It seems that the H5N1 Bird flu has dropped off the media radar. But that does not mean it has suddenly gone away, it just means it was upstaged by other things.
There have been oil spills, floods, landslides, typhoons, Swine flu, nuclear threats, and even the winter Olympic games that have happened in the past 15 months. All of them changed the headlines and pushed some important news stories to the back pages. But just because they get pushed to the back, does not mean they go away. You almost have to look at H5N1 as a bill that still must be paid.
Connecting the Dots keeps track of several things that we feel are important to talk about from time to time. The H5N1 Bird flu is just one such topic. Nearly everyday we get some news article sent to us on the H5N1 virus and what is going on. In fact only about 1% to 2% of the time we do not hear about the H5N1 virus.
So to bring everyone back up to speed, yes it is still deadly, yes people are still dying, and yes birds are still being culled wholesale. For a while there was some news about a magic bullet cure that dealt with the H5N1, but frankly with all the bad news and deliberate distortions going about lately on just about everything, we simply do not believe it and see it as some sort of propaganda to keep people from panicking.
The fact we base that on is until we know what it will be, we can not defend against it. The H1N1 Swine flu simply reinforced that. It was 6 months before there was some sort of vaccine, and the time was simply because the vaccine has to be incubated, and you can’t rush nature.
So with the rapid global spread of the H1N1 virus, we can expect the same with the H5N1 virus. The one difference is opposite numbers. Where 90% of the people survive the H1N1, 80% to 90% will not survive the H5N1 virus. So keeping the H5N1 off the front page is all about crowd control at this point.
As far as we can see, a fundamental change in vaccine technology has not happened. The few news articles that said things had changed were not wide spread, and that is the signature of leaked false information. Certainly something that significant would be on the evening news between cures for cancer, and the news on the ongoing war. But very simply it was not.
From the reads, not much has changed other than identifying that the virus is spread in droppings and some of the droppings get into the feathers. When the bird rests and preens the dropping falls to the ground or is ingested. If it is ingested the bird dies and the entire bunch gets culled.
Connecting the Dots is not looking to cause panic, in fact we would be happy to report that a cure has been found if we felt that was the case. But our gut feeling says this is just another case of hide the truth to stop panic.
