14 DAY TRIAL // Germany announced on Thursday a series of drastic measures against bird flu, after discovering new cases in the country, leading to a total of 140 infected animals, most of them in the Baltic Sea region.
The Minister of Agriculture announced that access to poultry farms will be restricted to people directly involved in operations of these sites, after already imposing restrictions of access within a 3-kilometre radius from where infected birds where found. Officials had to deal with people who desperately wanted to give up their cats, some even willing to put them to sleep, after a cat died because of the H5N1 virus.
The virus has not yet mutated so it cannot be transmitted among humans. Dr Barbara Bannister, director of the high security infectious diseases unit at Coppetts Wood Hospital, stated in order to reassure the audience that people are now more healthier and that scientists made considerable progress since the three bird flu pandemics, in 1918, 1957 and 1968:
"We are much better placed than we used to be. We have drugs to treat the virus infection. We understand much better how the virus is spread, we are better at making effective vaccines and we have a worldwide surveillance system telling us what the virus is doing and where."
Dr. Bannister talks about the Tamiflu, which, if taken within 48 hours of the first symptoms, considerably shortens the illness. Symptoms are the same as for the normal flu, the illness comes quite suddenly and it spreads the same as normal flu. There are still many unknown variables because the virus has not yet mutated.
Dr Hemda Garelick, at the Middlesex University, asserted: "The mortality rate of the current virus is unusually high. When it becomes a human virus it is likely to lose a bit of virulence, but scientists don't know what the mortality rate is going to be with a human virus. There are lots of uncertainties but people are taking it seriously. I would like to see the Government develop a vaccine for humans. If they vaccinate enough people, no-one should die."