Comments

You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name

Your e-mail (optional)

Website (optional)

	My Original Nic Pic-a-Nic Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Foto

Submit your comments on this article

Southeast Asia

Meanwhile, Bird Flu Keeps Rolling Along in Indonesia

2006-10-16

Indonesian health authorities confirmed Monday that two more people had died of bird flu, bringing the national toll from the H5N1 virus to 54 -- the highest in the world.

Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation, trails Vietnam, which suffered 42 deaths, none of which however occurred this year.

Samples taken from a 67-year-old woman who died overnight and an 11-year-old boy who died two days ago returned positive results from two laboratories, the health ministry said.

Positive results from two Indonesian laboratories mean that the World Health Organization includes the case in its records.

Runizar Rusin, head of the ministry's national bird flu information centre, identified the pair as Mamah Komariah, who had been hospitalised in West Java's
Bandung, and Aulia, the boy who died in Jakarta.

Hadi Yusuf, who headed the team of doctors treating Komariah in hospital, said the woman died late Sunday "with complications from the virus affecting all of her organs."

"She had been unconscious for the previous two days," he told AFP.

Yusuf said last week that the woman was also suffering from encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, believed to be caused by the virus.

He said that if she was confirmed as carrying H5N1, she would be the first case in Indonesia where the virus has attacked the brain. At least one other similar case has been found elsewhere, he said.

The younger victim died at Jakarta's Sulianti Saroso hospital, the country's main facility for treating bird flu patients, after being admitted on Saturday.

The boy had previously been treated for 10 days at another hospital in south Jakarta and health officials said that he had come into contact with poultry, the usual method for transmission of avian influenza.

Monday's confirmed results bring the archipelago nation's overall number of cases to 71.

The bird flu centre's Rusin also said that another patient, whose details he did not provide, had returned positive results to an initial test but the results from a second laboratory were not yet available.

Posted by:phil_b

#17 The Hellstrom Chronicles writ very very small...

Posted by: .com 2006-10-16 23:17

#16 Another bird flu death confirmed this morning (Indo time).

Posted by: phil_b 2006-10-16 23:14

#15 Good info, #14 'moose.

One of the things we've noticed in preparing for a possible pandemic (from the EMS angle, as well as some others) is that most businesses are absolutely unprepared for the effects of a pandemic. Many of them will have to close down completely for who knows how long, particularly if they haven't prepared for 50% absenteeism as people are sick or are caring for sick relatives, and particularly if their business isn't able to be carried on remotely by computer (retail, for instance). Delivery systems will be disrupted. In a major pandemic there will be a cascade effect on the economy far beyond just the illness.

And I haven't even looked into the costs to the insurance companies having to pay out for hospitalization, disabilities, and deaths.

But you're right - no matter how bad it is in this country, it will be much, much worse in others. And that's just the more westernized countries....

Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2006-10-16 21:47

#14 .com: I've been interested in killer flu since I was in high school. Back then, I got to interview several old folks who lived through the Spanish flu.

Surprisingly, some of our biggest advances aren't what you would imagine. One of the most important is public hygiene awareness. Back then, even though the medical community was aware of good hygiene practices, the public as a whole was pretty ignorant. That cost many lives.

Today, however, a large part of our society could overnight become mysophobic, afraid of uncleanliness and contamination. And if given good information on how to protect themselves through our other great advance, communications, this could be a major life-saver.

An advanced communications system can be a godsend in an epidemic. Even small towns can set up phone banks to routinely call every household--vastly improving emergency services. And then masked volunteers can police up any house that doesn't answer. This means that household quarantine signs can be put up quickly, limiting unintentional spread, the sick can be isolated and cared for, and the dead can be secured by mortuary services.

In many ways, an epidemic is like a forest fire, almost puzzling in its spread, unexplainably missing large areas yet devastating others. But at the same time, there are all sorts of means by which you can "short circuit" a fire or an epidemic, and inhibit much of its damage.

At the federal level, in an effort to short circuit outbreaks, we are using a vaccination system that hasn't been used in years. Normally, for flu, we vaccinate the old, very young, and infirm. But this is being changed to vaccinating school aged children, the biggest spreaders of disease, and outbreak areas.

Ironically, there are some things that we used to do that were wise precautions against epidemics, that we have generally forgotten. This is because back then they were *used* to epidemics of all sorts.

One of these is the "sick room" idea. Any family that could afford to had a small sick room, like a walk-in closet, for anyone in the family who became ill with a communicable disease. This limited exposure and contamination (and mess) through vomiting and diarrhea considerably.

Another is the use of quarantine, which is an ill-understood thing today. Every Doctor carried quarantine signs around with him, and the authorities were very strict about homes registered as quarantined staying marked as such until they had been certified by the health department.

A big shock to most people will be how authoritarian the health department can become in such a situation. They have virtually unlimited power.

And though travel restrictions are not particularly useful, undoubtedly some will be set up, and checkpoint guards will most likely be authorized to fire weapons when idiots attempt to run them.

All-in-all, the US should have at worst mortality from 300k to 1M, in an epidemic that could last over a year; and an equal number of casualties with severe lung damage. This will be insignificant to what the rest of the world experiences.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-10-16 20:09

#13 Doncha see? Few pigs in Indonesia - muslim country. It's Allen's will.

Posted by: Bobby 2006-10-16 16:01

#12 I was funnin' - but also take you seriously - your points are persuasive, heh. "Funny" thing is, it doesn't matter much whether we like the scenario or not. I have few doubts that the day will come, eventually, unless our medical prowess mushrooms dramatically and manufacturing capacity for those miracles magically appears - not likely until there's some serious liability reform.

Just a review of 1918 with the global travel of today should scare the bejesus out of every health official on the planet - including the political drones. Don't see that happening.

Can you tell I've read The Coming Plague? Lol. About a decade ago - been watching this topic with serious interest ever since.

Posted by: .com 2006-10-16 14:38

#11 .com: My rather morbid point, I suppose, is to ponder what will happen in Asia, post epidemic. A WHO epidemologist gave a prediction a while back of a 300M mortality--he was promptly told to STFU, and non-medical/non-scientific WHO bureaucrats reduced that number to 3M.

However, more and more, I suspect that his original estimate may be on the low side. That being said, with 80-90% of the casualties being in Asia, there will be some major changes to that stubbornly unchanging continent.

One aspect of the disease that is missed is how it utterly mucks up Asia's food supply. Not just from killing off vast numbers of chicken, ducks and pigs, but also from wild bird feces contaminating low-processed grain, fruits & vegetables, and other foods.

So you've got to admit that some pretty major changes could result from say a billion Chinese, Indians, Malaysians, Indonesians, etc., being suddenly gone in a few months.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-10-16 14:28

#10 # 3, Snackbar,
Bwaaahaahaa ! Great idea. Just as effective as WMD, and not too obvious. Goood One.

Posted by: SpecOp35 2006-10-16 13:57

#9 There has not been a pandemic since rapid worldwide air travel has become normal. This has contributed to faster spread of flus and is thus documented. Flus which once took the entire winter to spread are reduced to about a month total effective lifespan. If H5N1 goes nuclear, we will be hit hard from all sides. Home schooling is recommended. And, the birdies may bring it back and forth with their migrations, so we could have multible waves of fatal H5N1.
Concentrations of population will be hurting, and medical professionals will be overwhelmed.
It could get ugly.

Posted by: wxjames 2006-10-16 12:15

#8 Phil, Dr. Niman doesn't qualify as a reliable source in my view. He cites his own commentary rather than any independent sources.

We know cats can get avian flu through eating infected birds. That's been demonstrated in cases both in Asia and in Europe. Indonesians are reportedly not cat lovers, however, so exposure by feral cats is an unlikely route.

If anything, the continued association of sick and dying poultry with human cases suggests that the primary link is there. The cat association described though not well-cited by Dr. Niman was of a healthy cat. The other instances known resulted in illness in the cat.

Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2006-10-16 11:35

#7 You've convinced me - color me Pro-Pandemic too, then. Fry us up! All of us!

Heh. Sorry, 'Moose, you're a veritable Pandemic Chamber of Commerce there.

Posted by: .com 2006-10-16 11:20

#6 The aftermath of enormous plagues can be very interesting. The Black Plague in the 14th Century was followed by Renaissance; and the Black Plague in the 17th Century was followed by the Industrial Revolution.

First of all, farming becomes a lot more efficient with small farms combining into larger ones. Prices strongly drop on most commodities, yet the shortage of labor drives up wages.

Capital is freed up, with young people inheriting earlier and investing, which applies across the economic spectrum. Art and science are fully funded, resulting in a "knowledge boom".

Unlike with famine, that can devastate a region for hundreds of years and has only very slow recovery, the recovery from a plague is very quick.

Plagues also have a strong Darwinian factor, and demographically, they tend to work from the bottom of the pyramid up. They are also followed by a strong decline in organized religion, because banding together to pray away a plague is not a good idea.

After a plague there is a strong decline in those people who are both stupid and fanatical, along with kooks of all varieties. It also purges those who are incapable of changing their high-risk behaviors.

If the avian flu maintains its mortality, we can expect both radical change and strong stability in the rest of the world. Initially, there might be a shuffling of the deck politically, in many nations. But afterwards, both the status quo reigns, and there is a sharp decline in inter-nation hostilities. Many of the reason to go to war will strongly diminish.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-10-16 11:01

#5 The only matching sequence to the human infections was found in a cat.

BTW, flu is not seasonal in Indonesia (or only slightly so).

Posted by: phil_b 2006-10-16 10:40

#4 Phil, no evidence of that, I believe. The most likely mammal is the pig, and those are probably rare in Indonesia. All of the mammalian cases reported so far, in Europe and Asia, appear to be the result of the animal eating sick birds.

WHO reports three new cases, two of which are related to poultry deaths and one of which is under investigation. They're showing 55 cases in Indonesia.

Poultry, poor hygiene and limited healthcare are still the predominent factors in this situation. The number of cases will incease, as Phil states, because we are moving into the influenza season.

Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2006-10-16 08:56

#3 Please contribute today to MOBIRDS, the secret organization who are responsible for throwing dead birds into mosques. The members of MOBIRDS work hard to fulfill their goals of a real chance of bird flu for every muzzie, but they can't do it without you. Thank you for your support.

Posted by: A Snackbar 2006-10-16 07:56

#2 It seems to have got itself established in a mammalian host in Indo, possibly cats. The virus can now adapt to mammalian physiology - substantially different from birds.

I still think that one of these days we will wake up to 20 or 30 new cases rather than 2 or 3, then off it goes.

Posted by: phil_b 2006-10-16 01:35

#1 China, Vietnam, Indonesia... yep, the vector pool for this baby to perfect itself should be large and diverse enough.

Posted by: .com 2006-10-16 01:03

00:00