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Health agency lowers bird flu prediction
By Associated press
Published October 1, 2005
GENEVA - The World Health Organization moved Friday to revise alarming predictions that a pandemic stemming from the bird flu virus ravaging parts of Asia could kill as many as 150-million people.
The U.N. health agency was deluged with inquiries after Dr. David Nabarro - named Thursday as the U.N. coordinator for avian and human influenza - cited the number during a news conference at the U.N.'s New York headquarters.
While WHO's flu spokesman at the agency's Geneva headquarters did not say the 150-million prediction was wrong, he said that 7.4-million deaths is a more realistic estimate.
Scientists have made predictions ranging from less than 2-million to 360-million.
"We're not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic begins," WHO influenza spokesman Dick Thompson said Friday.
WHO said Friday it considers the most likely scenario to be a death toll of between 2-million and 7.4-million people.
Experts agree there will certainly be another flu pandemic - a new human flu strain that goes global. However, it is unknown when or how bad that global epidemic will be.
It also is unknown whether the H5N1 bird flu strain circulating in Asian poultry now will be the origin of the next pandemic. But experts are tracking it in case, and governments across the world are preparing themselves for such a possibility.
Between 250,000 and 500,000 die yearly from normal seasonal flu viruses, according to WHO.
The worst death rate was seen in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. That killed 2.6 percent of those who got sick, or about 40-million people. "That was an extreme of an already rare event," Thompson said.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu has swept through poultry populations in Asia since 2003, jumping to humans and killing at least 65 people - more than 40 of them in Vietnam - and resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of birds.
Most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds. But WHO has warned the virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans - changing into a human pandemic flu strain.
[Last modified October 1, 2005, 01:46:16]
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