Wow...a fair and balanced Bird Flu story from the MSM...about time

[SaveElmer]

I'm shocked...

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=1330252

[niallmac]

1. That journalist can forget about a career in infotainment.n/t

[iamjoy]

2. Very Good Article

not judgemental, no "sky is falling" but points out some of the practical conerns.

I think we need to remember this when we talk about what we perceive as threats (ie: global warming).

[pretzel4gore]

3. iow the newsmedia cannot and should not try to avoid doing its job

by invoking the threat of 'bird flu' or 'mad cattle' and soon, so they can skate by the criminal gang that has lied its way in to the white house and dragged a skeptical nation into the iraq calamity....poor mass media, imagine, getting men who blandly murder tens/thousands to NOTICE the press isn't the usual sukk up kick down! Thank Jeesyus for them birds died of colds in china! (never in USA, notice)
And the real threat from biology is if the busheviks, in their maddened fear at getting nailed for stealing the 2k election etc and a litany of serious death penalty class crimes, tries to buy time by unleashing some wunderbug upon humanity, similar to the probable cause of the Aids virus (notice Aids never went after old constipated white men who waved bibles, wore flag pins, raged in public at liberty and screwed lil boys every night while high on pharma coke?)
sometimes there's fire when there's smoke, but never when there's mirrors

[dalaigh lllama]

4. Fascinating. Especially the part about serosurveys

And just why have they not done this yet?

The way to tell the real death rate is by taking blood samples from a large population to see how many have antibodies to the virus, indicating they had been infected. These serosurveys, as they are called, are standard operating procedure when a new germ appears. They were among the first things done when West Nile virus and SARS emerged. Yet they have not been done in a big way among poultry workers in Asia the most likely people exposed to bird flu.

"I'm frankly a bit bamboozled by all that. I can't understand why that hasn't been done extensively," Schaffner said.

Without serosurvey information, the apparent human death rate for H5N1 infection of about 50 percent may be erroneous, said Craig Pringle, a viral diseases moderator for ProMed-mail, a blog operated by the International Society for Infectious Diseases. He's also a retired professor at the University of Warwick in England.

[SaveElmer]

6. I've heard others make this point...

Virtually every infectuous disease has virulent strains that kill...but only a minority of people. Why they haven't tried to determine this for the Bird Flu is a bit of a mystery!

[BrklynLiberal]

5. Excellent article. I am sending it out to everyone on my email list.

[SaveElmer]

7. Kick

Might be my imagination, but it seems like only the alarmist posts about Bird Flu get the comments!