Ok, we have "what if" and "what's more" but my take on it is "so what". There is no direct evidence that H5N1 will mutate and cause a pandemic that we all seem to be so worried about as we are overcome by fears stoked by the media. The only pandemic we need to worry and overcome is the pandemic of fear sweeping North America at this time. Fear sells and the media uses this to their advantage while the politicians and the elite celebrate because fear is the greatest tool for social control. All the responses taken by the "characters" in this thought experiment would most likely come about because of widespread panic and fear over bird flu, created by misinformation from the media, rather than an actual risk associated with bird flu. Fear is bred by hype, unless we are trained to assess risk independently. If we could tell the difference between potential and actual risk we would all sleep easier and ignore the fear mongering present is articles like this and all over the mainstream media.

Sounds suspciously like Stephen King's "The Stand."

The Spanish Flu started in the US Mid-west and spread to Europe in 1917/18 with the US troops. The rest is history. It spread around the world with the returning troops going to their home countries. On a recent trip to Europe with a very sick family sitting almost next to our family we all developed a very nasty flu-like cold within days of arriving at our destination. Our illness mirrored exactly what the other family was suffering. This is an all too common scenario of airline travel.

Just imagine the jump in the GDP with all the coffin and funeral expenses ! Economists must already be calculating the potential "growth" figures.

Ed Deak.

No kidding, Ed. Talk about wealth creation.

There's a very simple solution to food being suddenly unavailable. I propose we develop a new realm in human relationships: compassionate cannibalism. I'm not talking soylent green here. I'm talking nicely marbled steaks, juicy and succulent. First we could ask for contributers, then when that quickly ran out we could create a new government ministry, the Department of Departure. A little culling here and there and voila! No more food insecurity. We'd all start seeing each other with new eyes.

Told a friend just now (recently retired editor of the local paper) about this article. In fact I'm afraid the rendition I gave (regarding the likelyhood and the consquences of pandemic) sort of depressed her.

To cheer her up I advised that she find a copy of "The Hot Zone". There is still some humour in the worst scenario.

Superjudge: I do not know how to sort out what is "Hype" and what is to be acted upon. Not only that: I have no idea what is an appropriate action given a serious pandemic.
Talked to my "Best Bloved" daughter just now and advised her to check out thetyee. Seemed like I had depressed her as well but I did try to lighten it a bit - you know, read "the Hot Zone" for the humour there and have a Merry Christmas

Superjudge:
"no direct evidence"
The evidence will be very direct but it may not be H5N1

It might be Ebola or some other virus that we have not heard about.

What is glaringly obvious is that we have no systems in place to deal with much beyond a light snow storm.

My father was the local "Civil Defence" co ordinator way back in the '60s. I played with the radiac meters, guiger counter and the WW1 steel helmet with the red cross on it and the gas mask he was issued. Our little town even built a fallout shelter near the train staion.

At some point one of the local wags sent my father an alternate list of recommendations in event of nuclear war. The one I recall was the last:
"Sit down and wrap your arms around your head and ears. close your eyes. scrunch down into the smallest target you can achieve and
KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE

Unfortunately there's little doubt that humanity is due for a "correction". We simply don't have 5 earths or the will to change our present course.

Then, of course, it may mutate to a relatively harmless bug.

I've been following your blog for sometime Crawford and I am convinced you are doing something critically important. I am not sure avian flu is the thing; but if it is not avian flu it is almost certain to be something else.

Canada is clueless. We have next to no capacity to close the borders or isolate particular communities. Just one big happy clapping family. We have not even instituted the basic quarantine rules regarding Indonesia and Viet Nam. Or China.

At the moment this is somewhat reasonable. After all, why would we force travelers to sit out a two week quarantine. It would hurt trade. It would be racist. It would not do at all.

When granny and your kids are dying remember how useful being politically correct or economically efficient is. Delightful as air travel can be the fact is that it brings whatever is in a chicken coop in Haiphong directly to Vancouver.

It will be interesting to see if the folks on Vancouver Island stop the ferries at the docks. I doubt it. But, the day that a case is found in Vancouver that has to be the smart move. It might be a bit late; but late is better than never.

Looking for an avian flu vaccine? A good place to start would be a look at the interesting background info on tamiflu. here's a good starter piece:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4215984.stm
or try: http://www.wetlands.org/articlemenu.aspx?id=fa641fcb-eff6-4975-921a-b66c734cd573

Just two days ago a student arrived in my school and informed me that she had just been diagnosed with scarlet fever. The hospital had made no effort to quarantine her and I have since seen her around town at the 7-11 and at a hockey game.

Thinking we are prepared for any major epideminc is a joke.

There is also some thought that the Spanish Flue was a germ warfare project that went wrong. Note the source of its origin, Fort Riley, Kansas in U.S. Soldiers. Would that be the first time a new weapon was tested on the soldiers first, to see how well it worked?

There is an interesting article about that at:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/peopleevents/pandeAMEX86.html

Further information on the Spanish Flue comes from Heinrich Mueller, former head of the Gestapo. Who knows? this could be true or just more fiction.

"At a 1944 Nazi bacteriological warfare conference in Berlin, General Walter Schreiber, Chief of the Medical Corps of the German Army told Mueller that he had spent two months in the US in 1927 conferring with his counterparts. They told him that the "so-called double blow virus" (i.e. Spanish Flu) was developed and used during the 1914 war.

"But," according to Mueller, "it got out of control and instead of killing the Germans who had surrendered by then, it turned back on you, and nearly everybody else." ("Gestapo Chief: The 1948 CIA Interrogation of Heinrich Mueller" Vol. 2 by Gregory Douglas, p. 106)

(Actually the Armistice didn't take place until August 11, 1918.)

The interrogator, James Kronthal, the CIA Bern Station Chief asked Mueller to explain "double blow virus." It reminds me of AIDS.

Mueller: "I am not a doctor, you understand, but the 'double-blow' referred to a virus, or actually a pair of them that worked like a prize fighter. The first blow attacked the immune system and made the victim susceptible, fatally so, to the second blow which was a form of pneumonia...[Schreiber told me] a British scientist actually developed it...Now you see why such things are insanity. These things can alter themselves and what starts out as a limited thing can change into something really terrible."

The subject of the Spanish Flu arose in the context of a discussion of typhus. Mueller said the Nazis deliberately introduced typhus into Russian POW camps and, along with starvation, killed about three million men. The typhus spread to Auschwitz and other concentration camps with Russian and Polish POWS.

In the context of the Cold War, Mueller says: "If Stalin invades Europe...a little disease here and there would wipe out Stalin's hoards and leave everything intact. Besides, a small bottle of germs is so much cheaper than an atom bomb, isn't it? Why you could hold more soldiers in your hand than Stalin could possibly command and you don't have to feed them clothes them or supply them with munitions. On the other hand, the threat of war...does wonders... for the economy." (108)

Is Mueller credible? In my opinion he is. Gregory Douglas apparently is a pseudonym for his nephew with whom he left his papers. Normally a hoax would not run to thousands of pages. The Interrogation is 800 pages. The Memoirs are 250 pages. The Microfilmed Archive apparently covers 850,000 pages. Finally, the material I have read is incredibly well informed, authoritative and consistent."

umslopogaas:
Food for thought there, thanks
Further to the preparedness issue: my wife works for Campbell Health sytem (VIHA HA they call themselves) so she has an essential role in the Emergency Preparedness Plan here: She's supposed to make her way to the Hospital Morgue and tag toes. She has her own car, luckily 'cause I ain't gonna drive her to work. She might even do it (and I might drive her there) if the breakout or breakdown is not judged by us to be something so bad that you do not want to get anywhere near it and all our "best Beloved"s are in no present danger.
I think this points out a serious problem with any "Plan": Real emergencies create conditions in a random fashion. Any planning has to use a number of assumptions such as: the hospital is functioning and the roads are passable. Minimum communications such as land line telephone tend to be overwhelmed and cellular sytems are unreliable on a clear day in my neighbourhood.
I do not expect very much from "Planning" as such though individual preparations seem sensible. As pointed out above the well stocked fallout shelter can not be defended - in fact the defence itself would likely be targetted just for the weapons let alone the stores.

Establishing oneself in a neighbourhood might be the only hope but that has to have been done over many years prior to such events - pretty difficult to instantly win the trust of either a well supplied stranger or a lightly armed robber

This article is a pile of, uh..ahem..hype, of course.

Firstly, there's no proof that any virus has ever mutated progressively.

In fact, 'mutation' is probably the most valuable word in all of Pharmacorpia--or maybe the second most valuable, after 'vaccination.'

Secondly, the claims of the lethality of H5N1 by WHO must be taken lightly because there is absolutely no way to judge the lethality of a virus unless it is known how many people were infected by the virus and never showed ANY SYMPTOMS OR ILLNESS. It is, in fact, more likely that the Asian community has achieved an analogue of vaccine-type 'herd' immunity for a virus that only kills people whose immune systems are already compromised due to age or other illness, or chronic respiratory conditions. (Medical background profiles of those who died please, WHO)

Therefore, it is possible that H5N1 is no more lethal in humans than the strains of flu virus that routinely kill the immunologically compromised in Canada.

It is theroretically possible that a huge preponderance of the people who come into close daily contact with birds are silently infected, but show no symptoms, and are, in fact, immune.

I believe that this is the case, but of course I have no evidence to support this claim.

Viruses, like people, have genes.

Mutations are SEQUENCING ERRORS in amino acid-nucleotide synthesis. They tend to be degenerative, and, just as they result in birth defects and illnesses in humans, they render viruses LESS able to infiltrate the genetic material within the nuclei of their hosts after a mutation THAN THEY WERE BEFORE THE MUTATION.

Simply stated, mutations make viruses dumber, not smarter.

So, not to worry, people. We'll be having no pandemic from H5N1. The fact that the numbers of people who have succumbed to it remains very small, likely proves that it is statistically benign in healthy human beings and will remain so.

So WHO's claims of lethality for H5N1 are basically premature.

Not to worry, people.

Truman: You might be correct regarding H5N1

But I can not accept your last line

Buddy of mine went tandem hang gliding up in the Shuswap and described the training:
The pilot strapped him in to the wing and they stood well back from the precipice while he went through this introduction:
"When I say "Run" you run, OK?"
Nods OK
"RUN!"

So when WHO says:
"WORRY"
What are you going to do?

doggone, I know this is blasphemy, but I'm not overly impressed by WHO's objectivity or arm's lengthiness on these matters.

Incidentally, 'mutations' are said to be responsible for the failure of vaccination developement for another famous virus--hiv, after many billions spent on research and developement.

Go here for an interesting report by Calgary writer, Bryn Evans.

http://ffwdweekly.com/Issues/2006/1214/cover.htm

Truman, hello, happy holidays. You're right about the generally degenerative nature of mutation as a class of phenomena.

However...

Mutations as specific events are random. So, while out of a hundred or a thousand mutations, the great majority will not be viable or at least not for long, the odd one will, just by chance alone be perfectly viable. Just for argument, say half a percent. One in two hundred. I don't know what the real rate would be, I doubt anybody does, authoritatively. But just say I'm within an order of magnitude.

Then, of those that are viable, most will be benign, nicer than their progenitors. But not all. Some small percentage will me malignant, from our point of view. Nastier. Say a percent of viable mutations will be nastier.

Then, of the ones that are both viable and nastier, only some will be virulent. Easily transmittable and fatal to hosts.

So, a small percentage of a small percentage of a small percentage adds up to not zero.

A rare event, depending on the rate of mutations overall, but one that will occasionally happen.

H5n1 blog:
Good tool for now.
I'm wondering how far into a crisis, such as the Avian Flue Pandemic, internet access would be available.

Radio with battery power should continue to work but it only works one way.

Two way radios are available but hardly commonplace.

Hand held VHF radios with text capability should be buildable.

I have seen the radio combined with a GPS but why not combine it with a blackberry style computer and produce a "portable" internet station?

I don't think we will be worried about the internet when nature decides to adjust the human population of the planet.

I think that the prevaling currency will be ammunition.

umslopogaas
Where did you get that handle?

The one time (after I grew up) that it made sense to me to carry hardware occured in RSA while they were adjusting to the "Rainbow" nation and I was "Inserted" as a VSO voluteer. Things got a bit ugly with my wife and I being members of the tiny white community (the rest of the "whites" were Cuban) and My best friend: Thabete was "packin'" so I did ok wandering about the area at any hour sometimes without Thabete. I was damn lucky.
At some point the real whiteys show up from the capital: Bloemfontein. They are all revved up on the "Calgary" model: Gonna fix all the "fiscal imperfections" they had been watching for a few years. They pump the whole hospital up and assure us they are "right behind us". I am still the only visible representative of this new policy and the whiteys bugger off back to the capital.
Soma the people who were having a good time making money in the old situation (and not being able to figure out what this canadian ******* - me- was doing there anyway) began to sorta puff themselves up like a threatening animal would do.
Scared the shit out of me so I thought maybe I should get a weapon (very available there at the time) but I did go on thinking about the situation:
Do I want to shoot anybody?
NO!
How is carrying going to make me or my loved ones safer if I'm not prepared to fire on any provocation?
The unknown I would be facing is presumably armed and ready to fire.

I am not yet ready to kill so I have no fire arms

No, there is no proof that H5N1 will be the next pandemic virus. However epidemiologigal analysis suggests that H5N1 is getting better at infecting humans and other mammals. Consider this: In 1997 when it first broke out in hong kong, 18 people caught it, 5 died, and no contacts of the people who caught it developed symptoms or tested positive, and there were no family clusters of the disease. by 2003 at least 50% of those who caught the disease died, and most cases were family clusters with a delay in onset between the first person in the family to catch it and the rest of the family members. However the WHO has been very conservative in its analysis and only ruled cases as human to human spread if bird to human spread can be disproven. Regardless of the analysis, until this year H5N1 has never been shown to spread human to human more than once. This year, 2 large clusters of cases have occurred which suggest extended chains of transmission. One began in late December 2005 and continued into January, more disturbing it included 2 related families that had only shared Christmas dinner. Because both families raised chickens bird to human spread cannot be ruled out in this case. However the timing of the dates the family members fell ill suggests that their illness began with a single boy and that other members of both families caught it from him. Then, for the first time, other members of the second family appered to catch the disease from the family members that were already sick. In another case last summer, human to human spread was proven by a minor mutation that appeared in one of the victims and then spread to another family member, but analysis of the dates the family members got ill suggests that at least 3 and possibly 4 generations of human to human spread occurred that cannot be proven. Another incident occurred during the summer of 2006 where several faimily clusters began to break out in and around the family of Cikelet in Indonesia. The outbreaks only stopped when preventive doses of Tamiflu were given to the entire population of the region. Furthermore, a disturbing pattern has appeared in Indonesia this year. In most cases after an outbreak, genetic analysis of the virus that infects the people involved and that in the nearby poultry show the same virus in both. However in most human H5N1 cases in Indonesia this year, the virus cannot be matched to any bird virus. The WHO has downplayed the situation publicly, reporting that dying birds were found in the area to suggest the spread is bird to human. However, no one now knows where the disease is comming from in these cases. Since H5N1 infects not only humans but pigs, cats, dogs, and likely other mammals there is concern that a new mammilian reservoir may have developed moving the disease that much closer to a sustained presence in our population. As to suggestsions that huge numbers of people might have caught the disease but remained asymptomatic or have developed only mild symptoms, surveys have been conducted looking for antibodies to H5N1 and this does not be the case. For more information on the disease see the following blogs http://www.recombinomics.com/whats_new.html and http://declanbutler.info/blog/

So it kills two or three percent, or ten percent, of the infected population. The planet could use a little culling. Of course I don't want myself, my family or friends included in that deadly percentage, but que sera sera, if it comes, it will kill, and we are strangling the planet with overpopulation. If not H5N1 then it will be something else: Gaia will react, as all ecosystems eventually react, to overcrowding.

There can be no virus replication when there is adequate Vitamin C. IV Vit C was used by Fred Klenner to pull patients out of polio, scarlet fever et al.

In the article below, Klenner says that the herb boneset was used sucessfuly to avert flu by his family in the 1918 epidemic. He the goes on to discuss his use of IV sodium ascorbate.
http://www.orthomed.com/klenner.htm

Robert Cathcart is the present day expert.
http://www.vitamincfoundation.org/vitcrda.htm

Frankly, I think we are being terrorized so we will accept useless vacccinations.

Bacteria are the real problem as more and more they become immune to antibiotics. For some reason Big Pharma isn't interested in looking for new ones and instead puts out dangerous anti-virals.

mopled wrote: "Frankly, I think we are being terrorized so we will accept useless vaccinations."

Yes!

And the vaccinators don't even have to produce vaccinations that work, only reap huge grants from governments for research and profits from stockpiling. President Bush allowed nearly 8 billion dollars for upgrading of vaccination programs; all for the pharmceuticals, of course--and even initiated more legislation by which they will not be held accountable if people are injured by the vaccines.

Tamiflu, for instance, which governments are massively stockpiling, is not a vaccine, but rather an antiviral and there is not even a claim that it will work on recombined viruses, (the only real danger of avian flu is that it might combine with seasonal viruses; mutations are massively improbable) but merely shorten the period of symptomology of seasonal flu viruses.

The hype is all part of the marketing.

Notice most of Crawford's story is scary fiction.

I meant to include the numbers who die from seasonal viruses. (The real possible danger) but I haven't got them in front of me, so I'll get back.

So yes, blogs like Killian's H5N1 do a service all right. The question is: for whom?

Okay, so here's the stats on seasonal flu deaths and avian flu deaths.

World Seasonal flu deaths each year--250,000 to 500,000

US seasonal flu deaths: 36,000

US avian flu deaths: none.

World Avian flu deaths 2006: 29 (twenty-nine)

Crawford forgot to mention the avian flu (H5N1) deaths, unless I missed it.

and 10 in egypt in the last couple of days

Rumsfeld stands to make a fortune on royalties as a panicked world population scrambles to buy a drug worthless in curing effects of alleged Avian Flu. The model suggests the parallel to the brazen corruption of Halliburton Corporation whose former CEO is Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney’s company has so far gotten billions worth of US construction contracts in Iraq and elsewhere. Coincidence that Cheney’s closest political friend is Defense Secretary and Avian Flu beneficiary Don Rumsfeld? It is another example of what someone has called the principle of modern US corrupt special interest politics: ‘Concentrate the benefits; diffuse the costs’ President Bush has ordered the US Government to buy $2 billion worth of Gilead Science’s Tamilflu.

GMO Chickens come home to roost

But Tamiflu conflicts are perhaps just the tip of the iceberg of the Avian Flu story. There is high-level biological research underway in Britain and presumably also the United States to develop a genetic engineering method to make chickens and other birds ‘resistant’ to Avian Flu viruses.

British scientists are reportedly genetically engineering chickens to produce birds resistant to the lethal strains of the H5N1 virus devastating poultry in the Far East. Laurence Tiley, Professor of Microular Virology at Cambridge University and Helen Sang of the Roslin Institute in Scotland are involved in developing ‘transgenic chickens’ which would have small pieces of genetic material inserted into chicken eggs to allegedly make the chickens H5N1 resistant.

Tiley told the Times of London on October 29, ‘Once we have regulatory approval, we believe it will only take between four and five years to breed enough chickens to replace the entire world (chicken) population.’ The real question in this dubious undertaking is which GMO giants are underwriting the research and development of GMO chickens and who will control their products. It is increasingly clear that the entire saga of Avian Flu is one whose dimensions are only slowly coming to light. What we can see so far is not at all pretty.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20EN20051030&articleId=1169

Get the picture?

Mopled:
It's a lot worse than I thought. The only question in my mind is:
Which is worse
1) Devastating Pandemic
or
2) Continued "success" of the current incarnation of "ingenuity"?

This might go a ways towards answering your question about 'ingenuity,' doggone.

Do an internet search for 'Deadly Immunity' by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in Rolling Stone magazine or Salon.com.

Kennedy writes about the alleged link between childhood autism and the use of thimerosal in vaccines. Thimerosal is a kind of antiseptic containing mercury. Mercury is claimed by some researchers to be a well-known neurotoxin. It is used to prevent or reduce fungal and bacterial grown in vaccines.

"...fungal and bacterial growth," that is.. talk about entropy increasing, or what, eh.

I know three locals who've gone for the flu vaccine over the past two years. Interestingly, all three claimed they had previously come down with flu approx once a year for a period of less than three days, so I wondered why they bothered in the first place. Also interesting, none of them knew the specific name of the vaccine (so much for DIY research!) And since being vaccinated, all three have had flu at least three times a year for at least a week and up to three weeks. Alternately, if the vaccine actually works to prevent flu, what happens to our immune systems? We need to be exposed to viruses occasionally to build up antibodies and immune system health. According to studies, most of us already have antibodies to many seemingly scary viruses like Epstein-barr (mono, it’s in 90% of us), cytomegalovirus and varicella-zoster (chicken pox), all of them members of the herpes “family.”

Since the flu vaccine is pitched to prevent flu, why would healthy individuals accept the various vaccine risks, including death?

By calling all of these emerging “viruses” dangerous, deadly and in need of combatant drugs and vaccines, science turns its back on the effects of environmental poisoning, industrial toxins, genetically modified foods and pharmadrugs.

Crawford, where did you find proof that avian flu is a virus?

Doggone, you're buying into a psyop calledthe coming pandemic flu which exterminates me and my loved ones.

I'm so glad the topic of mercury and autism came up. How can one fill an infant with 125X more mercury in one shot than the daily safe level and not expect neurological damage.
Just look at this:
http://www.909shot.com/Issues/HgCalculator.htm

[U]

http://www.advancedhealthplan.com/flushots.html

The article confirms Danielle's suspicion that the shots actually damage the immune system.

I looked, but couldn not find the reference. A survey was done in the last two years, I think in Beijing, which found that over 60% of the test population had been exposed to H5N1 at some time in their lives.

There are two factors which I think might have a bearing on whether one gets sick enough to die. What is the level of air pollution the person is exposed to normally and what drugs are used in treatment. All the antivirals seem to be really problematic.

I'd sure like to see that 60% survey, Mopled. Large imlications. Several sites claim that surveys have been done, but not published.

Yes, Danielle E. These common infections are widespread in the community. They are detected by the presence of antibodies.

Of course, only with Aids diagnosis is the presence of antibodies an indicator of impending doom. (The dreaded Aids test, which is, in fact a test for the presence of antibodies to hiv)

With all other viral diseases, the presence of antibodies in the absence of symptoms means that the immune system has been made aware of the presence of disease antigen, but has successsfully produced antibodies. In other words: not to worry.

However, if you have antibodies to hiv you're going to be recommended for antiretrovirals, which often cause the exact symptoms required for an Aids diagnosis.

The tests are not specific and a positive outcome will occur with some 70 odd conditions, including malaria, TB and just being pregnant.

The figures for HIV positivity are extrapolated to the general population from the only routine tests given...at prenatal clinics.

I'll keep looking for the Chinese data on H5N1.

Whoops, I left out the important part...that's tests given in Africa.

Well. it looks like our concern about H5N1 will soon be very much secondary to our concern about MRSA. The last place you want to go is an Hospital (since that's where the little buggers are holed up) so what to do?

Best advice I've heard (and I had a smattering) is:

Keep the affected area clean - soap and water

Repeat if nessessary

Good one, doggone--about methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus.

Here's the yearly American deaths from MRSA: 13,000. Kinda puts the avian flu American deaths (0) into perspective--and maybe handwashing, too. Remember bacteria need water too, eh, so keeping your hands dry is probably as important as washing them--especially in public facilities, which are bacteria edens.

Excellent article on this subject:

http://www.slate.com/id/2152118/