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BREAKING NEWS –
WHO chief to raise pandemic alert level to 5
See my other diaries here, here and over @ET here.
My recent comment: Tall Tales Across the Rio Grande. IMO Mexico thinks it can get away with no testing near “point zero” at La Gloria near the Springfield pig farms.
The WHO and western nations will have a chance to develop a vaccin the coming months before a new wave of cases will develop this fall. Fall and winter is the season of colds and influenze, spreading the virus within communities. Unfortunately, Australia and New Zealand (Southern Hemisphere) could see the virus spread in their upcoming winter season.
(Scoop.nz) – Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with anti-viral drugs and (if available) a vaccine.
An army of skeptics has rightly contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in the case of avian flu) faster than the WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often nonexistent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases.
But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the U.S. and Britain, which prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot Lines, rather than dramatically increase aid to epidemic frontlines overseas–as well as to Big Pharma, which has battled Third World demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche’s Tamiflu.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
