Officials trying to reduce impact of swine flu

Officials trying to reduce impact of swine flu
With anxiety spreading faster than swine flu, authorities try to reduce the outbreak's impact
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Officials-trying-to-reduce-apf-15064393.html?sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=

WASHINGTON (AP) -- With global anxiety spreading even faster than the new swine flu -- and a vaccine still months away -- health authorities are struggling to reduce the impact of an outbreak that can't be contained by simply shutting borders.
The world has no vaccine to prevent infection but U.S. health officials aim to have a key ingredient for one ready in early May, the big step that vaccine manufacturers are awaiting. But even if the World Health Organization ordered up emergency vaccine supplies -- and that decision hasn't been made yet -- it would take at least two more months to produce the initial shots needed for human safety testing.
"We're working together at 100 miles an hour to get material that will be useful," Dr. Jesse Goodman, who oversees the Food and Drug Administration's swine flu work, told The Associated Press.
Meanwhile, health authorities are preparing for the worst. "I fully expect we will see deaths from this infection," said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The U.S. is shipping to states not only enough anti-flu medication for 11 million people, but also masks, hospital supplies and flu test kits. President Barack Obama asked Congress for $1.5 billion in emergency funds to help build more drug stockpiles and monitor future cases, as well as help international efforts to avoid a full-fledged pandemic.
"It's a very serious possibility, but it is still too early to say that this is inevitable," the WHO's flu chief, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, told a telephone news conference.
Cuba and Argentina banned flights to Mexico, where swine flu is suspected of killing more than 150 people and sickening well over 2,000. In a bit of good news, Mexico's health secretary, Jose Cordova, late Tuesday called the death toll there "more or less stable."

Mexico City, one of the world's largest cities, has taken drastic steps to curb the virus' spread, starting with shutting down schools and on Tuesday expanding closures to gyms and swimming pools and even telling restaurants to limit service to takeout. People who venture out tend to wear masks in hopes of protection.

The number of confirmed swine flu cases in the United States rose to 66 in six states, with 45 in New York, 11 in California, six in Texas, two in Kansas and one each in Indiana and Ohio, but cities and states suspected more. In New York, the city's health commissioner said "many hundreds" of schoolchildren were ill at a school where some students had confirmed cases.

New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Britain, Germany, Spain and Canada have also reported cases.
But only in Mexico so far are there confirmed deaths, and scientists remain baffled as to why.

The WHO argues against closing borders to stem the spread, and the U.S. -- although checking arriving travelers for the ill who may need care -- agrees it's too late for that tactic.
"Sealing a border as an approach to containment is something that has been discussed and it was our planning assumption should an outbreak of a new strain of influenza occur overseas. We had plans for trying to swoop in and knockout or quench an outbreak if it were occurring far from our borders. That's not the case here," Besser told a telephone briefing of Nevada-based health providers and reporters. "The idea of trying to limit the spread to Mexico is not realistic or at all possible."
"Border controls do not work. Travel restrictions do not work," WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said in Geneva, recalling the SARS epidemic earlier in the decade that killed 774 people, mostly in Asia, and slowed the global economy.
Authorities sought to keep the crisis in context: Flu deaths are common around the world. In the U.S. alone, the CDC says about 36,000 people a year die of flu-related causes. Still, the CDC calls the new strain a combination of pig, bird and human viruses for which people may have limited natural immunity.

Hence the need for a vaccine. Using samples of the flu taken from people who fell ill in Mexico and the U.S., scientists are engineering a strain that could trigger the immune system without causing illness. The hope is to get that ingredient -- called a "reference strain" in vaccine jargon -- to manufacturers around the second week of May, so they can begin their own laborious production work, said CDC's Dr. Ruben Donis, who is leading that effort.

Outbreak Like Mexican Swine Flu Predicted 14 Months Ago
(Source By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor)
posted: 27 April 2009 04:12 pm ET

A team of scientists predicted more than a year ago that Mexico and other tropical locales were emerging "hotspots" for so-called zoonotic diseases that jump from animals to humans, getting it right on the newly reported swine flu.
This week, the scientists are analyzing the patterns of the new swine flu virus's spread and trying to predict its next moves. The researchers "should have preliminary findings by the weekend," team leader Peter Daszak of the Wildlife Trust told LiveScience.
Daszak and his colleagues cautioned in February 2008 that infectious disease-fighting resources are not effectively deployed around the globe and that the U.S. government has not always accurately investigated how flu strains will arrive here.

Hot spots
The tropics prediction came from an analysis of 335 "disease events" involving emerging infectious diseases between 1940 and 2004 examples include Ebola, HIV, yellow fever and SARS. The analysis showed that such events peaked in the 1980s and that the threat of these diseases to global health is increasing.
The events, mostly caused by zoonotic diseases, were found to be correlated with socio-economic, environmental and ecological factors.
That allowed the scientists to make a predictive map of where emerging diseases are most likely to emerge pointing to Latin America, tropical Africa and Asia. The map also pointed up that global resources to fight disease emergence are misguided focusing on richer, developed countries of Europe, North America, parts of Asia and Australia, rather than in developing countries. The report was published in the Feb. 21, 2008, issue of the journal Nature. Read Article...
http://www.livescience.com/health/090427-flu-prediction.html

The disease event prediction map is like an earthquake risk map, Daszak said. "If we live in one of these 'hotspots,' we need to protect ourselves, and our trading and traveling partners from the risk of new diseases," he said.

Soros is very pessimistic and sees a global meltdown

March 28, 2009
George Soros, the man who broke the Bank, sees a global meltdown
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5989163.ece

(Source Times Online)
The man who has a phobia about maths has made his name as the philosopher king of economics – his book The Crash of 2008, out in paper-back next week, has been a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Since 1944 he has believed in what he calls “reflexivity” – the idea that people base their decisions on their own perception of a situation rather than on the reality.
He has applied this both to investment and to politics: his skill has been to predict moments of seismic change by identifying a disjunction between perception and reality.
When everyone else was convinced that the markets would automatically correct themselves, the 78-year-old “old fogey”, as he calls himself, was one of the few warning of recession. He put all his chips on “the Barack guy” early on when all around him were still gunning for Hillary Clinton. It’s almost as if he has been waiting for the Great Recession for the past ten years. When we ask whether he prefers booms or busts, he replies: “I have to admit that actually I flourish, I’m more stimulated by the bust.”
This recession, he explains, is a “once-in-a-lifetime event”, particularly in Britain. “This is a crisis unlike any other. It’s a total collapse of the financial system with tremendous implications for everyday life. On previous occasions when you had a crisis that was threatening the system the authorities intervened and did whatever was necessary to protect the system. This time they failed.”
The financial oracle does not know how long it will last. “That depends on how it’s handled. Allowing Lehman Brothers to fail was the game-changing event. That’s when the financial crisis went over the brink.” We could end up with a depression. “Unless we handle it well then I think we would. The size of the problem is actually bigger than in the 1930s.”
The problem in Britain, he believes, is in many ways worse than in America or Germany. “American memory is seared by the Depression, the German memory is seared by hyperinfla-tion but Britain has a pretty serious problem in many ways worse than America because the financial sector looms bigger and the overvaluation of real estate is bigger than in America.”

Soros: The Recession Will Last Forever
(Source Yahoo Tech Ticker)
Already, there are signs that no consensus will be reached. Germany's Angel Merkel, for one, is sounding particularly strident in her opposition to a "global New Deal", which is what the US and the UK would like to see.

But George Soros says it's the last chance to save the world, and that if they don't the world could face a depression worse than the 30s:
Times of London: The G20 summit in London next week is, he says, the last chance to avert disaster. “The odds would favour that it fails because there are such differences of opinion. It’s difficult enough to get it right in your own country let alone with 20 governments coming together, but if it’s a failure I think then the global financial and trading system falls apart.”
If the G20 is nothing but a talking shop then he thinks we are heading for meltdown. “That could push the world into depression. It’s really a make-or-break occasion. That’s why it’s so important.” The chances of a depression are, he says, “quite high” – even if that is averted, the recession will last a long time. “Look, we are not going back to where we came from. In that sense it’s going to last for ever.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/222342/Soros-The-Recession-Will-Last-Forever?tickers=^dji,^gspc