Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, a molecular pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Technology has been one of the leading avian flu experts that the media has been quoting lately. The following appeared in the NYT's on Nov 8th.
Some experts like Dr. Peter Palese of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York say the A(H5N1) flu viruses are a false alarm. He notes that studies of serum collected in 1992 from people in rural China indicated that millions of people there had antibodies to the A(H5N1) strain.
That means they had been infected with an H5N1 bird virus and recovered, apparently without incident.
Despite that, and the fact that those viruses have been circulating in China more than a dozen years, almost no human-to-human spread has occurred. "The virus has been around for more than a dozen years, but it hasn't jumped into the human population," Dr. Palese said. "I don't think it has the capability of doing it."
Dr. Taubenberger said he could argue it either way.
"It's a nasty virus," he said. "It is highly virulent in domestic birds and wild birds. The fact that it has killed half the humans it has infected makes it of concern, and the fact that it shares some features with the 1918 virus makes it of concern."But the fact that it has circulated in Asia for years and hasn't caused a pandemic argues against it. Maybe there are some biological barriers we don't understand."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/science/08flu.html?pagewanted=2What I find odd about Dr. Taubenberger's recent statements is how he fails to tell us about his previous conclusions about the 1918 pandemic and that he himself discovered that most people at the time didn't even die from avian flu, but rather secondary infections that could easily be treated or avoided all together due to almost 100 years worth of advances in medicine and controlling infectious diseases.
The project hit on a topic that had remained an enigma to scientists. The 1918 Spanish Flu had killed approximately 40 to 50 million people around the world in a six-month period, but there was little known about it because no viral isolates were made in 1918.
According to Dr. Taubenberger, most of the people who died during the pandemic died as a result of secondary health complications spurred by the virus, making it difficult to find the needed genetic material from the virus to study it. When a person is exposed to the flu virus it causes a rapid infection, but then the virus leaves the individual's lungs quickly.
"By five days after exposure you can't recover the flu virus. It leaves and goes elsewhere and does not linger. Most of the people who died in 1918 died of secondary bacterial pneumonia. There were no antibiotics in 1918, so if you had bacterial pneumonia, you were very likely to die. When they died, ultimately because they were exposed to the flu, there was no flu virus left in them," he said.
http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=917&issueID=65Maybe if Dr.Taubenberger wasn't on the military's payroll, I wouldn't have to wonder so much about his motives?
Edit: fixed toeing, see below
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