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February 23rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda THURSDAY, Feb. 23 (HealthDay News) — The avian flu, which killed
almost 60 percent of those known to be infected, actually struck many more
people worldwide but didn’t make them very sick, a new analysis finds.
The actual fatality rate of the H5N1 flu strain, therefore, is probably
less than 60 percent considering that millions of people may have been
infected over the past eight years, the researchers report.
The analysis results confirm earlier findings, said one expert, Dr.
Marc Siegel, an associate professor of medicine at New York University.
It’s still not clear how fatal the strain actually is, but the research
“emphasizes that H5N1 is not as deadly in humans as is being proposed by
some people,” said Siegel, author of Bird Flu: Everything You Need to
Know About the Next Pandemic.
Siegel added that he doesn’t think “this particular virus is going to
mutate to go easily from human to human. That’s extremely unlikely.”
Scientists and public health officials have been sounding the alarm for
years about the potential that the avian flu strain called H5N1 could
become a major threat to humans. As of last December, the World Health
Organization (WHO) reported a total of 573 cases since 2003; of those, 59
percent died.
Fears about the strain are so intense that a controversy erupted this
year over whether scientists might help bioterrorists by publishing
details about their research into bird flu. The WHO agreed last week to
allow the research, which examines a mutated and more contagious form of
bird flu, to be published.
In the new report, researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in
New York City launched a combined analysis of 20 studies that examined
blood test results from than 12,500 people. They found that 1 percent to 2
percent of them had signs that they’d been infected with the H5N1
infection. Most of those said they hadn’t recently had cold or fever
symptoms.
The research suggests that few people are being infected by the strain,
Siegel said. It would be unusual for this particular type of flu to mutate
in a dangerous way that could cause it to become contagious between
people, he said.
Philip Alcabes, a professor of public health at City University of New
York’s School of Public Health at Hunter College, cautioned that the
findings do show that the strain infects people more easily than
previously thought.
“Does this mean H5N1 is more or less of a threat to human health?
Really, the report changes nothing in that regard — because the public
health concern about avian flu is about the possibility of future change
in the virus-human relationship. With this study we know a little more
about the present virus-human relationship — but we still don’t have a
crystal ball,” Alcabes said.
“So it remains important to understand how animal viruses, including
H5N1 and others, circulate among animals and how they migrate to human
populations,” added Alcabes, who was not involved in the new study.
The analysis appears in the Feb. 23 online issue of Science.
More information:
For more on pandemic flu, try the U.S. National Library of
Medicine.
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