Gotta Lvov it

Occasionally I stop and take stock, and wonder if my concerns over an Avian Flu Pandemic are overblown. After all, as I’ve pointed out many times, it might not happen. We could get lucky, the virus might mutate itself out of existence, and we can go on with more mundane threats to our survival, like North Korea, Terrorism, and the fall network TV schedule.

These moments of self doubt are short term however, as there are many voices, far more strident than mine, giving warning. One such voice is that of Dmitry Lvov, the director of a virology research institute at the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences.

A few choice quotes from our man in Moscow.

“The world is one step away from a bird flu pandemic that cannot be averted by quarantine or vaccination”

“The pandemic virus could strike at any moment, and would most likely come from China, leading to tens of millions of human deaths, or one third of the global population.”

“Quarantine measures could delay the pandemic for a few days but not prevent it, and that vaccination would not stop people getting sick.”

“One amino-acid replacement in the genome remains to make the virus transferable from human to human”

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20060307/43989397.html

Of course, he could be wrong. Scientists who have predicted the course of the spread of the H5 virus claimed it would never spread beyond south east asia, and they were wrong. They also said it would remain strictly a disease of birds, and now we know this to be wrong. And they repeated, ad naseum, for the past three years that no evidence of human to human (H2H) transmission existed, when they had strong suspicions that it did.

So Dmitry Lvov could be an alarmist. His warnings in the past have included the possibility that one billion people, one in six, could die in a pandemic. That’s pretty alarming. But it’s a number that has been discussed, quietly, and out of the public view, by more than a few experts.

While it's nice to know I'm not the biggest doomsayer on the planet in regards to pandemic flu, somehow, I'm not comforted by that fact.

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