"Climate Of Fear" Expected To Smash Asian Economies When Bird Flu Pandemic Hits

Even a short pandemic, of only a few weeks duration, killing a few thousand people, is expected to absolutely devastate the economy of the country most unfortunate to suffer such a fate.

What makes economists so nervous about the dreaded H5N1 pandemic is that the idea of a "short pandemic" is fiction. The World Health Organisation, and most recently Australian health minister Tony Abbott, talk of pandemic 'waves' lasting a few months each, with perhaps as many as three or four subsequent 'waves' in the next two or so years.

The economic devastation comes from such a wide array of financial impacts it's almost impossible to sum them up briefly. But the short version is this : when people start dying of bird flu, and a pandemic level outbreak is announced, most people will stop going to work, and public gatherings and public transport systems will be shut down, to halt the spread of the infection.

People won't be going to the mall, but there won't be people to serve them or stock the shelves even if they did go. Now imagine that paradigm across every aspect of the social and business life of a city, or large town.

The "climate of fear" under discussion in the story below also includes the possibility of widespread panic, and subsequent extremely negative economic impacts that follow, even when the human death tolls are low, and the spread halted quickly.

Well, the World Health Organisation has spent three years now scaring the crap out of people about how dangerous and deadly H5N1 can be, and how careful people need to be around poultry birds that may be infected. Of course there is going to be a "climate of fear", the WHO helped to create this reality.

From Hindustan Times :

Asia-Pacific health ministers said on Friday that a "climate of fear" that accompanies the outbreak of infectious diseases such as bird flu could have a devastating impact on Asia's economies.

The APEC Health Ministers conference in Sydney ended on Friday with a commitment to share virus specimens and vaccines and to work to encourage investor and consumer confidence to help Asia-Pacific economies recover in the event of a pandemic.

"The climate of fear that disease outbreaks such as avian influenza bring can rapidly sap the confidence and enterprise that underpins the economic dynamism of our region," Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott told the conference.

The health ministers endorsed a plan called "APEC Functioning Economies in Times of Pandemic Guidelines" which aims to assist in managing economies during a pandemic. The guidelines cover communications, essential services, financial systems and movement between and within countries.

"We recognise that healthy populations contribute to economic growth and development. Conversely, any threat to the health of a population can have a devastating effect on prosperity," the ministers from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum said in a statement.

The ministers said that the Asia-Pacific needed to replicate the co-operation seen during the SARS respiratory crisis in 2003 to combat the threat of a bird flu pandemic.

"The global nature of pandemic influenza and other virulent disease demands international solidarity, co-operation and co-ordination of efforts...for the sharing of information and resources," said the ministers.

World Health Organisation : Get Ready, The Pandemic Is Coming

UPDATE : A very serious warning about the coming pandemic is announced publicly by the chief of the World Health Organisation and it gets very little media coverage. At least, very little in comparison to, say, the latest news about whether or not Paris Hilton will go to jail for drunk driving.

Here's WHO chief Margaret Chan speaking in Singapore on April 2 :

"The next pandemic will certainly happen..."

'We cannot let our guard down,'' Chan said. ''My advice for all member states is to maintain vigilance, to prepare for the pandemic. One thing we know for certain is that any country that is prepared will see less damage.''

Previously...

It's been tipped as a very likely possibility for almost four years now, but we just heard a radio report that appeared to be stating that a worldwide bird flu pandemic is now coming.

According to a report on Australia's 'Radio National', Margaret Chan, the chief of the World Health Organisation, told a meeting of avian influenza experts in Singapore that the world must now prepare for the bird flu pandemic.

Chan said it was no longer a possibility, but a certainty.

She urged all the governments of the world to begin, or to finalise, their preparations for the bird flu pandemic, to cope with the hundreds of millions who will need to be hospitalised, and the many millions who are expected to die.

No links up yet, as this information was taken from a radio report. We'll update when news media start running reports on the net.

You can only hope she's ramping up the hype, for whatever reason. The world, on the whole, is clearly not prepared for a repeat of, or something worse than, the 1918 pandemic, when more than 60 million people out of a worldwide population of less than one billion died.

Bush Reads A Book On The Deadliest Plague In History

Has Bird Flu Escaped From A Bio Research Lab In Flood Devastated New Orleans?

By Darryl Mason.

GW Bush is not known for being a big reader. If you’re thinking of ‘My Pet Goat’ on the morning of September 11, remember that was being read to him by a school kid while the US was under savage attack by jet-hijacking freedom haters.

But things have changed. The White House issued a short statement a few weeks ago to inform the media that GW Bush was spending the longest holiday in US presidential history catching up on some light reading.

Not ‘My Pet Goat II’ but a weighty tome entitled ‘The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History.’

So what’s it about? ‘The Great Influenza’ details the stunning impact of the Spanish Flu pandemic that swept the globe from 1918-1919, and explains how the death toll of 60 to 100 million people changed society and politics across the planet.

There was little warning before the Spanish Flu hit. Unlike most flu epidemics this one killed without discrimination. It laid waste to infants, old people, healthy young men.

If you caught it, you could die within a couple of days, there was no cure. Back then, they didn't even know what was killing millions was an actual virus, they thought it was bacteria.

The book describes how doctors, hospitals, morgues and graveyards were overwhelmed by the endless casualties. It cited the US city of Philadelphia as one example where 5000 people died in a week. Mass rioting broke out, whole streets full of cramped dwellings were torched and corpses were piled in mounds a dozen bodies high. They were tossed into carts and transported to mass burial sites.

In some European cities, entire towns were burned to the ground, with the dying still in their homes, to try and contain the spread of Spanish Flu. Ships were torched in harbours before passengers could get to land. The author of ‘The Great Influenza’ described how ships still at sea were blocked from entering ports and became “floating caskets.”

The flu virus originated in animals but mutated quickly and crossed over into humans. Exactly the scenario now forcing the World Health Organisation to make claims that the threat of a bird flu pandemic in humans was not a case of If but When.

Some details of the book make for uncomfortable reading today, and no doubt GW Bush had some sleepless nights as he worked his way through its pages.

The global conditions that encouraged the spread of the Spanish Flu have some striking parallels to our own time.

Of particular significance were the overcrowded military, refugee and evacuee camps of World War I that gave the virus plenty of bodies in which to thrive through the last days of that war.

For today’s world, think of Iraq’s ‘Green Zone’, the post-Katrina camps and shelters across 20 US states and the numerous trailer parks filled with millions across Africa.

Massive troop deployments also encouraged the spread of Spanish flu, as the rotations of troops through Iraq and Afghanistan would encourage a pandemic to spread further, farther, if it were to break out today.

A lack of capable medical facilities, vaccine and a shortage of doctors and nurses also helped the 1918-19 death toll to move into the tens of millions. There are few countries in the world today that can honestly claim to have a universal public health system that could cope with a bird flu pandemic.

Australia’s health minister Tony Abbott doesn’t even try to deny that the death toll would be enormous and that there is little his government can do to help those infected.

Then, as now, the sick will be quarantined in their homes and left to die.

In Australia the Spanish Flu killed an estimated 20,000 people out of a population of four million, and that was in the days when interstate travel was virtually unheard of for the majority of people.

Incredibly, hundreds of young Australian men who had survived the incomprehensible horrors of World War I returned home only to catch the flu and then, quickly, die.

In Australia, schools, churches, concert halls, theatres, train stations, public squares, pubs, were all locked down. Farms, factories and city business districts ground to a halt as people fled to the country to escape the pandemic. They only succeeded in transporting the virus to rural Australia, where it killed as effortlessly as it had in heavily populated city centres.

Two weeks ago, GW Bush returned from his holiday reading to find his country awash with at least 300,000 people crowded into camps and shelters across some 20 states. He has already declared a State of Emergency that encompasses more than two thirds of the US, and some 80,000 troops and support crews (including deployments from Mexico, Canada and Israel) are on the ground in at least four states smashed by Hurricane Katrina.

New deployments of National Guard to Iraq and Afghanistan are being cut back, soldiers are being recalled from the war zones and the Department of Defence is calling for at least 3000 volunteers from within their civilian ranks to deal with an unspecified ‘crisis’ in the homeland.

In Q & As with journalists as he toured the Hurricane Katrina disaster zones, Bush made reference to “a possible avian flu pandemic” and how the US would cope with such an outbreak. He was short on details.

Finally, in the days following Hurricane Katrina, the US Centre For Disease Control issued guidelines on how the many bioresearch labs and facilities in the Katrina disaster zones should go about reporting lost, damaged, compromised or stolen ‘stock’.

One such bioresearch facility in central New Orleans is located on the campus of Tulane University. The facility was flooded. Amongst the active bio-agents listed in its ‘stockpile’ that have been possibly lost, damaged, compromised or stolen was avian influenza.