Who's Sorry Now?
We should all be glad the Avian flu scare is waning. The recent news confirms this. The fear mongering appears to have run it's course. Not enough buyers? Or something else...
We're sure scratching our heads about a couple of things. Remember in the 1970's the scare about the Swine flu? After the hype was over, most medical experts agreed that diseases like this don't jump species. In the meantime, everyone had gone nuts. The sky was definitely falling. Weirdness ensued, then, suddenly, it was over. Never to be heard from again.
So we wonder, what happened? Was it good science that saved the day, or more cynically, did the money grubbers make their money and simply fold their tent.
Hmmmmm. They say the similiarities of today's avian flu panic to that scare 30 some years ago is striking. So we looked into Tamiflu, the supposed vaccine for the recent "imminent" threat, and lo and behold it's RUMMY to the rescue.
Learn more here: "The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world. Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfield."
Luckily, cooler heads have prevailed throughout this mess from experts like Dr. Jeremy Farar: "Having observed A(H5N1) for many years in Asia, he thinks it is unlikely that the virus is poised to jump species, becoming readily transmissible to humans or among them. Nor does he believe the mantra that a horrific influenza pandemic is inevitable or long overdue. He points out that the only prior pandemic with a devastating death toll was in 1918, and he says that may have been "a unique biological event."
"For years, they have been telling us it's going to happen — and it hasn't," said Dr. Farrar, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit at the hospital in Vietnam. "Billions of chickens in Asia have been infected and millions of people lived with them — we in Asia are intimate with our poultry — and less than 200 people have gotten infected. "That tells you that the constraints on the virus are considerable," he continued. "It must be hard for this virus to jump.""
