How afraid are you of the Avian/'bird flu'? The news stories are getting scarier by the minute. Media hype/or a valid concern?

not at all, actually i havent even heard of it... then again, i dont watch news. I was about to say, maybe it wasn't around my area, but then I see you live in the same city!

I'm mostly worried about dying of cancer then anything else.

you live in Halifax??? cool lovely day eh?

I'm concerned enough to keep tabs on it, but not worried enough to put on my Bio/Chemical warfare suit. As a prudent analyst, I'm watching it, and reading up on what the professionals (Beskeptical, the CDC, et al) are saying/doing about it.

When it comes to things like this, I look at it like the Y2k prep: I'm a Computer Engineer, and was in college in the run-up to Y2k. All sorts of people were worried and fear-mongering (including the Media and certain members of my extended family). I looked around my industry, and saw no real worry or concern. Yes, we expected some problems. No, it wasn't going to be the end of the world - not even close. It wasn't.

I look at the CDC and medical community. If they're worried, it's time to be worried. Otherwise, it's overblown.

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A Bugless Program is an Abstract Theoretical Concept.

For myself not concerned at all but it could be a problem for me dear old mum who's in her eighties. Avian flu is at the moment only a threat, it's far from a pandemic and IIRC there have been 45 deaths (I won't say only 'cos that's a bit insulting) worldwide so far and the situation is being closely monitored.

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By asking questions we sometimes get the wrong answers, from wrong answers we learn to ask the right questions.

We're overdue for a 1918-scale flu outbreak. You've got to think we can't hold it off forever.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I don't think statsitics and averages quite works that way. 8-[

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.ASM programmers drive stick shifts - and I do.
A Bugless Program is an Abstract Theoretical Concept.

Personally, I wouldn't rate a death toll in 1918 terms a pandemic in the modern world. The overall toll will be drastic if there's another outbreak, but we're talking about a world with over 6 billion people on it to 1918's maybe a billion? (Keep in mind, the world's population was 2 billion when Neil left his footprints on the moon.)

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

I thought the population was about 3 billion by the 60s. Anyway, more people in the world means more people to infect, especially if the disease starts in Asia, where population density is extremely high. So if the 1918 flu were released again today, I'd expect it to kill far more people than it did the first time.

The media is not blowing it out of proportion, for once. But people tend to interpret what the media reports in different ways.

Avian flu is a very big hazard looming on the horizon. But so is the Cascadia subduction quake hazard, global warming climate based disasters, and many others.

But don't think it isn't a big deal because the 1918 flu pandemic certainly was. Modern medicine may not be advanced enough yet to handle a repeat.

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The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

Yes they do.

You are saying if we know the average and the range of years between flu pandemics we can't say one is overdue? Why not?

What we have is what looks like the beginning of a new pandemic but we don't know what the beginning looks like for sure. AND we have the historical average time between pandemics. Just one more piece of evidence to consider.

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The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

It depends on the situation. If there is some kind of cyclical mechanism that causes A to happen every x units of time on average, then the probability of A happening actually increases as you reach x time since the last occurrence. But if there is no cyclical mechanism, and the average timespan between occurrences is merely a function of the probability of A occurring at any one time, then that probability is always the same no matter when A last happened.

But there is a reason for the cycle.

When an infectious disease works its way through a population some immunity is conferred. As the population is replaced by new and therefore not previously infected members, the potential for a new epidemic increases each year. With some diseases such as measles, (before vaccines), which does not mutate as readily as flu virus, local epidemics used to occur every 3-5 years. That's how long it took to add enough susceptible members to allow sustained transmission of virus.

With other diseases, these patterns are complicated by the organisms own cycle. As flu virus mutates, there is a potential for deadly combinations of its genetic components. Just as with a coin toss, it may not be predictable which side will face up with each toss, but it is predictable over time you will eventually get the other side.

So the mechanisms of pandemic flu are cyclic for biologic reasons and we are over due. As I said, you take range and average into account. What the longest period between pandemics is is unknown. The fact there is a limit is known. It is not if but when.

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The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/

I accept what you say about the cyclical behavior of epidemics, but do we know of a cyclical process for virus mutations? Or do we have evidence that there is one? Even if we don't, it's prudent to consider that there might be one, since cyclical processes are so common in biology. I'm just saying that it's not a given.

As for the coin toss, what you say is true, but note that the number of tosses that have elapsed since you last got heads has no bearing on your chances of getting heads over any future series of tosses. Because there is no cyclical mechanism behind coin tosses, you can never be overdue for heads. (Gambler's Fallacy)

Edited for clarity.

As someone who works part time at Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport and who comes into personal contact with literally hundreds of people every day from infected areas (a huge percentage of our incoming passengers fly in from Asia) it does concern me. Mind you, we've been aware and on guard against avian flu for over a year now, so it's nothging new to us.


spelling edit

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The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

I have trouble understanding how anyone could say that the media are blowing this out of proportion. From what I've seen of the national media recently, I've been surprised (and a little worried) at how little coverage there has been. Is there more of it on television or something? (I don't watch TV.)

I have never believed in getting my science from the news media. They are notorious for making mistakes and jumping to the wrong conclusions because sensational stories sell. As a senior systems developer I never believed in y2k and, I agree with some of the others here, I will be worried when the CDC and the medical community are.

What would you define as "worried"? Right now, they seem to be saying it's a major threat. They're never going to panic and run screaming through the streets, because they are professionals.

If you tossed that coin for a sufficient amount of time, you could collect reasonable data of the average time between getting the opposite side and the longest time one has ever gone only getting one side. For gambling and pure random coin tossing, each coin toss has a new 50:50 chance of landing on one side. But for biological systems the range and averages do rely on more than chance. You can often find the patterns before understanding the underlying mechanisms.

Some suggested mechanisms would be the life cycle of flu virus pandemics is such that it not only includes time for the susceptible population of humans to regenerate, but that there is also a pattern in wild birds and domestic poultry interacting with the human outbreaks. These cyclic avian outbreaks occur when they cross the species barrier. So the new viruses have to emerge first in the poultry, spread to ducks, then to pigs then to humans. Each new cycle takes x number of years on average with a range of y years. Once the virus emerges it is more pathogenic until milder versions are naturally selected. (Kills too fast, dies out, host survives, virus passed on.) The range of lethality could be from mild to severe. Any single new pandemic could cause mild or severe disease but the regularity of the pandemics could be very predictable.

What we have now is a pandemic overdue. The lethality might be unknown with each new pandemic but all signs are a doozy is forming.

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The real news, including science news corporations may not allow on stations they own. http://www.democracynow.org/