killing cats and dogs in Korea

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=2681519

Sure hope this guy is right

Here is the most optimistic prognosis yet.



http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1793183.htm

Sure hope this guy is right

Here is the most optimistic prognosis yet.



http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1793183.htm

Well, just as there is some headway, another problem raises its head. The ability of our current leaders to provide vaccine for us is probably the main issue determining how many die and how many are saved during pandemic. We can hunker down and isolate from the flu for a while, but if that time is too long, supplies, patience, even broken appliances may end out isolation. Having less flu vaccine is not a good thing.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061117/ap_on_he_me/bird_flu_vaccines

Well, I am very happy to have managed to have my party in Las Vegas in December before any mutation. Perhaps it will all hold off until I am dead of something else. At least I have modeled the proper response when the kids have to face pandemic.

More virus analysis

These changes would have to occur for the virus to mutate.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2655618

Lake log October 30, 2006

We woke up to the first snow of the season. I know many of you, having just endured that Buffalo area storm perhaps can't celebrate with us, but it certainly was stunningly beautiful to greet sunise frosted in over an inch of white.

The fish have stopped biting off the dock. If I want to catch them, I have to look for perch and pretend to be fishing through the ice.

***********************



On Halloween we had one trick or treater whose dad decided to walk the length of our dark street and to our lighted house. We had debated buying any candy, but I was glad I had the bag of Reeses's peanut butter cup.

Jacob was 5 or 6 at most and was very talkative and opinionated. With his round glasses he looked just like a miniature version of that kid who gets the Red Ryder B-B gun in the old Jean Shepard You'll-shoot=your-eye-out story.

"Who do we have here?" Elizabeth asked.
"I want you to guess." Jacob responded.
" I guess you are Harry Potter."
"No." responded Jacob, "I am Jacob disguised as Harry Potter."

So much for confusing objective and subjective reality.

I fished out a couple peanut butter cups, dropped it in his plastic pumpkin, and decided to add a fine local apple I had just bought that day. I showed it to Jacob's dad, so he would know that it was safe and would not just toss it away.

"An apple is NOT a treat!" asserted Jacob Harry Potter, and he buzzed me with his magic wand to punctuate this truth.

"Well, I did also put in the two peanut butter cups," I explained.

His outrage was appeased.

*********************
Tomorrow we are going up to Yarmouth, Maine. Elizabeth has a conference, and I am tagging along. With my cold almost completely gone I suspect it will be a delightful journey.



As you walk into winter,
Enjoy!

Lake log October 30, 2006

We woke up to the first snow of the season. I know many of you, having just endured that Buffalo area storm perhaps can't celebrate with us, but it certainly was stunningly beautiful to greet sunise frosted in over an inch of white.

The fish have stopped biting off the dock. If I want to catch them, I have to look for perch and pretend to be fishing through the ice.

***********************



On Halloween we had one trick or treater whose dad decided to walk the length of our dark street and to our lighted house. We had debated buying any candy, but I was glad I had the bag of Reeses's peanut butter cup.

Jacob was 5 or 6 at most and was very talkative and opinionated. With his round glasses he looked just like a miniature version of that kid who gets the Red Ryder B-B gun in the old Jean Shepard You'll-shoot=your-eye-out story.

"Who do we have here?" Elizabeth asked.
"I want you to guess." Jacob responded.
" I guess you are Harry Potter."
"No." responded Jacob, "I am Jacob disguised as Harry Potter."

So much for confusing objective and subjective reality.

I fished out a couple peanut butter cups, dropped it in his plastic pumpkin, and decided to add a fine local apple I had just bought that day. I showed it to Jacob's dad, so he would know that it was safe and would not just toss it away.

"An apple is NOT a treat!" asserted Jacob Harry Potter, and he buzzed me with his magic wand to punctuate this truth.

"Well, I did also put in the two peanut butter cups," I explained.

His outrage was appeased.

*********************
Tomorrow we are going up to Yarmouth, Maine. Elizabeth has a conference, and I am tagging along. With my cold almost completely gone I suspect it will be a delightful journey.



As you walk into winter,
Enjoy!

Lake log October 30, 2006

We woke up to the first snow of the season. I know many of you, having just endured that Buffalo area storm perhaps can't celebrate with us, but it certainly was stunningly beautiful to greet sunise frosted in over an inch of white.

The fish have stopped biting off the dock. If I want to catch them, I have to look for perch and pretend to be fishing through the ice.

***********************



On Halloween we had one trick or treater whose dad decided to walk the length of our dark street and to our lighted house. We had debated buying any candy, but I was glad I had the bag of Reeses's peanut butter cup.

Jacob was 5 or 6 at most and was very talkative and opinionated. With his round glasses he looked just like a miniature version of that kid who gets the Red Ryder B-B gun in the old Jean Shepard You'll-shoot=your-eye-out story.

"Who do we have here?" Elizabeth asked.
"I want you to guess." Jacob responded.
" I guess you are Harry Potter."
"No." responded Jacob, "I am Jacob disguised as Harry Potter."

So much for confusing objective and subjective reality.

I fished out a couple peanut butter cups, dropped it in his plastic pumpkin, and decided to add a fine local apple I had just bought that day. I showed it to Jacob's dad, so he would know that it was safe and would not just toss it away.

"An apple is NOT a treat!" asserted Jacob Harry Potter, and he buzzed me with his magic wand to punctuate this truth.

"Well, I did also put in the two peanut butter cups," I explained.

His outrage was appeased.

*********************
Tomorrow we are going up to Yarmouth, Maine. Elizabeth has a conference, and I am tagging along. With my cold almost completely gone I suspect it will be a delightful journey.



As you walk into winter,
Enjoy!

Discouraging News

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2616595&page=1

There is a new strain now resistant to fowl vaccines. This whole game is like playing Whack-a-Mole and hoping that all of a sudden the More does not find a way to leave his hole in the wooden box.

More whining

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review.php?ID=24635
Here is the attitude that worries me. There has been scientific warning for years now on possible pandemic, but when it actually catches the mainline press and raises consciousness, then everyone thinks it must happen on schedule, sooner rather than later, or it is just a joke. It doesn't happen in a few months and Oh well........

This is what happened in New Orleans. There was always a possibility of an intense hurricane, but because people were warned so many times, they got used to it, and did not take precaution.

Scientists tell us pandemic will come. Tomorrow or in a decade. Individual preparation is all that is needed. Put away a little food, Prepare for being home a lot. Back up your energy needs. Plan.

We all wait for the emergency. Then it is too late. I have seen the inconvenience, shock, and fear that just 9 days of power loss and a little storm caused in Buffalo and that was when all surroundings areas could rally to help, when neighbors could help neighbors and when no one was dying of the trouble.

Listen, the World Health Organization may not get top news billing every day, but they say this is a huge world wide danger. People need to prepare for it just like they do for a house fire. Our houses that have never burned in 100 years still have smoke detectors, electrical inspections, fire extinquishers. Larger buildings install sprinkle systems.

This kind of whining is very irresponsible. It suggests that there is a plot to put people in panic for no reason when actually there is a panic that dysfunctional families and communities will be at a total loss if this hits and people ought to at least know the danger.

And it isn't like there is no news. There is news every day of folks attempting to make vaccine, making plans, testing wild birds, it just does not get in the daily news on the top of the page. And it won't. Every day someone has their car inspected too and problems corrected, but it is the car crashes that get the media attention.

Remember the joke about the farmer with the leaky roof. On sunny days he noticed nothing, but when it rained and roof leaked, well, who could fix the roof in the rain?

All the farmer with the leaky roof ended up was wet. The farmer with pandemic roof leaks may end up dead or worse yet, with dead children.

Bird Flu Vaccine might be a very good one

This is the best vaccine news I have read in a long while:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061018/ap_on_he_me/pandemic_vaccine

Another attempt at a good spin

Anything to calm the public. In Iraq we won the war and lost the peace. In Bird Flu we are state of the art in control of the chickens who might get it, but if it becomes a people disease, our government says we are unprepared, that like Katrina this is a job for local and state government, that we are individually responsible for protecting ourselves, and that we ought to be weekly putting a can of tuna and some powdered milk under the bed as a hedge against starvation. Hardly seems like a "state of the art" plan to me. Unless you are a chicken.

http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=N05401262

Virus mutates easily

This is not really new information, but it is resubstantiated by this report. It is going to be a long, anxious winter.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060928/ap_on_he_me/un_bird_flu

and in case we were getting lulled

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/bird-flu-still-real-risk-says-expert/2006/09/17/1158431586185.html

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=144528

Call for more drugs

I don't like hearing of the drug resistant strains. Scary stuff.


http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200609/s1749795.htm

More research into immune response as killer

One of the great ironies of this strain of flu, like its cousin in 1918 is that it is often the immune system that kills the victim. That is one of the suggested reasons why so many young people die when they get the disease. Here is some new research with mice exploring that phenomena.


http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2499374

Air travel and spread of flu

Not that this is new information, but it does confirm by a study what most took for granted.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2422029

Bird Flu Compared with Common Flu

A new study in Vietnam throws some detailed light on why this flu is so deadly. It also stresses early treatment with Tamiflu.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2006/1737677.htm

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060910/ap_on_he_me/bird_flu_humans

http://article.wn.com/view/2006/09/11/Study_shows_need_for_early_use_of_Tamiflu/

AND FROM PANDEMIC NEWS:

Paris - New research conducted among bird flu victims in Vietnam
shows the H5N1 virus replicates massively before unleashing a
dangerous inflammatory response by the immune system, indicating
that patients should be given antiviral drugs as soon as possible.

Published online Sunday by the journal Nature Medicine, the study
focuses on 18 Vietnamese who caught bird flu in 2004 and 2005, 13
of whom died.

Samples were taken from these patients to assess the level of H5N1
virus in the throat, and compared with other patients who had two
strains of ordinary human flu.

H5N1 patients had much higher viral loads than counterparts with
the human virus. In addition, high levels of H5N1 also triggered a
"dysregulation" of cytokines - messenger proteins in the immune
system - which in turn caused inflammation and worsened the
patient's condition.

"The focus of clinical management should be on preventing this
intense cytokine response, by early diagnosis and effective
antiviral
treatment," says the paper, lead-authored by Menno de Jong of the
Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam.

The antiviral of choice in fighting H5N1 is oseltamivir, which
is made
by the Swiss group Roche and commercialised under the brand Tamiflu.

Tamiflu is not a cure for flu. It brakes replication of the virus,
thereby
easing inflammation which is the cause of most flu symptoms and
speeding the time to recovery.

Roche recommends that Tamiflu be administered within 48 hours to
treat ordinary seasonal human flu, and says work is under way to
fine tune treatment for bird flu.

Millions of doses of Tamiflu are being stockpiled by governments
and the World Health Organisation in the event of a global
flu pandemic.

Some experts warn against over-reliance on Tamiflu, fearing
that the
drug could be of limited use if the H5N1 virus, at present
transmissible
from birds to humans, mutates into a form that could make it easily
contagious among humans.

In the Vietnam study, 17 of the 18 cases received Tamiflu.
The drug
appears to have had little effect, but probably because
it was
administered too late to prevent the cytokine cascade,
the paper
said. - Sapa-AFP

More good news

CLUES TO TREATMENT OF BIRD FLU A review of medical literature published during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic suggests that transfusions from people who survived the flu may have helped others who became sick. Navy researchers combed old publications to determine what strategies might have been effective for fighting the last pandemic flu. They believe that transfusions from someone who successfully survived the flu virus may be a viable way to treat victims of the current circulating H5N1 bird flu. This research was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.


I heard a report on this on NPR. It seems pretty plausible. Maybe it will save some lives. One good thing is to have so many people working in different ideas before there is pandemic. In 1918 the scientists had to start for square one. They were not even sure if it was influenza or some new disease. At least we have the pathogen at the starting gate.

Interesting flu case

This will help show not only if pregnant women can be treated with Tamiflu but if it at all helps slow up this virus.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060828/ap_on_he_me/bird_flu_pregnancy