Buried in this story in the Guardian about (what else) the violent death of ten security guards and the kidnapping of an African engineer, was this report about a suspected case of Bird Flu in Baghdad:
Elsewhere, Iraqi doctors were investigating if a 15-year-old girl who recently died from a lung infection was infected with bird flu, a Health Ministry official said Wednesday.
The girl’s family apparently kept chickens in their house in the northeast Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyah, and some of those birds also died, said Dr. Abdul Jalil Naji, who heads the ministry’s bird flu office.
A health official in Sulaimaniyah, Sherko Abdellah, said an initial autopsy found no evidence of bird flu in the girl but blood samples have been sent to Jordan for more tests. Officials were also on the way to Sulaimaniyah to investigate.
Turkey, which borders Iraq to the north, is battling an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus, with 21 confirmed human cases. Sulaimaniyah is more than 120 miles from the Turkish border.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that bird flu might already have spread from Turkey to neighboring countries, including Iraq. There have been no confirmed human cases so far in Iraq.
Let’s hope the tests confirm this young woman didn’t die of bird flu, but this should remind all of us how quickly this epidemic could spread to the United States. Turkey, which borders on Iraq, has numerous cases of confirmed bird flu at present, and with all of our soldiers and other US civilians in Iraq, the virus is only a trans-atlantic flight away from appearing at a neighborhood or military base near you.
More Iraq stories after the break . . .
There are other incidents of violence reported in the same Guardian story, including this report about a 72 hour deadline imposed by the captors of hostage Jill Carroll, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor:
Police are also working to secure the release of kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll, who was seen in a tape aired on an Arab TV station late Tuesday for the first time since her Jan. 7 abduction in Baghdad.
Al-Jazeera said the tape, a silent 20-second video showing Carroll appearing pale and tired, also included a threat to kill the 28-year-old freelance writer in 72 hours if U.S. authorities didn’t release all Iraqi women in military custody.
U.S. military spokeswoman Sgt. Stacy Simon said eight Iraqi women are currently detained, but provided no further details.
Carroll, working for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper, was abducted in one of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods as she was being driven to meet a Sunni Arab politician, who failed to appear for the interview. Carroll’s translator was killed.
On the tape, Carroll is wearing a white-colored pullover, while her long, straight, brown hair is parted in the middle and pulled back from her face as she speaks into the camera. Al-Jazeera would not tell The Associated Press how it received the tape, but the station issued its own statement calling for Carroll’s release.
A still photograph of Carroll from the videotape appeared on Al-Jazeera’s Web site carrying a logo reading “The Revenge Brigade,” a group that was not previously known from other claims of responsibility of violence in Iraq.
I fear that nothing will be done for Ms. Carroll in time to save her life. If so, she will be another casualty in a war which has claimed the lives of more journalists in 3 years than died during the entire Vietnam war. A true tragedy for her family, but also for all of us. By all accounts, Ms. Carroll is an intrepid reporter who has worked doggedly to expose the truth about the events in Iraq, despite the danger posed by the insurgents, and the obfuscation and disinformation of the US government.
Meanwhile, 1000 US troops backed by Iraqi forces have commenced yet another operation to clear insurgents in the western province of Anbar:
About 1,000 US troops backed by Iraqi soldiers have launched a counterinsurgency operation in the western Iraqi province of Anbar.
Operation Wadi Aljundi is targeting insurgents and their weapons caches in the Western Euphrates River Valley between the Jubbah and Baghdadi regions and the city of Hit, 85 miles west of Baghdad.
The US forces, with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable), are searching houses and cordoning areas for weapons and insurgents.
If at first you don’t succeed . . . Not sure how many offensives have been conducted in Anbar by “Coalition” forces, but the mere fact they keep having to return, again and again, speaks volumes.
Finally, from the Department of Why Am I Not Surprised, comes this tidbit:
Early doubts about uranium sale to Iraq
By Eric Lichtblau The New York TimesWEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2006
A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was “unlikely” because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department.
Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department’s intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send “25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers” filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.
The analysts’ doubts were registered nearly a year before President George W. Bush, in what became known as the notorious “16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
The White House later acknowledged that the charge, which played a part in the decision to invade Iraq in the belief that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear program, should not have been included in the speech and relied on faulty intelligence. And two months ago, Italian intelligence officials concluded that a set of documents at the center of the purported Iraq-Niger link had been forged by an occasional Italian spy.
Go read the whole article.
sorry for posting right after you.
Lichtblau is really getting a lot of damaging information lately, isn’t he?
Or they’re finally letting him publish stories that he’s had for a while. These days who can say?
…with all of our soldiers and other US civilians in Iraq, the virus is only a trans-atlantic flight away from appearing at a neighborhood or military base near you.
Only if they’re transporting chickens or ducks at this point, as the virus has yet to mutate to allow efficient human-to-human transmission. However, medical experts feel that is only a matter of time.
I expect that will be a distinction lost on the general public, though, and once the bird flu is established in Iraq (again, only a matter of time) there will likely be an additional cohort of families and others calling for a speedy pullout from “the hot zone.”
Addressing the health problem in Iraq may require the presence of WHO personnel. How the administration will respond to this can only be imagined. It will, however, serve as an experimental demonstration to them that martial law is not an adequate or effective strategy for dealing with pandemics. Not that I expect them to believe the science. More likely, they’ll decide that the noose needed to be tighter, so tight that a virus couldn’t fit through. They have a track record of drawing exactly the wrong conclusions from a situation, after all.
And a mass destruction of local poultry will really do wonders for our reputation with the locals in Iraq.
Interestingly, some historical accounts say that the 1918 flu epidemic reached the US with returning soldiers from WWI, a meme that likely will not be lost on the media, which finds that nothing sells Dodge Ram pickups, Nyquil and Viagra better than a good round of public panic.
An interesting account of the effects of the 1918 flu epidemic on Philadelphia, drawn from newspaper accounts of the time, can be found here. It’s sobering reading, and I recommend it highly to all so you can mentally brace yourself on what the worst-case scenario could be. On the other hand, there is evidence out of Turkey that the bird flu might be somewhat less deadly than initially thought, a hope to hang on to…
The truth is, we aren’t sure if the virus can be transmitted from human to human. Some of the stories out of Turkey suggest that that may now be the case.
As always we have to hope for the best.
Would not surprise me in the least. Anyone else remember the SARS epidemic? Pretty much as soon as it left China, the virulence and transmission rate dropped way, way down. It seemed pretty clear that the Chinese government had been seriously mishandling the situation – taking inadequate precautions, trying to maintain political face instead of actually doing the right thing, etc. It’s not said outright, but that article you link to strongly imply Business As Usual in China.
I’m sorry, but I’m highly skeptical of the whole bird flu narrative. Too me it smacks all too much of the spectre of the “mushroom cloud”– as another politically useful bogeyman, and another way to pad the pockets of Pharma (i.e., let’s all stock up on Tamiflu). I don’t mean to entirely dismiss the possibilty of a repeat of flu epidemics of yore.
Maybe it’s just my own thick hide– I mean, I’ve already had HIV for some years, and living with that for so long, it almost amuses me to see everyone go all Chicken Little over a flu bug (look at the mortality rates during the past flu epidemics, for instance– it’s a bit of yawner for those of us who thought for certain we’d have been dead of AIDS by now). In the Poz community we call such people “the worried well.”
I don’t even get a flu shot each year and I’ve got like half a normal immune system (I’m more worried about the mercury in the flu shots than the bug itself). And I’m old enough to remember the Swine Flu and Legionnaire’s diseases debacles (the latter, btw, was a big headline at the same time gay men were first starting to catch HIV en masse, the latter of which was almost completely ignored by the media until, oh, around 1985 or so when children and straight women started getting sick– imagine how many of those toddlers and ladies they might’ve saved if they’d broadcast the story early enough with an accurate sense of its potential threat).
Anyhow, keep stocking up on your Tamiflu– maybe I should buy some of their stock in the meantime. I bet W’s cronies already have….
Google rumsfeld + tamiflu…no surprise there.
It also provides a convenient way for the government to crack down on free-range poultry farms.
Good point. For something like H5N1 to jump from animals to human, you need the coexistence of birds + swine. This could be an argument for herding the pigs and chickens back into their industrial factory cubicles.
It’s already being used as an argument to try and convince farmers to confine their free-range chickens. Which, of course, removes their competitive advantage against big factory farmers.
Many of these farmers are probably minimal risk to begin with. They take good care of their birds, and watch carefully for sources of infection like this. Also, the close quarters of coops seem much more likely to spread the disease rapidly between birds and to the human handlers.
OOPS, I did not intend a pun when saying “Chicken Littles” in reference to the bird flu.
(blushing)
Then again, this administration would find a bird flu epedemic in Iraq as just cause for “keeping them over there”(referring to our soldiers) so we don’t have a pandemic here. Am I cynical or what?
I’ve seen speculation that the 1918 pandemic was caused in part by the return of many troops that had been vaccinated. Think about all the U.S. troops now in Iraq and environs who have been shot full of god knows what kinds of chemicals, some of which likely work against each other, and whose immune systems are thus weakened and who are under horrific stress anyway. what happens when they all get home?
Not surprising that it’s turned up in northeastern Iraq, given that it’s apparently in Turkey. And things like flu don’t pay attention to the imaginary boundaries drawn by people.
Steven D you seem to believe everything.
Quit worrying about Bird Flu. It’s another “terror” that the media loves and the administration (of what?) uses to scare people.
Of course Bird Flu comes from “foreigners”. We have to protect our borders and keep them out. They will blow us up or make us sick. It could never originate here. We are clean. Those foreigners are dirty and they live with their animals…and of course they are really dumb people, uneducated…not like us….we’re smart…we can read and write., some of us were very good students in school and got A and B’s, so we know we are smart. People in Iraq are poor, they don’t have money and everything is all blown up, becasue they are so dumb, they got themselves blown up. Now we are trying to help them with democracy so they can be smart like us.
But they are trying to give us the bird flu because they don’t appreciate all we have done for them.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/
. Is there a connection between 1918 and bird flu today? I haven’t read any conclusive proof. And have they shown that it has migrated to humans? I don’t think anything is clear.
I am saying whatever it’s merits it is being used to scare people and appeal to their prejudices on precious little factual information and plenty of factual specualtion.
yes there is absolute a connection between today and 1918.
http://www.fluwikie.com/index.php?n=Main.TourLevelI
I’m not buying into this is all I am saying. There are lots of viruses. This is the one they have latched on to to create hysteria.
It makes for great reading, it’s scary…maybe people like scary stuff. Wasn’t there a movie called Virus? And a great distraction from real world events that I think are a lot more scary.
Okay Stu, but on this you are just wrong.
With respect, I’ll tell you why.
Normal viruses kill only the very old and the very young, who are compromised immune systems. You or I get the flu and we are miserble for a few days, but we don’t die. That is because we have some immunity from human viruses.
However, we have no immunity from bird viruses. So, if we catch them we are in dire jeopardy of dying from it. Fortunately, it is rare for a bird virus to jump to humans, but A(H5N1) has already done that…
There is only one reason why potentially millions of people have not already died. And that reason is that A(H5N1) has not mutated to the point where human-to-human transmission is easy. If it does, we’re fucked and it could be 1918 all over again.
Whatever advances in medicine we have made since 1918 will be of little assistance to us because there will not be any hospital beds or medicine available once it gets used up by the first wave.
We won’t be able to dispose of the dead fast enough, so all kinds of secondary outbreaks will kill off even more people.
As for the idea that this fear is based on racism, that is absurd. Bird Flu mutations occur most easily where birds are kept in very cramped and unsanitary conditions. It can happen here, but they call is Asian Flu for a reason. Most often new flu trains develop in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc.
I don’t see anyone using the fear of bird flu to scare people into supporting neo-conservatism and I don’t know where you got such an idea.
Just be glad that Bush is listening to the scientists for once in his life.
Not true, Boo, for several reasons:
1) 1918 was made worse by soldiers returning from the war and living in very poor sanitary conditions. There were a lot of people coming back from unsanitary conditions abroad, crammed into small ships, then crammed into hastily-assembled camps here in NA, then returned to their homes.
2) One of the reasons A(H5N1) is so virulent is that it isn’t a human virus. Our immune systems don’t know how to handle it. It’s entirely possible that most mutations that would make it human-to-human transmissible would also significantly reduce its virulence, because they’d involve it changing into something we’re better-equipped to handle. There have been cases of this happening – it is, if memory serves, one of the reasons why SARS might have died off. It simply mutated into something that our immune systems could eat for breakfast, as it were.
If I’m up on my immunology, and I’m probably not, current thinking is that these killer plagues aren’t new. They’ve jumped the species barrier before, and quite often. It’s just that our medical system is only now developed enough and our population density high enough that we’re able to spot them during their virulent phase.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t take precautions, but predicting an inevitable epidemic if the virus mutates is probably unrealistic.
fair points. But if it mutates without compromising its virulence then we’re in big trouble.
Or were you talking about congress?
If, yes. But then we’re left with the question of “Why hasn’t this happened before?” One possibility is closer quarters and better transportation, but when one considers the late 19th century, that sort of becomes questionable. Another is that the virulence of animal-human diseases like this one comes because they’re not adapted for human-to-human transmission, which is how they slip under our immune system.
As an aside, if there have only been the three deaths in Turkey, that’s very interesting. Because from the articles I read, all three children had been playing with the corpses of chickens that died from A(H5N1).
Bush is listening becuase it serves a purpose. To scare people and to present himself as a leader who you must depend on to solve the problem.
Whatever happened to Monkey Pox?
Since Viruses can’t be contained permanently, any virus can have a destructive effect on a human being that it has no defense against with it’s immune system.
So all that you say may very well be true. But what are the odds this is going to happen? I think they are extremely low and I remember some “experts” etc. saying as such.
There are a number of important distinctions between 1918 and now. I’m at work and don’t have to time to enumerate them, but one that stands out: the soldiers then were living in trenches– they lived and died in filth and were exposed to all sorts of pathogens (flu was only one of the bugs that killed them– plus, all those bullets must’ve hurt, too). Today’s soldiers have Pizza Huts and get a whole soup of innoculations (again, I’m more worried about the mercury that Big Pill– er, Pharma– puts in all those vaccines than the actual viruses).
Also, the standard of medicine and hygience and whatnot then, in the early 20th century… I mean, LOTS of Americans still used outhouses and wiped their bums with corncobs or catalogues, and rural electrification didn’t get started in earnest until the 30’s. I wonder what standard of care they found at their local clinics?
I’d much rather all these hundreds of millions of dollars that are being proposed to line the pockets of Big Pill go to, say, buy some real armor for the troops. Or, even better, let’s buy some damn mosquito nets for the children in the tropics who are certifiably dying of malaria even as I type this.
The conditions the Iraqi people are living under currently do NOT include “Pizza Hut and a whole soup of inoculations.” They are exposed to the effects of ongoing radiation from depleted uranium, many suffer from poor nutrition, and they lack access to healthcare. Add to that the ongoing issues with sporadic electricity and running water, and you have increased the likelihood of a public health disaster, IMO. If the bird flu is going to jump species, it will do it in an at-risk population.
I said “soldiers,” not Iraqi people (I was speaking of US troops).
These were the conditions US troops faces in WWI, from a site called firstwoldwar.com:
Rat Infestation
Rats in their millions infested trenches. There were two main types, the brown and the black rat. Both were despised but the brown rat was especially feared. Gorging themselves on human remains (grotesquely disfiguring them by eating their eyes and liver) they could grow to the size of a cat.
Men, exasperated and afraid of these rats (which would even scamper across their faces in the dark), would attempt to rid the trenches of them by various methods: gunfire, with the bayonet, and even by clubbing them to death.
It was futile however: a single rat couple could produce up to 900 offspring in a year, spreading infection and contaminating food. The rat problem remained for the duration of the war (although many veteran soldiers swore that rats sensed impending heavy enemy shellfire and consequently disappeared from view).
Frogs, Lice and Worse
Rats were by no means the only source of infection and nuisance. Lice were a never-ending problem, breeding in the seams of filthy clothing and causing men to itch unceasingly.
Even when clothing was periodically washed and deloused, lice eggs invariably remained hidden in the seams; within a few hours of the clothes being re-worn the body heat generated would cause the eggs to hatch.
Lice caused Trench Fever, a particularly painful disease that began suddenly with severe pain followed by high fever. Recovery – away from the trenches – took up to twelve weeks. Lice were not actually identified as the culprit of Trench Fever until 1918.
Frogs by the score were found in shell holes covered in water; they were also found in the base of trenches. Slugs and horned beetles crowded the sides of the trench.
Many men chose to shave their heads entirely to avoid another prevalent scourge: nits.
Trench Foot was another medical condition peculiar to trench life. It was a fungal infection of the feet caused by cold, wet and unsanitary trench conditions. It could turn gangrenous and result in amputation. Trench Foot was more of a problem at the start of trench warfare; as conditions improved in 1915 it rapidly faded, although a trickle of cases continued throughout the war.
It was a different time…..and that has a lot to do with the possibility that this virus could spread.
I don’t think it will spread and I don’t think there are many terrroists in this world and i am not afraid of them.
I am only afraid of people who are afraid. They are the ones, who spread the disease of fear and with it an unending cycle of violence.
They are always people who are small minded.
Reasons why the Republicans will never properly fund prevention efforts:
Reasons why the Democrats will never properly fund prevention efforts:
I hate when I have a typo in my post!
Should read: