# 1115
My thanks to one of my loyal readers, Gary the Fire Dude, for sending me this article. At first I thought this was recycled news, since there were grim predictions made at an Australian conference earlier this summer.
But this article appears to reference the recent Hutchinson Study that confirmed that H2H transmission occurred in Kao Indonesia last year, which would make it current. Radio Australia is also carrying a short blurb on bird flu, with quotes from David Heymann.
WHO Warns Bird Flu Pandemic More Likely Than Not
September 5, 2007 -
The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that a bird flu pandemic is likely.
Head of the communicable diseases department of WHO, Dr David Heymann, said in Canberra, Australia Wednesday that his organization had evidence that the H5N1 (bird flu) virus was now communicable between human and human.
Dr Heymann said because of international travel and the short time the infection will take to travel from person to person, it was not a question of if a pandemic would occur but when.
"Because of international travel and the speed with which people might be infected, [people] in one part of the world can come to another part of the world still in the incubation period of a disease and the develop signs and symptoms of that disease once they are home," he said.
He warned health workers in contact with those who had contracted the virus saying, "Fortunately [thus far] health workers have not been infected with H5N1 from their patients, it's been much closer contact than that, it's been home care where family members may not know the means of protecting themselves as they help those who are sick," he said.
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Representatives from the WHO have been increasingly vocal about the threat of a pandemic over the past few months. The statements coming out of Australia have been particularly blunt.
Dr. Heymann is no lightweight at the WHO. He is the Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases. When he offers an opinion, it is one we should take seriously.
Of course, trying to quantify statements such as `likely' and `more likely than not', can be difficult when no timeframe is included. If open ended, at some point, another pandemic is all but inevitable, making `likely' practically an understatement.
The real concern is not whether another pandemic will occur, but whether one will occur soon. And while no one seems capable of predicting when, the tone of these warnings illustrate just how worried many public health officials are that we are uncomfortably close to the next global health crisis.
