Recent content by niman

Case Mortality Rate The media is now starting to cover the high case mortality rate (72%) as well as the mediaa age of fatal cases (13) http://www.recombinomics.com/H5N1_case_mortality_rate.html

Please. H5N1 has been identified in patients in Vietnam and Thailand and the case fatality rate is 70-80%. Citing other strains in other locations or times is pretty irrelevant. H3N2 has a lower case fatality rate and H5N1 is 2004 in locations other than Vietnam or Thailand have not been...

It Is 2004 Check out the calendar. It is 2004. 1997 saw the first documented human H5N1 cases. 6 of the 18 confirmed cases died. That's a case fatality rate of 33%. The H5N1 circulating in Asia has evolved quite a bit since 1997, which is why the 1997 pandemic vaccine is not very...

H5N1 Mating and Mutating Today Reuters has a story on the looming flu pandemic. The use a 1% case fatality rate, which is VERY optimistic. They also state that there has been no evidence of H5N1 mating and mutating, which is clearly wrong http://www.recombinomics.com/H5N1_mating_mutating.html

Much has been made of pigs as a "mixing vessel". However, H5N1 has evolved considerably and it is not clear that a mammalian mixing vessel is required for H5N1 to achieve human to human transmission. The most prevelent serotype in Asia is H9N2 and some H9s already have human receptor binding...

Quarantine The effectiveness of quarantine really depends of the organism. For SARS quarantine may have helped because peak levels of virus shedding was several days after symptoms (and seasonal factors may have played a fairly major role). Flu can move around pretty quickly and there...

New Vaccines The technologies exist not only for stockpiling vaccines, but also for predicting new isolates before they emerge http://www.recombinomics.com/vaccine_development.html but its easier to do on paper than scale up to make billions of vaccines.

Case Mortality Rate The case mortality rate in the 70-80% is pretty solid. There were human cases in Vietnam and Thailand at the beginning of this year, and then another wave over the summer. All data sets have case mortaility rates in the 70-80% range. The key question concerns human...