How real is the threat of an H5N1 pandemic?

A

areasys

Registered Senior Member
The second of two controversial H5N1 studies was released today. My question is this: if H5N1 were to become easily transmissible between humans, how bad would it be? Are there any potential vaccines available (I heard the swine flu vaccine helps)? How hard would it be to develop and mass-produce a vaccine before the pandemic gets out of hand?

Or is the talk of a pandemic just hype?
 
Well they plan to use the data in the studies to make a program to create every possible mutation of the virus so it will be easy to make a vaccine for it if it every arises. My question is what if it mutates with another virus. I guess you could watch contagion. I am however confident that our growing medical systems are capable of handling such things. I don't think even the worst disease could kill more than a billion people but then again I am certainly no expert. I also don't think a zombie virus is even remotely plausible. I'm an optimist though and I think the human race is going to be okay.
 
Yes it's possible for it to kill billions, it's happened before after WW1 and that close proximity problem which allows rapid transmission is FAR worse now than it was even then. Further more the warm, moist air inside shopping centres and airports and train stations allows respitory viruses to hang in the air far longer and therefore infect massive amounts of people, just look at the common cold. On the treatment side we have very little that there wasn't available during the Spanish flu epidemic, there is no silver bullet like antibiotics for a virus. Tammiflu works on some strains but is compleatly useless on others so your back to supportive care and even if Tammiflu DOES work only those at the very start of an epidemic will be administered it, once it gets going it will all be saved for health care workers and essential services and even THEN Australia's stock pile will only last either a week or a month (it's a while since I did pandemic preparedness sorry). It's actually one of the drugs under the direct control of the department of health and which you require permission to distribute
 
CDC may have something. But they are not going to inform all of us.
 
All I know is that virus epidemics are the deadliest of killers. Somehow, probably because it isn't considered as gloriously newsworthy as war The Influenza Pandemic of 1918 is largely forgotten today. And yet ''The Spanish Flu' killed 16 million people. I have read calling the flu Spanish is ironic because Spain was not its source; it was merely that Spain wasn't at war at the time, like so many other Western nations, so the epidemic was more widely reported there, and so assumed to have originated there.
 
I still don't see H5N1 becoming a pandemic except maybe in the next 7 years but after that no. I have a question, when ever there is bird flu found they kill the entire bird population in the area. Why not quarantine them to see which ones survive or develop immunity. Maybe they could find a way to cheaply and efficiently immunize fowl to it. That would reduce the occurrence of the virus, especially near people.
 
I believe the problem with H5N1 is that it kills chicken eggs which is how we make flu vaccines. Otherwise there would already be a vaccine to it
 
I guess the question is: if there is an epidemic, if H5N1 does become easily transmissible among humans, what kind of death toll are we looking at?
 
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