Here it comes

KILLAFORNIA said:
They already have found a vaccine for it, what are you all worried about, this is old news....
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This is news. What is your source? How many doses are on hand? How quick will they be producing doses?
 
I guess the news comes faster, here in california.....j/k....i saw it on t.v.,i forget specifics but i think the vaccine was made in england or switzerland, i haven't looked it up, but no doubt would find it by a little search on the web.........
 
Temper said:
Bring it on, I for one can't wait for a little 'thinning' out :thumbup:
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When was the last time you caught a Cold??
Tamiflu, not enough to go around .The "Flu" as all other Virus's comes in wave's each time you'll need medication.
 
ranger88 said:
I could be Alex Jones. You never know. LOL
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alex jones would recognize the pic i have on my profile and would run screaming like a lil girl.... me and alex didnt see eye to eye when i lived in austin.....
 
Last I heard about Tamiflu was that importation was being slowed/halted because people were getting prescriptions for Tamiflu and hoarding quantities of it, for their personal or family use:

Evidence of hoarding in New York City
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today that sales of flu antivirals soared in New York City in the last week of October 2005, 7 weeks before any flu cases were confirmed in the area. The agency said the spike in sales probably signaled personal stockpiling by people worried about a flu pandemic.

The sales data came from New York state Medicaid records and from a retail pharmacy chain that reports certain prescription drug sales to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, according to an article in the Mar 17 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. About 34% of New York City residents receive Medicaid benefits, the article says.

The sales data show a major spike in the week of Oct 23 through 29. The pharmacy chain sold almost 1,000 prescriptions of the four available flu antivirals—oseltamivir, zanamivir, amantadine, and rimantadine. The Medicaid records showed close to 400 prescriptions for oseltamivir, zanamivir, and rimantadine. (Medicaid excluded amantadine from the flu category because it is also prescribed for Parkinson's disease.)

In previous years, strong sales of flu antivirals coincided with peaks in confirmed cases of flu, the CDC reports. But the October sales boom came 7 weeks before the first lab-confirmed flu cases in the New York area were reported in mid-December, the agency says.

The sales boom came amid heavy publicity about both avian and pandemic influenza. Romania, Russia, and China were reporting outbreaks in birds at the time, and the federal government was about to release its pandemic preparedness plan.

"Increased media attention to avian influenza in Asia and the resulting public concern might have produced the unprecedented demand for antiviral influenza medications in NYC before the start of the influenza season," the article says.

"These findings suggest that persons requested and/or their health-care providers prescribed antiviral influenza medications to create personal stockpiles for use in the event of an outbreak of avian influenza or an influenza pandemic."

The report notes that public health agencies and medical societies have discouraged healthcare providers from prescribing antiviral drugs for personal stockpiles, since global supplies are limited. But most of those recommendations were issued after the October sales spike, it says.
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Tamiflu is supposedly the only medication, currently available, that is thought to have the ability to fight the Avian Flu. If you already have the flu, you need to take two Tamiflu each day, for five days, to fight the infection, starting the medication within 48-hours after the first appearance of symptoms.

There is a lot more Tamiflu information at the top link.

This pandemic might turn out to be a dud, or it may rival the 1918-1919 "Spanish Flu." Now is the time to get food and water in preparation. Or, you can wait until the first human-to-human Avian Flu transmission occurs in Europe, or Russia...but, please don't wait until human-to-human spread of the Avian Flu has reached the East or West or North or South U.S. border(s)!

Talk about "shopping hell"...I wouldn't want to be near a grocery store, on that day! ;)

GeoThorn
 
geothorn said:
Now is the time to get food and water in preparation.
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If you live in earthquake country, as I do, you'd better already have food and water and all the other necessary supplies anyway.

Water for 14 days and food for 3 months seems to be about the limit for what people can store and be able to maintain it. If that doesn't sound like enough to you in the face of a pandemic, well, it probably isn't. But there's a limit to what anyone can prepare for in isolation from their communities.

Seriously, past that, there isn't an awful lot to be done to prepare for a pandemic. Either the government will be able to mobilize drugs to combat the problem or it won't. Since we can't possibly make drugs for a bug that doesn't currently exist, I'm not about to complain if a pandemic hits and the government doesn't have stockpiles of the right stuff.

In the end, it'll be the best immune systems that win.

There's so much to worry about in the world these days, why get worked up about a problem that might someday possibly happen in our lifetimes and that we can't hope to prepare for anyway?
 
Tamiflu has only shown promiss in "some" people with the original virus not all and it is unkown whether it will work on the mutated virus when and if it happens. There is not enough of it by a long shot anyway.

There is NO vacine as they dont know what the virus will mutate into yet. When they know it will take more than a year to make enough.

No matter how you cut it, when this thing mutates we are all in the s hit to one degree or another.

Stay tuned and get educated.

Skam
 
I recently read a book about the 1918 pandemic.

- First the virus has to mutate into an easily spreadable to humans AND remain highly lethal to humans, chances are mutations revert to the mean. However mutations can and have occured like this.

- A significant percentage of the 1918 pandemic died to to complications 1) secondary infections 2) edema, organ failure and other immune system over response. So the _total_ death rate from the secondary included causes where more like 20% - 30%

- Any vaccine available is a guess on what the flu will be in the future and may or may not be relevant to the actual flu going around.

- There will not be enough vaccine available soon enough to make much of a difference.

- expect that there would be quarantine.

- If a whole scale pandemic expect what happened in 1918, hospitals overflow, you couldn't bury the dead fast enough, martial law, economic crash, blah blah blah. Basically we're toast.
 
Weird. I came across this website, it has some info. I don't know what to think of it.

My advice? See an Md who specializes in this type of medicine.
 
Self-quarantine might be the only way to survive the Avian Flu pandemic, should it arrive. The best way to survive the Avian Flu is not to get it, and the only way that one might prevent catching the flu is by not being around those that have the Avian Flu, and are therefore "carriers."

Remember, the flu is contagious even without the one that has the flu showing any symptoms. In the 1918-1919 "Spanish Flu," meeting and gathering places were shut down in order to halt further spreading of the flu. Typically, churches were shut down, dance halls were shut down, and movie theaters were shut down. Why would grocery stores, department stores, workplaces, and restaurants not also shut down...?

The best way to beat the Avian Flu is not to catch it, and the only effective way to accomplish that is not to mingle with people, who may or may not be carrying the Avian Flu, despite not showing any symptoms.

An Avian Flu vaccine would supposedly take from nine months to a year to be produced, after human to human transmission of Avian Flu has begun. Why would it take so long? Because an Avian Flu vaccine would be for a form of flu different than the H5N1 variety, vaccine production would have to wait until human to human transmission occurs, so that antibodies to the human form can be produced, from which an Avian Flu vaccine would be created.

For now, staying away from crowded places is the best way to dodge the Avian Flu...if you can successfully dodge human to human transmission of the Avian Flu for nine-months or a year, you, too, could be alive and able to get the Avian Flu vaccine....

What would happen to America's economy if everyone was self-quarantined for nine-months or a year...? It wouldn't be pretty.

GeoThorn
 
Anybody truly interested in researching this topic should probably start with the flu wiki. It has a ton of resources on what could happen, what is happening, and what you can do to prepare for it.

For a truly scary read, check out the scenarios. These are fictional accounts of what a pandemic would look like. This one is written by a woman (a nurse, I think) in Canada who talks about what it's like to try and quarantine yourself for the duration of the event. It's very long, but then I expect a pandemic would take a very long time to play out. No doubt events wouldn't play out exactly like this. Still, this is enough for me to believe that self quarantine really isn't an option.
 
The Great Pandemic of 1918: State by State
Georgia State Summit: History Supplement

Opening Remarks Prepared for Delivery
By the Honorable Mike Leavitt
Secretary of Health and Human Services
January 13, 2006

The Great Pandemic also touched Georgia.

It probably arrived during the first week of October 1918, and then spread like a wildfire throughout the state. In just three weeks, from October 19th to November 9th, there were more than 20,000 cases and more than 500 deaths.

Towns and communities were terribly affected.

Augusta was the hardest-hit city in the state. Trained nurses were far too few for the many needs, and they too were struck down by the pandemic. As a consequence, nursing students were put in charge of shifts at a local hospital. Schoolteachers were enlisted to act as nurses, cooks and hospital clerks, at an emergency hospital constructed on a local fairground.

In Athens, the University of Georgia announced that it was indefinitely suspending classes.

In the town of Quitman, stringent rules were established to combat influenza, which touched almost facet of life:

Public gatherings, including indoor funerals, were prohibited
Public spitting was outlawed
The serving of any beverage was prohibited in public places, unless it was poured into sanitary cups or served in glasses that were thoroughly sterilized each time they were used
The accumulation of dust in places of business was prohibited. Merchants were ordered to keep their floors damp enough to keep the dust down
All cases of influenza were ordered quarantined. In places where the disease had struck, a placard stating "influenza" had to be displayed
A similar strategy was adopted here in Atlanta. The City Council declared a ban on public gatherings for two months. Schools, libraries, theaters and churches were all closed.

For better ventilation, streetcars were ordered to keep their windows open, except in the rain.

Yet despite all those desperate measures, the pandemic still extracted a terrible toll.

Final casualty figures in Georgia will never be known. After making their initial reports, state officials were simply too overwhelmed to tell the U.S. Public Health Service anything more.
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The link up above has twenty-two state by state reports of what occurred during the 1918-1919 "Spanish flu."

One thing that all of them have in-common is that the numbers of people killed by the 1918-1919 pandemic, state by state, went uncounted because of their numbers and the scale of the catastrophe....

There doesn't seem to be too many great survival options if we get a repeat of the 1918-1919 "Spanish flu" pandemic. So, my thought is to try preparing for the worst, and praying for the best, I guess.

GeoThorn
 
..outright survivalists (or closeted ones anyways.)And I guess as a subgroup of the population we might be the best prepared to "ride out the storm"food,shelter,weapons,and most importantly skills/mindset to adapt,overcome and survive will see us through.Aren't you guys glad you still have the Y2K stuff??:D
 
The New York Times has an article up about avian flu today. In it, they interview a doctor Jeremy Farrar who "has treated about two dozen people with avian influenza in the last three years."

There have been 186 cases of people infected with Avian flu since 2003. Not a lot in a world filled with 6.5 billion people.

From the article:

Still, Dr. Farrar is not sure that this intensity is entirely rational:

Having observed A(H5N1) for many years in Asia, he thinks it is unlikely that the virus is poised to jump species, becoming readily transmissible to humans or among them. Nor does he believe the mantra that a horrific influenza pandemic is inevitable or long overdue. He points out that the only prior pandemic with a devastating death toll was in 1918, and he says that may have been "a unique biological event."

"For years, they have been telling us it's going to happen — and it hasn't," said Dr. Farrar, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit at the hospital in Vietnam. "Billions of chickens in Asia have been infected and millions of people lived with them — we in Asia are intimate with our poultry — and less than 200 people have gotten infected.

"That tells you that the constraints on the virus are considerable," he continued. "It must be hard for this virus to jump."
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The article goes on to say that he fears the bird flu for the very nasty virus that it is. He also calls for the creation of better forms of influenza vaccines:

Flu vaccines are still manufactured by an "ancient strategy" that involves injecting eggs with virus, he complained, even as other vaccines rely on more sophisticated methods. As a result, flu vaccines — including experimental versions aimed at A(H5N1) — are cumbersome to produce, and target just one strain.

"What we need is a vaccine that is effective across strains because the virus can be different each year," he said. "My mom in the U.K. can get a shot every year, but that is not realistic in rural Asia."

More remarkable still, he said, Tamiflu is still the only drug useful against avian influenza, "and we all know that one drug is not adequate to treat any viral disease," he said, noting that multiple drugs are used in AIDS.
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My point in resurrecting this thread is to point out that if you really want to survive a future flu pandemic, you should prepare now by pressuring your elected officials to set policies that encourage the creation and stockpiling of effective influenza vaccines. Exactly what those policies should be is, of course, a whole other debate which is probably best left for the politics forum, yes?
 
bulgron said:
. . .
My point in resurrecting this thread is to point out that if you really want to survive a future flu pandemic, you should prepare now by pressuring your elected officials to set policies that encourage the creation and stockpiling of effective influenza vaccines. Exactly what those policies should be is, of course, a whole other debate which is probably best left for the politics forum, yes?
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Thank you for the link.

Because the virus in question, a "jump" from the current form, does not exist, no vaccine can be prepared. What could be done is to increase capacity to create vaccine if a form of "avian flu" readily transmittable to humans does appear -- after all these centuries.
 
Thomas Linton said:
Thank you for the link.

Because the virus in question, a "jump" from the current form, does not exist, no vaccine can be prepared.
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What a meant was this (from the article that I link to):

"What we need is a vaccine that is effective across strains because the virus can be different each year."

Right now, given the way we create flu vaccines, we cannot prepare drugs ahead of time because our current drugs are targeted to specific strains. But it is theoretically possible (judging by this statement from someone heavily involved in the problem) to create flu vaccines that cross strains. In fact, isn't that exactly what tamiflu is? More of this sort of drug what our drug companies should be working towards if we want to mitigate the damage that might arise due to any pandemic that might occur.
 
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