Media Alert: CNN Saturday Night April 29th 7pm EDT
Killer Flu: A Breath Away
A Sanjay Gupta Special.
What a Difference a Day Makes
In the past 24 hours, Bird Flu news has broken out of the doldrums. We’ve gone from reassuring articles, telling us how unlikely it is to contract avian flu from pigeons, and that the arrival of H5N1 infected birds to the U.S. poses little danger to people, to this roundup of alarming headlines.
U-N Official say world needs to prepare for Bird Flu pandemic
Don't Give In to Bird Flu Fatigue Warn Experts
GENEVA (Reuters) - The world must prepare for a long-term fight against bird flu and not give in to fatigue that seems to have set in, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official warned.
No Stopping Bird Flu, Studies Conclude
Associated Press
Washington — If pandemic influenza hits in the next year or so, the few weapons the United States has to keep it from spreading will do little, a new computer model shows.
Ivory Coast Records Bird Flu Outbreak
Ivory Coast has become the sixth country in Africa to report an outbreak of bird flu.
EMTs given lesson in handling avian flu outbreak
PRINCETON BOROUGH -- Reacting to the potential threat of avian flu, doctors and nurses from The University Medical Center at Princeton held a workshop Monday night to instruct local EMTs on how to recognize and respond to the lethal virus, should there be an outbreak of the disease.
And most alarming, from China, we have the following :
Cover Ups on Pneumonia Warned
. . . some medical institutes were failing to quickly report on "pneumonia cases with unknown causes" or avoided using the term by diagnosing them as severe pneumonia . . .
It seems that, according to Beijing officials, local governments and hospitals have been covering up, or failing to report, suspected human cases of Avian Flu.
Long time readers of this blog are aware that I have sounded this alarm in the past. The number of cases confirmed from China have been kept artificially low. It has never made sense that in a country of over 1 billion people, the number of human infection has been roughly the same as reported from Egypt, which only has 70 million people. And H5N1 has been reported in China since November of last year. More than twice as long as it has been in Egypt.
Add to this the somewhat suspicious actions of the Beijing government over the past few months, and many have suspected a wholesale cover up. This report seems to move towards confirming our suspicions.
Earlier this month, Chinese authorities decreed that newspapers may no longer report on bird flu cases. All information would be provided by official government releases.
The question is, why admit it now?
We can only speculate. But the worry is that the number of human H5N1 cases in China is now so large that they are unable to maintain their veil of secrecy. Better to get out in front of the story, and blame local officials for the cover up, before it blows up in Beijing’s face.
None of this, of course, proves there is a large outbreak in China. Even scattered, Bird-to-Human cases would be expected to be much larger than currently reported. And this may be all this is. We can only wait, and pray, and hope the Chinese government will provide accurate details.
And that they do it very, very soon.
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