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| Britain |
| Avian Flu: British Mortality Estimates |
| 2005-03-22 |
| Hundreds of thousands of people may die and one quarter of the work force could be absent if Britain were hit by a bird flu pandemic, a senior government official said. "It may be somewhere between 20,000 and 750,000 extra deaths and it may be 25 percent of the population off work," the government official, speaking on a non-attributable basis, told a conference in London. "That is the shape of the event we are going to have to deal with," he said. Britain's population is nearly 60 million people, with 28 million working, according to government figures. Contingency plans already announced by Britain's health department include the stockpiling of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu at a cost of 200 million pounds (380 million dollars, 290 million euros). The country's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has also previously described a national preparedness plan the government is ready to put in place should the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus develop into a new strain that spreads from human to human. Measures include closing schools and cancelling public gatherings like football matches and pop concerts, as well as issuing travel warnings. The estimate of 750,000 dead put forward was described later Tuesday by a health department spokeswoman as a "theoretical upper limit" of a catastrophe. She said the government was sticking to its estimate of 50,000 British deaths, a number advanced earlier this month when it published its contingency plan. The higher figure, presented to an international forum at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, came days after a leading scientist warned that the government's estimate was "optimistic". Professor Hugh Pennington, president of the Society for General Microbiology, said he believed up to two million Britons could perish from a mutated form of the H5N1 virus. He has criticised current planning for an outbreak, warning that a strain affecting humans will be "here before we know it". Though the government has ordered 14.6 million vaccine doses for Britain they will take up to two years to arrive, prompting some worries that the population could be at risk in the interim. Since last January, some 46 people in southeast Asia, most of them in Vietnam, have died after contracting a type of the disease as a result of contact with sick or dead birds. Medical experts have warned that if the virus develops the ability to pass from human to human, the consequences would be devastating. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #5 Summa you medical-whizzes might find the Scientific American article on the computer simulation of a smallpox release interesting. March, 2005. Targeted vaccination and quarantine makes the difference between 435 dead after 70 days and 12,499 (with no response). I'd say that a *substantial* difference! There have also been several flu articles over the past few months.... Me? I like the pictures. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-03-22 11:46:48 PM |
| #4 That works off ideal suppositions. People can very actively change, or not change, their risk factors. Plus, even with a lack of immunity, there is a strong difference between exposure and infection. If you receive an exposure of too small a quantity of the pathogen to overwhelm your immune system's response, you can develop at least partial immunity without ever developing an infection. Mutation is very important, as was demonstrated with the Swine flu of the 1970s, which mutated to a much less lethal form just before arriving in the US. Unlike other pathogens, where mutation is purely Darwinistic, influenza has a high number of "flexible genes" that mutate with little or no logic. Last but not least, all carriers are not equal. For this reason, the US tends to emphasize not only an outbreak quarantine system, but give priority of vaccination to those individuals most likely to contract and spread the disease, i.e. school-age children. The bottom line is that this flu is very, very special, and it will be a major war once it evolved easy human to human transmission. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-03-22 10:17:06 PM |
| #3 most mutations, in this case, making the disease less contagious and lethal. True but irrelevant. The mutations that make it more contagious and to a lesser degree more lethal will be the ones that spread. The thing you have to keep in mind is any population will continue to be at risk until its immunity level is well in excess of 50%. Immunity results either from being having been infected or being immunized. It will take 6 months to get an effective vaccine and at least 12 months to produce enough to immunize more than 50% of the UK population. We don't know what the existing level of immunity to H5 is, but we have to assume its low. So it will be a question of keeping the disease in check until sufficient vaccine is available. Some places may be able to keep it out entirely, but most of the worlds population live in places that will not get vaccines in any relevant timeframe and whose governments do not have the wherewithal to implement disease control measures. However many it kills in the UK, hundreds times more will be killed in the developing world. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-03-22 9:59:45 PM |
| #2 Disease mortality projections are a wild guess. There are a large number of variables, such as how the disease is introduced into the population; overall public hygiene, general health, and information control; the health care system; how rapidly the government responds with quarantines, innoculations, sanitation and cadaver removal. The influenza itself is prone to mutate unpredictably, with most mutations, in this case, making the disease less contagious and lethal. Finally, it is almost impossible to predict what percentage of the population is naturally immune to this particular strain. However, based on the lethality of the Spanish Flu, even the 2M estimate may be low. I could imagine a 10M out of 60M reduction, with maybe another 5-10M disabled for six months or more. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-03-22 9:35:27 PM |
| #1 somewhere between 20,000 and 750,000 extra deaths From the same people who said the Iraqi civilian casualty figure was somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000? This is science? |
| Posted by: Hupising Cliting6229 2005-03-22 9:21:57 PM |