New ladder to a pandemic alert

[Giuseppe]

Re: New ladder to a pandemic alert

Length of transmission chain is a significant measure of transmissibility. Tamiflu is rightly given to contacts of a case. Use of the Tamiflu blanket can mask transmission events.

Another feature of a readily transmissible virus is its spread among general population with casual contacts.

To date no such event happened.

A large cluster of cases involving both index cases, HCWs, transportation personnell will signal efficient, sustained human-to-human transmission.

A casual contacts - not traceable directly to index cases - may be a person who lives in a apartments building as happened at Hong Kong Amoy Garden residential building, when several people were quarantined after a man fell ill with SARS and some residents developed clinical symptoms without proven close contact with the patient.

[Giuseppe]

Re: New ladder to a pandemic alert

H5N1 lacks more than half of the sequence markers for pandemic human disease, according to articles posted here recently.

The real danger in H5N1 lies in the continued spread, reinfection of migrating waterbirds and episodic infection of passerines, and viral transmission to highly susceptible domestic poultry.

The danger to the global food source posed by H5N1 was also noted in a commentary article posted today (and previously noted in other threads).

In the last 20 years, global industrial-scale poultry production has increased by thousands of percent, particularly in Asia and more recently in Africa - it's the new, cheap protein source to feed a hungry, overpopulated planet.

The match between migration patterns, Niman's molecular travel logs, and recent adoption of large-scale poultry operations in specific countries and outbreaks:

Priceless.

I concur with Henry: the so-called pandemic experts simply don't 'get it'. The necessary molecular markers for pandemic aren't acquired by ressortment, nor by 'random mutation'.

But at least we understand why Webster was 'far less concerned' about H5N1 than he had been several years ago.

At the end, even Robert Webster and his monumental work on influenzaviruses is on the way of trashbin?

Perhaps, one may investigate a bit prior to draw similar conclusion.

I hope in a honest, valuable debate, not only in a partisan acceptance of a single point of view.

When Webster told to world about catastrophic pandemic he was good, now that (perhaps) he has modified the position is bad.

Too simple to accept without skepticism.