NEWS: Watch Your Step! Attack of Frozen Poo!

Oh noes, it's killed 154 people out of 7 fucking billion, let's all crawl into bunkers and shit ourselves.

Source

That's a 60% mortality rate. If you're not scared, you should be.



1) The article does not state the date from which the count started. Just when it ended. If it's counting from the first recorded illness (1997) that's only 154 deaths in 9 years. NOT scary.
2) The article also does not state the location of the any of the deaths, the conditions in which the illness took place and who the sick people were. The people most likely to be affected by serious flu-type viruses are the elderly, the very young, those with previously compromised immune systems and those with little or no access to decent medical care.

You'll have to excuse me if I'm still not quaking and praying for mercy.

I'm sure you're not. And I do sincerely hope you're right.

Most of the dead are Vietnamese and Chinese, IIRC. I am sure that's reassuring to a lot of people. Likewise your comment about the people who tend to be affected by flu-type viruses. However, in this case, it's not quite so simple, because the people who tend to be affected by bird flu are those who are in close contact with birds. So the population which produces these casualties is rather less vulnerable than it might first seem.

The other difficulty is that it is not - and has never been - the existing H5N1 that's the problem. What we've got here is a very dangerous virus which isn't easily (or perhaps at all) transmissible from human to human - which is why the people who tend to get it are chicken-farmers.

But the flu viruses are notoriously mutable. One of the major concerns among the professionals is what will happen when the H5N1 strains get into the African population (both birds and humans), because there the H5N1 will have the opportunity to co-opt genes from a much wider set of other organisms.

So what we have is a highly lethal flu virus which is not yet transmissible between humans. It may never be transmissible between humans. I hope it never is.

But you should take it seriously. The last time we had an outbreak of one of those, it killed upwards of 50 million people in a year. That epidemic didn't kill just the old and infirm, either. And its mortality rate was no more than 20%.

I'm not saying that a pandemic is impossible and I'm going to go bathing in chicken shit with impunity. However, there is currently no reason to believe that this is going to be a huge deal. Health organizations are already aware of the potential threat and are no doubt working on plans to combat a pandemic should it ever occur. If people suddenly start dying left and right I'll freak out a bit. But I'm not going to stop eating chicken just because a few farmers in Asia got sick.