Step 3: Self Limiting Pandemic
Today I found out that Moscow doesn’t have just a few problems with the bird flu, but many. I knew of about 3 or 4 sites that had found the virus and had begun to ‘destroy’ their birds. Now there are many more suspected sites, all of them within a few hours of Vladimir.
I then did some research on the avian flu. Turns out, the World Health Organization has a generic 6 step process for the spreading of pandemic viruses. The avian flu is currently in step 3. The virus can mutate to infect humans, but can’t transfer hosts between humans. The next steps are:
4. Person to person
5. Epidemic exists
6. Pandemic exists
Added to this, I found the following information:
To acquire the needed mutation through drift, it simply has to continue being an epidemic in birds long enough for the mutations to occur and then be passed to a human.
This is for the H5N1 strain of the avian flu (pretty much the only one reported in the news). If there is an genetic shift in the virus, humans will be at an extremely great risk, with those who are nearer the birds are the first to get sick.
I’m kinda glad I’ll be leaving Russia if only out of my paranoid fear of pandemics and diseases. I don’t trust Russian hospitals, so I’m trying to go to a place without birds. My next move is to the Middle East, I hope. Unfortunately, I wanted to go back to Krasnodar but in the nearby Adygean Republic they are having problems too.
BTW, the CDC reports that if only a medium level pandemic were to break out in the US, over 207,000 people will die.
[Reuters Article - Wikipedia - CDC]
