Imagine the COVID pandemic all over again. Hospitals full of dying people. Their overworked staff burnt out to the point of exhaustion. The masked survivors walking though haunted empry streets. The economies of the world in freefall. Only try to imagine that the pathogen is ten times more lethal than the COVID-19 virus. And you begin to get some idea of what the H5N1 virus will do.
So far the virus has been confined to birds Large scale factory farming of poultry is a sur- fire incubator of pandemic organisms. But, if you think you and your family are safe, read this from Nature Briefings Teenage Bird Flu rings alarm Bells
| A teenager in Canada is in critical condition after being infected with a version of the H5N1 avian influenza virus that has researchers on high alert. Viral genome sequences suggest that this is a mutated form of H5N1 — which is related to the one infecting US dairy cattle but might be better at infecting the human airway. If true, it could mean that the virus can rapidly evolve to make the jump from birds to humans. “There is reason to be concerned,” says immunologist Scott Hensley. “But not reason to totally freak out.”Nature | 6 min read [1] |
Obviously scientists and doctors will try to calm us down, it’s part of their job. But one chilling, ineluctable fact screams out from between the lines of these reports. The virus has jumped the barrier between species, Now only one last stage remains: to find a way to perfect human to human transmission. Every disease-ebola fever, smallpox, Bubonic plague, whatever- must pass these two tests. If it does so, it can kill at leisure-in enormous numbers. Remember the Spanish influenza panic of 1918? That was a similar virus(H1N1) and it carried off at least 50 million people from a world population of 1.8 billion. If we scale up to today’s population, the deaths will easily top 227 million. And that’s before we take into account the much faster communication and transport systems we now have, which will spread the virus so much more quickly.
So, while you are busy wondering the on line shopping malls, wondering whether Blagdon United will beat Nowhere City or trying to find a group of different people to hate, your nemesis may already be waiting in the wings. Question: does it serve you right?
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
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