In the last hour or so, WHO has announced that we now have a Pandemic, the first in 41 years as infections have climbed over 30,000 people. As I said in my previous blog, many people still have their heads in the sand, thinking it won’t happen to them, but pretty much everyone I know is aware of people close to them who either have N1H1, or have been asked to quarantine themselves just in case.
WHO Chief Margaret Chan made the announcement a short while ago saying that “Swine Flu is unstoppable.” She also went on to say that it has progressed so far that it is no longer possible to follow the track of the virus and htat the statistics only reflect the data from countries who have good tracking measures in place.
This takes me back to my prvious blog where I asked if you were prepared. It is now quite likely that you may have to be quarantined and if this is the case, your whole family may find itself in this situation. I meet and shake hands with a lot of people every day, my wife works in a retirement village and my daughter is a school teacher. Between us, the chances of getting exposed become much higher.
Just to put this into perspective, the last time WHO declared a pandemic, the Hong Kong Flu, 41 years ago, around 1 million people died.
Now I’m not trying to say the sky is falling, but I am saying you need to consider what it means to be prepared. If you have a little more food in the cupboards and don’t need it, cool, have a non swine flu party when its all over. Make sure you wash your hands regularly after contact with other people, you can buy handy little bottles of hand cleaner that doesn’t require water.
A final reminder for you, who are thinking, I’m young and healthy, it’s the elderly people who get killed with these viruses. Think again, the majority of deaths with Swine Flu have been aged 30-50 years old.
I have to start by saying I don’t think it was, but it is a ligitimate question, given that bioviolence is something that many countries around the world will be considering and it is an obvious threat from terrorists. We don’t hear anything about the neutron bomb these days, but the concept of killing off people but leaving the environment intact, is not new.
Several years ago I was helping a water authority with mobile data communications around the same time as a meeting of world leaders . Even though bioterrorism has not been seen in this country, there were was hightened vigilence of the city’s water reservoirs, to ensure that they were not deliberately contaminated as a protest against the international meeting.
You would have to have your head in the sand to not consider the act of unleashing a virus as a possible act of warfare and in order to run tests to assess the viability of such an exercise, it would seem that the best way to test whether this is possible, would be to try it on humans.
Swine Flu has so far only been highly contagious in one city of the world. Most of the deaths occured in Mexico or a small number of people who had been to Mexico City. If you were running tests, you would of course not want your tests to accidentaly kill off a large percentage of the human race, you would want it to be in controlled environment, particularly one where your countries citizens were a vast minority.
It is common public knowledge that the US military does research into infectus diseases and according to The Frederick News, Fort Meade is investigating the possibility of missing virus samples fromthe U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. It doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to consider wht the Army would have such an Institute. You could ligitimately suggest that they need this in case other countries or terrorist groups decide to engage in bio-warfare and of course in order to understand how to defend against such attacks you would of course have to know how to create the viruses.
The web is littered with sites like Freedom Watch saying that since 9/11 the US has been preparing for further terrorist attacks and that biological warfare would make a lot of sense. Many of these sites appear to be from civil liberty organisations and while many of them are based on reasonable foundations, there are obviously many that appear on the redneck fringe.
Nevertheless, this type of warfare of sorts has been documented for thousands of years, with the first known use of biotics was from 1500 – 1200 BC where Hittite texts suggested the use of ergot being used to deliberately contaminate water wells. Ergot was the same hallucinatory that is said to have been the foundation of the Salem witch trials, where the rye was contaminated causing LSD like hallucinations. So the concept is nothing new.
I spent quite a lot of time looking for any credible authority that suggests that there is any credibility to this possibility, but they all seem to quote Freedom Watch and similar sites as their source.
So was Swine Flu N1H1 man made? I doubt it. Is it possible, of course. Could a virus like this be mutated and used by terrorists or foreign governments as a military weapon, absolutely.
So back to the future. According to NZ Herald, the current list is now over 6,600 people in 33 countries, including over 70 deaths. The media in the US keeps saying they aren’t seriously concerned at the moment because summer is coming and the bacteria doesn’t survive for long in warm temperatures. Of course in New Zealand we are now heading into the flu season and there are currently around 400 people in isolation as I write this blog. A bit different to the bird flu we were worried about.
In one of my next blogs I will see what I can find out about the 2nd wave. Traditionally these sorts of viruses come back again in waves with the waves often having mutated and being far more virulent than the first and this is one of the problems for the makers of Tamiflu, because the antivirus they make now in massive quantities, might be powerless against the next wave of the bug. Will the 2nd wave start down under, or will it come in 4-5 months on the Amercian continent. Will we be ready for it?
While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.
Thanks so much for your support:)
For the last word, lets look inside a Mexican Swine Flu Isolation Ward.
So the story continues. It seems a long time ago (Monday of this week!) when I asked the question, Is the Swine Flu going to be a pandemic? Well on level 4 indicating a significant increased risk of a pandemic, a global outbreak of a serious disease. It isn’t yet a Pandemic, but it doesn’t show any signs of abating. As it appears that secondary transmission of human to human may now be occurring, a Reuters story says that they may soon raise to Level 5.
Another Reuters story also mentions that many countries have imposed a ban on US pork imports, this could lead to similar bans on pork exports from all countries where Swine Flu has been confirmed. This is despite WHO announcing that you can not catch A/N1H1 Swine Flu from eating pork, and in fact there is no evidence of pigs in Mexico or the USA being sick. There is conjecture that they may have captured the virus from Asian birds, possibly imported into Mexico, but the mystery is if the pigs aren’t sick, how is it that humans have caught it from them. It’s no wonder that conspiracy theories abound, while we have no real answers. A team of WHO specialists are now in Mexico trying to unravel this mystery.
On Tuesday I commented that Swine Flu is a bit close to home as New Zealand is one of the early significant areas where Swine Flu was strongly suspected to exist. This was confirmed yesterday and 360 odd passengers on Air New Zealand Flight 1 from Los Angeles were asked to quarantine themselves.
On Wednesday I blogged about how to get Swine Flu and within 24 hours most large corporates had emailed their staff with instructions about personal hygiene and how to minimise the risk of infection. Whether people are concerned or not is difficult to gauge and I suspect a lot of people are still thinking, this wil never happen to me. Despite this 2 hours ago the number of confirmed infected was increased to 14 and the suspect list includes an additional 56 people according to New Zealand’s TV3 News.
According to the Google Swine Flu Map the Kiwi’s affected are spread from Auckland in the North Island to Otago deep into the South Island. They of course had to use confined public transport to get there, so it is likely they may have spread the virus further.
One question I have is why have people died in Mexico but not in other countries. It also seems that the symptoms have been worse for people in Mexico. One theory is that it is attenuating as it spreads from one person to the other and weakening in the process. This could explain why the people in Mexico, including expats, have suffered far more than people in other countries, although this ios contraindicated by the fact that most if not all of those in New Zealand contracted the virus whilst personally in Mexico. There have been a very small number of people suspected to have Swine Flu who had not been to Mexico, but had been on flights together with people who have been confirmed as having Swine Flu. I have yet to hear of anyone who has been confirmed with the virus who were noton a flight with people who had been to Mexico or hadn’t been to Mexico themselves.
There are still some unsolved mysteries and it is the secondary nature of the spread of this virus that holds the greatest risk of a pandemic.
While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.
Yesterday I posted a blog about Swine Flu, this is an interesting situation which will be at the forefront of many people’s minds for some time to come.
We live in interesting times. It seems analogous to the way banks have behaved since the ’89 meltdown when they said they would never be as free with their lending again, such as 100% mortgage loans. we relaxed after the Bird Flu fizzled out, but now we have a new strain N1H1 which apparently comes from pigs but is related to the bird flu. Whilst it appears that Tamiflu has a positive effect on this, there are of course no vaccines because it is new.
It was interesting to read in the NZ Herald this morning that Air New Zealand was saying that their aircraft are safe for fellow passengers because filters in the aircraft’s air conditioning system filter 99.9% of airborne viruses. Funny then how so many of us who travel on long haul flights end up coming down with some sort of virus within a short period of time after a flight.
Of course these filters require that you sneeze into them. A lot of people look into lights to help them sneeze (I must explore that sometime, or ifyou know why, please share the answer in a comment), but you lift your head to the light and then sneeze on the way down, creating a nice arc of germs.
So how fast does a sneeze travel through the air? Well according to the appropriately named site Blurtit, the fastest recorded sneeze was 102 Miles per hour! I would say that the germs from even an average 50MPH sneeze could travel a fair distance in an aircraft cabin.
Some more news from this morning’s NZ Herald was that the students that came back to Auckland after a school trip to mexico come from not one but 2 colleges, Rangititoto and Northcote College. The story also said that some of the kids who were ok when they arrived are now also showing symptoms. I wonder how many people they have been in contact with. The ones who are ill have been quarantined in their homes, but it didn’t say whether their sublings and parents were also quarantined or were going to their schools and workplaces.
What I find really interesting is the coincidence in the numbers. Greater Mexico City has a population of around 22 million people. 1300 reported people with Swine Flu is around 0.00005% of the population and yet a group of 20 odd Auckland kids have been exposed to it. It makes you wonder if the real number is far greater, but these are the only ones that they are prepared to announce. In a city of that size it must be spreading like wildfire.
There is of course already a Swine Flu Google Map, so you can keep an eye on how it spreads.
Is your household prepared for a pandemic?
Just as a footnote, if you have Sky TV, there is a movie called Doomsday on tonight, which is about a virus in Scotland, where they quarantine the whole country. I won’t be home to watch it, but its funny how its on TV tonight. I love coincidences.
While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.
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