: We got VERY lucky with SARS. Unbelievably so. If the infection had been just a little slower, so there were more vector's lose in the general population once preventitive measures were being taken....

In Toronto, we got unlucky. But the health authorities managed to sort it out.

	20-02-2005 07:04									#12
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Jesus will return before the next outbreak.