Asian Flu
Are we in for a new pandemic of Asian flu?
In 1957 there was a very serious Asian flu
pandemic that killed anywhere from 1 million people to 4 million
people. Different bodies give different numbers but even at one
million you are looking at a huge number of people. Anyway this
Asian flu strain was finally dealt with and all was fine again until
October of 2004. This is the year that an American lab sent out
samples of this deadly, deadly strain of Asian flu to different labs
all over the world. Now I am not talking about a few measly deadly
samples of the Asian flu, I am talking about 3,700 samples of the
Asian flu. Did you get the all over the world part?
Now of course the US is scrambling to try to fix
this horrible mistake, they are doing their best to get all of these
wayward samples of the Asian flu destroyed but, well, good luck. He
labs did not know they were going to be getting such a potentially
deadly virus sent to them. So how did this happen you ask?
There is a body known as the College of American
Pathologists and what they do every now and then is send different
viruses to labs all over the world. They do this so that these labs
can test to see how good they are doing. The CAP is supposed to know
what they are sending out though, it is only the receiving lab that
is in the dark. Well, the CAP thought that they were sending out a
regular old Influenza A virus but ooops, not so much. Instead they
sent out one of the most deadly viruses in human history: the Asian
flu.
The thing is that if this Asian flu has gotten out
or if it does the world could be in big trouble. None of us who are
born after 1968 will be able to fend this Asian flu off at all, we
all have absolutely zero immunity to it, this means that the Asian
flu will hit us just as hard or worse than it did the people in
1957.
Supposedly this whole Asian flu episode is some
sort of misunderstanding, though how this could have happened really
is still a mystery. How could 3,700 samples of Asian flu get put out
into the world by accident? They were sent to Asia, the Middle East,
North America and South America as well as Europe.
What strikes fear into the heart of so many in the
know is that these test kits that got sent out were treated like
other test kits are treated which is not a good thing when what they
contain is a deadly Asian flu. These samples of the Asian flu should
have been handled with extreme care and a high level of containment
but they were not. Since these types of kits usually contain
something harmless they were treated as such. This doe not bode well
for us, the public when it comes to protecting us from the Asian
flu.
Recommended Reading:
Asian Flu
Chicken Flu FAQs
Cold Flu
The history of
the Spanish flu
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