Thread: Nine-year-old boy in Chiang Mai tested for deadly influenza

INFLUENZA A(H1N1)
Nine-year-old boy in Chiang Mai tested for deadly influenza




A hospital in Chiang Mai has quarantined a nine-year-old boy who developed a high fever after visiting Japan and sent his sample to test for Influenza A(H1N1), Chiang Mai health doctor Dr Wattana Kanchanakamol said Friday.
The boy, his twin brother and mother went to Japan recently. All of them had high fever after they returned to Thailand.
Doctors quarantined the boy who has higher fever on May 13 while allowed his mother and brother to go home.
He will be under monitoring for seven days, Wattana said.
They were controlled for 7 days till his family could go home except him.
Earlier a student and a female flight attendant were quarantined as they developed high fever. The student just visited Texas, USA while the flight attendant returned from Los Angeles, USA.
Dr Wattana said after seven days, doctors found that they had no Influenza A(H1N1) virus.
The doctor said his office has surveyed and found that more than 100 students in Chiang Mai had travelled abroad during summer break.
The health office in Chiang Mai has asked cooperation from universities and schools in Chiang Mai to allow students travelling aboard to stay at home for seven days to observe their condition before going to school."
Meanwhile director of San Sai Hospital in Chiang Mai, Worawut Phowatcharakul said a woman who was in quarantine in the hospital suffered higher fever. She was under very close watch and no one, even her family, was allowed to visit her.
The doctor refused to reveal her name.


Nine-year-old boy in Chiang Mai tested for deadly influenza - Nationmultimedia.com

Damn, it sure would not take long for a pandemic to get a start at 500 or 600 miles an hour around the world today.

“The swine flu fiasco of 1976 is an example of the damage that can be done from fear of a mutated virus that can theoretically affect us. More than 1,000 cases of paralysis occurred from a rushed vaccine given to more than 40 million people in response to a pandemic that never came.

“Why provoke the public to see a potential pandemic in end-of-the-world terms? A pandemic simply means people in several areas having a disease at the same time -- but it may be hundreds rather than millions. The last flu pandemic, in 1968, killed 33,800 Americans, which is about the flu's toll in an average year. We don't need to panic in advance for that kind of pandemic.


“Cooking poultry kills any flu 100 percent of the time, yet the fear of H5N1 bird flu is already so out of control in Europe that 46 countries have banned French poultry exports after a single turkey was found to be infected. France, fourth in the world in poultry exports, is already hemorrhaging more than $40 million a month.


“Imagine what would happen if a bird in the United States gets H5N1 bird flu. At the rate we are going, the fear of birds will be so great that our own poultry industry, number one in the world, is likely to be in shambles. We already have this problem with mad cow disease, where a single sick cow that is not even in the food chain makes people very nervous, despite the fact that it is almost impossible to get mad cow disease from eating beef.


“Flu is worthy of our concern. But concern can lead to long term preparation whereas panic can be far more virulent and costly than the bird flu itself.”


Dr. Marc Siegel, associate professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine, is author of ''False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear."

Excerpts from: The cost of bird flu hysteria, March 17, 2006
MARC SIEGEL, M.D. © Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.



Dear Jim,


The reason why the Flu was so successful in 1918 was primarily the "terrain", namely the millions of immuno-deficient hosts and hostesses starved and stressed by 4 years of war.


Secondarily, one can speculate that the 1918 flu strain may also have been a "new" recombinant to the 1918 population and thus more successful than a more established seasonal strain may have been. As I found in 1968, flu, unlike practically all other animal viruses, has multiple RNA segments, equivalent to multiple chromosomes and thus can readily form new recombinants - the reason why we have seasonal flus, but have measles, mumps, polio, pox etc. only once in a lifetime.


Thirdly, the odds that the Centers for Disease Control alias World Health Organization ever predicts an epidemic prior to its arrival are not good: They have predicted in past several years numerous epidemics or "pandemics" such as the flu, the hanta-virus, anthrax, the rotavirus, the Ebola virus, the West Nile virus, "mad cow" epidemic, the Sars-virus epidemic, an epi-pandemic of "random, eg. heterosexual non-drug user-AIDS" - but none of these ever materialized (see, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery publishing, Washington DC, 1996). The last one that came close to an epidemic was polio in the 1950s and that was not predicted by American public health scientists.


Fourth, the currently hyped prospective Flu pandemic has long missed its chances. It has been hyped almost daily in the San Francisco Chronicle since November. But all that happened was a dead chicken in Nigeria, a hamster in Germany, two sick (dead?) kids in Turkey, a euthanized swan in Sweden, several dead or euthanized chicken in Iraq (Yes Iraq!!) etc. That is not the pattern of a potential killer microbe. All "new" killer viral or microbial epidemics of the past have spread exponentially within weeks to months and then declined exponentially owing to the induction of immunity or death of susceptible hosts - take Albert Camus' "Plague" as a classical example.


The current Flu propaganda is thus a mix of ignorance and self-interest and an exploitation of general ignorance by the CDC, WHO, the vaccine, pill and test-kit manufacturers of our universities and pharma companies, and of our "science" journalists, who need to fill their daily columns - and must sell their aging vaccine stocks before they decompose and their Tamiflu pills before the summer.
But despite hyping in dozens of microbial Godots - no Godot has come since polio.


People are just too well nourished these days, and thus have optimally maintained immune systems, for microbes to attack more than just the fringes of the ever growing human herd. That in fact is their historical share. The 150 million+ Flu pandemics are hype for fund raising by the ever more costly science/health armies in search for real enemies. Their success is based on the invisible monsters of the microbial epidemics of the times, when nutrition lacked vitamines, proteins and sanitation or was lacking all together - and on the never failing microbial and viral horror phantasies of our science writers, politicians and Hollywood producers.


And now I have given you a lecture, although I had intended to feed you just a few convenient lines...


Hope you like it and don’t mind that I cc it several colleagues who have asked but didn't get a good answer, because I was too "busy" to write.


Regards,
Peter

(Peter H. Duesberg, Ph.D. is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of the book, “Inventing the AIDS Virus”).