This takes me back to the pig flu and the real deal that was the 2003 SARS epidemic.

Amazing how much turmoil these nanoscopic lifeforms can do.

In China, and otehr East Asian countries, large populations of humans, birds, and pigs live in close contact with each other. This facilitates both the transfer of bird viruses to people, but the mixing of bird and human strains in pigs, which can result in a mutant hybrid combining the high lethality of an avian flu with the high transmissibility of human flu.

The same happened in Europe 300/400 years ago and there was no flu... we had plague(s), but no flu.

In any case, these cases are still far from being the next Spanish flu, otherwise we would be already ill and maybe death. Worringly enough, the Spanish flu (also from the H1N1 variant) may also started with birds and pigs, and in China...

There was plenty of flu in Europe back then. The plague spread for the same reason; close contact allowing an animal disease to jump to people.

It's hard to judge against the Spanish Flu in terms of mortality because we don't have a good idea of its mortality yet; it seems very high but that might be because the mild cases are going unreported. The Spanish Flu had a 10-20% kill rate. (And is credited with wiping out 3-6% of the human population) What we can say is that H7N9 has so far not shown the ability to spread between people easily like the Spanish Flu could. (Though it's already better at infecting people than other bird flus)

Is 11 deaths and 43 infections really a case to start throwing out "pandemic" alerts? Seriously? In a country as populated as China and they only have that many cases so far? The regular seasonal flu probably kills thousands more than that each year in China alone...

I think our society/media/government use these things as scare tactics. Bird Flu, Swine Flu, all those major "pandemic" flus in the last 10 years have had no major outbreak or affect like our governments/media tried to make it out to be.

There's no pandemic alert, just a warning that this bears keeping a close eye on. The number of deaths and infections isn't the problem, the problem is that the mortality rate seems very high, the virus is better suited to infecting people than other avian flus, and birds can carry it without appearing ill. It may very well never become a pandemic, but it's better to err on the side of caution with so much at stake.

What's the alternative, that we aren't informed of possible threats?

Enough of this alarmist nonsense already.

Ebola virus, SARS virus, swine flu and now a duck flu (again).

You can only cry wolf so many times.

sethnintendo said: Wright said: pezus said: Holy shit. The "epidemiologist" here (or whatever it's called) just mentioned this to me 2 days ago, ahead of this report, when I had to visit him for a list of HIV infected individuals in Iceland. Guess he wasn't lying What were you doing looking for a list of HIV infected individuals in Iceland? He has to make sure he didn't man whore it out to one of these individuals. Actually, I heard they were making a sequel to the movie Kids in Iceland.

I know your joking, but you don't understand how interesting that would be. I spent my middle school years there. Cold climate long days and a bunch a kids with nothing to do. Interesting things do happen.

You never know when its doing to be the real thing though. Better to be told when there's a possibility than to find out once a pandemic has begun that, "oh, hey guys, there's a pandemic already on the go. We could have maybe prevented it by warning people to stay away from country x when we first found out about it, but we didn't want to alarm you." Covering up an outbreak is never a good idea.

Did you already forget the swine flu mass hysteria?

Did you not notice the hyperbole in the article you quote?

"even more deadly", "Why experts are so worried", "it gets really worrisome", "more and more dangerous", "global concern", "particulary worrying", "severity and speed" "extremely resistant", "no vaccine".

That is mental rape. I want to vomit.

There's absolutely no proportions whatsoever in that article.