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Bird Flu... Made me think of Marburg Virus

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Bardo Thodol

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BANGKOK, Thailand (Jan. 24) - Thailand and Cambodia confirmed bird flu outbreaks Friday, bringing the number of Asian nations hit by the virus to six. World health officials recommended quarantining people as an ailing Thai man died - the country's first suspected bird flu death.

Thailand is now the second country where people, not just chickens, have come down with the illness recently.

The other is Vietnam, where the death toll from the virus climbed to six on Saturday when the World Health Organization confirmed that a 13-year-old boy from Ho Chi Minh City died from the disease on Jan. 22.

The WHO also said that an 8-year-old girl had been infected with the virus and was in critical condition at the Hospital of Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City.

The cases are the first confirmations of the H5N1 virus in people in the southern part of Vietnam, where the bird flu has infected millions of chickens.

Together with the re-emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome, also a flu-like illness, Asia is on a region-wide health alert. Governments have started slaughtering chickens as they scramble to contain the outbreak. Millions of chickens have died or been killed in the six countries, which also include South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

Scientists have reached no firm conclusions on why the flu is so contagious, but a leading theory is its adaptability. The World Health Organization fears bird flu could combine with a human flu to create a dangerous mutant form.

Dr. Klaus Stohr, head of the U.N. agency's influenza program, recommended Friday that people with bird flu be quarantined to avoid contact with sufferers of regular influenza.

However, he said he saw no need for the kind of travel warnings WHO issued during last year's outbreak of SARS, which killed nearly 800 people worldwide.

''We have to put things into perspective. There is a chance that something can go wrong but it looks if we act decisively now then there still is a window of opportunity here to control the disease before it takes on global proportions.''

Killing chickens in affected countries is ''the key to the solution of the whole problem,'' Stohr added. ''We do not have a problem of international spread by infected humans. We may have a problem of international spread by birds.''

Thailand's government confirmed the disease was present in its poultry population. It also said tests showed two boys, one 6 and the other 7, have the virus and two other people are suspected of having it. One, reportedly a 56-year-old man who raised fighting ****s, died Friday, the government said.

Cambodia also confirmed its outbreak while Laos held an emergency meeting Friday to evaluate cases of dead poultry there.

Farmers in Thailand have been saying for more than a week that their chickens, like those in neighboring countries, were dying of bird flu. But until Friday, officials had maintained the chickens were suffering from fowl cholera - which they said posed no danger to people.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra denied his government tried to cover up the situation. ''We were waiting for the tests,'' he told reporters. ''I know what I'm doing.''

Thailand is among the world's top five poultry exporters. Stocks in chicken producers plunged and the European Union joined Japan, together Thailand's largest chicken markets, in slapping import bans. Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines have done likewise.

Thailand will host a meeting Jan. 28 of agriculture and health ministers from bird flu-affected countries.

The WHO will send two influenza experts to Thailand this weekend to help cope with the outbreak.

Scientists believe people get the disease through contact with sick birds. So far, there has been no evidence of person-to-person transmission. But health officials worry the avian virus could mutate by combining with an influenza virus to allow human transmission.

Thailand said it tested samples from more than 100,000 chickens nationwide and found bird flu to be present in Suphanburi province. The Agriculture Ministry ordered the slaughter of all chickens in Suphanburi.

Opposition politicians urged Thailand to be forthcoming about bird flu, saying it should not follow the example of China, which disastrously tried to hide details about SARS, leading to a global health crisis last year.

''What the government has done cannot make the people feel sure about their lives and the safety of the community,'' said Ong-art Klampaiboon, spokesman for the Democrat Party.

The Health Ministry said the man who died Friday was admitted to a hospital in Chachoengsao province on Jan. 20 with diarrhea and severe pneumonia. At the time he was diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia. Doctors now suspect he may have had bird flu and were conducting further tests.

The deadly bird flu virus crossed over from chickens to humans in Hong Kong in 1997 and killed six people. International health experts have started work on a human vaccine but expect it will be months before one is ready.

AP-NY-01-24-04 0016EST

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Yeah...and, ALMOST as creepy is the "West Nile Virus", that's been killing birds here in Georgia. (& elsewhere, I'm sure) I remember when I first heard about it on the news a few years ago, I thought of Millennium, and promptly brought my doves back into the house!

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  • 3 months later...
Guest Seraphim

Poor birds ;_; I don't know how familiar anyone here is with Marburg Virus. But it is a Filovirus. Ebola is also a filovirus. It is named after a German city in which the first know outbreak occured in 1967. Outbreaks in Frankfurt and Belgrade occured that year as well. All were related to blood cultures from African Green Monkeys. It is actually less severe than Ebola. The symptoms are pretty much the same though. My own belief is that we will see a lot of outbreaks of diseases in the near future. Alas, the human population is bigger than it should be. Methink the Earth will take care of that, if you get my meaning.

Mikhael

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Guest kath

Your doves will be safe against the west nile virus. the birds that are affected are the birds who eat carron and other animals. If you think about it, its a plausable explanation as to how the illness is spread. the birds eat the road kill thats been infected and they in turn become infected.

our crow population has dropped.

kath

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  • 11 years later...

Weird reading posts from 2004. about west Nile.    In 2004 someone posted  about carrion eating birds.  Now we know it's got nothing to do with that, it's about the mosquitoes.  I remember  before 2004, being asked to  be a sentinel area for West Nile and EEE because I had chickens. That was back int he 90's.   But still mainstream folks didn't know how it was spread.

Now we have West Nile as a matter of course, and EEE, and  other things, and now bird flu,  and mass culling of  birds.   In Asia people get this and die.  Here it's only a matter of time.

 

Ebola, which was once a word no one knew, is now an internet joke, because people are so afraid of it they'd rather joke about ti than talk about it.

 

 What was unheard of in  the time of MIllennium?   Old news now.

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I'm one of those people that believe most of the illnesses and diseases we have are man created and spread through all the toxins they put in our atmosphere.  And naturally, the birds would be the first to get sick and die, then the elderly and people already ill with something else.  Check out all the videos at YouTube about Chemtrails, and you too will be convinced.  Here's the search page link after typing in YouTube, Chemtrails.

https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube%2C+chemtrails&rlz=1C1CHWL_enUS673US673&oq=youtube%2C+chemtrails&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.7888j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

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  • Elders (Moderators)

The bug I've currently got is flu-like, but seemingly not full-blown flu. None of the rest of the family have got it - I only found out via another forum that other people in the UK have got it. I don't go out very much, but my husband, and daughter and grandson who visit often, don't have it, yet they go out a lot; so I guess I could only have picked up the bug when I was last shopping for food.

It's a bit weird, that seemingly I was the only one who got the bug. Epidemiology is so complex, because each of us can react in different ways to viruses.

 

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21 hours ago, Libby said:

It's a bit weird, that seemingly I was the only one who got the bug. Epidemiology is so complex, because each of us can react in different ways to viruses.

Yes, we all do react different because we have different metabolisms.  There are so many different strains as well, which is very disturbing.

This is one of the reason why I don't get shot, too many different strains for one shot to stop them all, and the fact that we don't know what all is in the shots to begin with.  I know there are solid medical reasons since my daughter is an RN, but I'm one of those people that believes in strengthening my immune system to be able to fight it off when exposed, and because I take Walborn (Walgreens brand of Airbourne) daily for many years, I haven't had the flu in years.  If I catch anything, sniffles, cough, I double up on my Walborn and it's gone within 24-48 hours.   Also, I am just barely affected by allergies anymore, whereas before I started this ritual every night of drinking Walborn with herb tea, I would really suffer from them.  A strong immune system is the key, not drugs, and especially not putting the virus in your system to combat it.  Again, them medical profession has excellent reasons for it, but I am not convinced they are right.

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