Should info on the new Bird Flu be published?

[Skeptic Ginger]

I take real issue with this statement. I believe the 60% is of patients that are hospitalized very late in the disease's progression. And that the illness varies from a slight mal-ease to the symptoms of the more common flus in different patients. And that modern medical care, like simply hydration, can handle the "epidemic".

Get a flu shot, and stop pandering to the fearful masses with doom and gloom predictions of "60% Fatalities".

The 1918 H1N1 pandemic had a much lower fatality rate. The current HPAI H5N1 only needs a 2 or 3% fatality rate and an infection rate of 30-40% to kill millions.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Are there any links to the stories about a 'created' flu virus, or is this just yet another varient that has been isolated to allow for vaccine development?

Your questions are off base. Vaccine development is not an issue with this research.

 

[Dymanic]

All known cases that went to the hospital, half died. What about the ones that didn't go to the hospital, is what I wonder.

You and just about every epidemiologist on the planet. It's not very difficult to determine whether a person has been infected with the virus: test for antibodies. It obviously isn't practical to do that for seven billion people, however, so what you do instead is go to places where the virus is known to have appeared, round up some of the people you figure are most likely to have been exposed, and test them. Not nearly as much of this has been done as everybody would like, but the studies that have been done are not very supportive of the idea that there is a lot of subclinical infection out there. Here's one sample:

"Participants in this study were from villages in central and northern Thailand where widespread, confirmed outbreaks of influenza (H5N1) infection in poultry and at least 1 human influenza (H5N1) case had occurred during 2004. A substantial proportion of participants reported exposure to backyard poultry, including contact with sick or dead chickens, the primary risk factor for influenza (H5N1) infection (8,9). Nevertheless, we found no serologic evidence of mild or subclinical influenza (H5N1) infection, suggesting that clade 1 influenza virus A (H5N1) strains circulating in Thailand among backyard poultry during 2004 did not transmit easily to our study population."
http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/15/5/08-0316_article.htm

And more here, including a chart:
http://www.fluwiki.info/pmwiki.php?n=Science.Seroprevalence
One of those is an outlier: the Hong Kong study casebro is probably thinking of.

Of course, we're still talking about a virus that hasn't adapted to efficient transmission between humans, so even if we knew exactly what the current mortality rate is (that is, if there were NO uncertainty about the numbers of subclinical/asymptomatic cases) there'd be no way to know how much that would change when the virus aquired whatever characteristics would enable it to make the jump. It will be a different virus at that point.

What they've done with the ferrets seems... daring. It's easy to picture a scenario like:
"So how are Bob and those guys coming along with the ferrets?"
"I dunno, haven't heard from them in a couple of weeks, and they aren't answering the phones..."

 

[Dymanic]

And now the government is considering whether it should ask Nature and Science to not publish detailed articles on it.

Update: The US government has now gone ahead and taken that unprecedented step:

A government advisory panel, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, overseen by the National Institutes of Health, has asked two journals, Science and Nature, to keep certain details out of reports that they intend to publish on the research. The panel said conclusions should be published, but not “experimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.”

The panel cannot force the journals to censor their articles, but the editor of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the journal was taking the recommendations seriously and would probably withhold some information — but only if the government creates a system to provide the missing information to legitimate scientists worldwide who need it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/h...sks-journals-to-censor-articles-on-virus.html