- Hello Jeff - Martial law if it gets worse and the WHO
could, very well, be in charge.
-
- Note the quote - "potentially prompting travel restrictions,"
-
- "POTENTIALLY prompting travel restrictions"
?? The travel restrictions should be in place and should have been in place
Wednesday.
-
- It is probably way too late to stop the virus from entering
and spreading...it's here. It is also ALL OVER THE US being spread through
the illegal alien 'community'. We need to stop an influx of illegals to
prevent sick ones from flooding our health care system and crushing our
health care infrastructure before American citizens even have a chance
to use it. They will also put our health care professionals and first responders
at grave risk...or even wipe most of it out.
-
-
- I am pretty darn sure this virus is likely already in
Chicago, DC, NY State, Florida and in much of the suburbs, cities and rural
areas which house illegals. We cannot afford to care for a mass of people
from Mexico. I have NO DOUBT that if the US had been hit first, Mexico
would have set up powerful military border patrols to stop US citizens
from crossing into Mexico. Travel restrictions would have been slammed
intoi place in a flash and Americans might even be shot on sight should
they try to enter Mexico.
-
- IF this virus doesn't fizzle out, we could be faced with
no supplies, no food, no health care workers, police and fire, etc in a
very short period of time. When you reach for protective masks and gloves,
or gowns, they won't be there...no supplies.
-
- Time to close the flood gates NOW. There won't be enough
resources for Americans and we cannot stretch what we don't have.
-
- Patty
-
-
- Swine Flu May Be Named Event of 'International Concern'
By WHO
- By Jason Gale
- 4-25-9
-
-
- (Bloomberg) -- The World Health Organization is set to
declare the deadly swine flu virus outbreak in Mexico and the U.S. a global
concern, potentially prompting travel restrictions, said a person familiar
with the matter.
-
-
- An emergency committee of the WHO in Geneva will declare
the outbreak "a public health event of international concern"
in a 4 p.m. teleconference today, said the person, who spoke on condition
of anonymity because the meeting is confidential. In response, WHO Director-General
Margaret Chan may raise the level of pandemic alert, which could lead to
travel restrictions aimed at curbing the disease's spread.
-
-
- "These levels of pandemic alert are all signals
for action," said Malik Peiris, a professor of microbiology at the
University of Hong Kong, who has studied influenza viruses for more than
a decade. "Raising the level of alertness to influenza, especially
in returning travelers, would be a relevant thing to do."
-
-
- Human-to-human spread of the previously unseen H1N1 swine
influenza in Mexico and the U.S. is heightening concern that the virus
may spark a pandemic. At least 68 people have died and more than 1,000
have fallen ill with flu-like symptoms in the Mexico City region in the
past month, Jose Cordova, Mexico's Health Minister, told reporters yesterday.
The government has shut schools and distributed face masks.
-
-
- Sari Setiogi, a WHO spokeswoman in Geneva, declined to
comment on the agency's response, saying it will depend on the outcome
of today's meeting.
-
-
- Closing Theaters Mexico's Social Security Institute shut
all of the theaters and cultural centers it operates nationwide to avoid
spreading the flu strain -- reminiscent of actions implemented during the
2003 SARS outbreak in Asia. Travel curbs imposed there damaged economies
throughout the region, where that virus circulated most widely.
- In Singapore, where 33 infected people died, gross domestic
product shrank 11.4 percent in the second quarter of 2003 because of the
severe acute respiratory syndrome.
- Swine flu was confirmed in 20 of the deaths so far in
Mexico. Of 14 tissue samples tested from Mexico, half were a genetic match
with the swine flu reported in eight people in California and Texas, the
Atlanta-based <http://www.cdc.gov/flu/swine/>Centers of Disease Control
and Prevention said.
-
-
- "We do not know whether this swine flu virus or
some other influenza virus will lead to the next pandemic," Richard
Besser, the CDC's acting director, told reporters yesterday on a teleconference.
"Scientists around the world continue to monitor the virus and take
its threat seriously."
-
-
- Pandemic Threat
-
-
- The new influenza strain, a conglomeration of genes from
swine, bird and human viruses, poses the biggest threat of a large-scale
flu pandemic since the emergence of the H5N1 strain that has killed millions
of birds and hundreds of people, said William Schaffner, an influenza expert
at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.
- "It re-combined to create something totally new,"
David Butler-Jones, Canada's chief public health minister, told reporters
yesterday. "How, when, or where it did that I don't think we know.
What it will lead to is impossible to predict."
-
-
- WHO's alert level is at level 3, meaning there is no,
or very limited, human-to-human transmission of a potential pandemic virus.
Officials at the agency have said the global spread of the H5N1 bird flu
virus since 2003 has put the world closer to another influenza pandemic
than at any time since 1968, when the last of the previous century's three
pandemics occurred.
-
-
- Alert System
-
-
- WHO uses a six-step alert system to tell the world what
preparations to take in response to a pandemic. Flu can spread quickly
when a new strain emerges because no one has natural immunity and a vaccine
takes months to develop. The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed as
many as 50 million people, began when an avian flu virus jumped to people,
doctors said.
-
- (JEFF, THE SPANISH FLU VIRUS JUMPED FROM AVIAN TO PIGS
AND THEN TO PEOPLE. IT DID NOT SIMPLY JUMP FROM BIRDS TO HUMANS -- PIGS
WERE A MOST IMPORTANT PART. Patty)
-
-
- Teams of disease investigators have been sent to California
and Texas to trace how the malady has spread, and the U.S. offered to send
scientists to Mexico, said the CDC's Besser. U.S. hospitals are being asked
to collect samples from patients with flu-like symptoms, said Schaffner,
chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt, in a telephone interview yesterday.
-
-
- 'Sense of Urgency'
-
-
- "They are asking us who work in hospitals to go
to our emergency rooms and our pediatric wards to gather specimens and
start testing them," Schaffner said. "This has a sense of urgency
about it."
-
-
- Mexico's government has closed schools, museums, movie
theaters and libraries in Mexico City and surrounding areas until further
notice, according to an e-mail from the National Arts and Culture Council.
It's also handing out free facemasks and extending the deadline for filing
taxes until May 31, Cordova said. A million doses of antiviral medicine
are available for distribution, he said.
-
-
- Twenty-four cases, including three deaths, have been
reported in San Luis Potosi, in central Mexico, and four cases have been
found in Mexicali near the border with the U.S., according to the WHO.
-
-
- Three main human flu strains -- H3N2, H1N1 and type-B
-- circulate and cause 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year in seasonal epidemics,
according to the World Health Organization. Pandemics occur when a novel
influenza A-type virus, to which almost no one has natural immunity, emerges
and begins spreading.
-
-
- To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Gale in
Singapore at j.gale@bloomberg.net
- Last Updated: April 25, 2009 08:06 EDT
-
- Patricia A. Doyle DVM, PhD Bus Admin, Tropical Agricultural
Economics Univ of West Indies Please visit my "Emerging Diseases"
message board at: http://www.emergingdisease.org/phpbb/index.php Also my
new website: http://drpdoyle.tripod.com/ Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa
Go with God and in Good Health
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