My friend Randy works for a large computer equipment company in Colorado. The employees fly to Asia a lot, and some were concerned about catching SARS or Bird Flu. One of Randy's friends put together an Excel spreadsheet to analyze the risk. Click on images for enlargement.
I know people are concerned about the possibility of a "bird flu pandemic". The news media is not helping to calm these fears. The truth is, from the last news clippings I have, that there have been 22 human fatalities in Vietnam and Thailand. The incidence of this cause of death is twice as high as the probability of dying in an airline accident — but to keep this in perspective, you are 20 times more likely to be killed by lightning in Colorado than a Vietnam citizen is likely to die of bird flu!! All human incidents of the disease have been in people who handled sick birds. There is no known mutation of the virus to a state that would allow transmission between people. There have been no instances of humans becoming sick from eating properly cooked poultry. 80 million chickens & ducks have been exterminated in the Asian countries whose poultry has been infected. My sense is that there is less and less concern as time goes on, and the efforts of the governments to control the outbreak in the bird populations is resulting in a reduction of the problem.
…the probability of dying from SARS in Taiwan was roughly the same as the probability of being hit by lightning in Colorado.
UPDATE: Aalia sez:
I enjoyed your post earlier on the low risk of catching bird flu. However I
hate to nitpick but I'd just been reading a few articles on the subject and
couldn't resist pointing out that there is a probable human to human case of
transmission in Thailand, under investigation by WHO.
This was reported in ProMed Digest today:
"Thailand went on high alert last week [final week of Sep 2004], after it
reported that an earlier avian influenza victim died after probably
contracting the virus from her daughter. She was the 1st person in this
outbreak believed to have contracted the disease from another human, rather
than from poultry." Source cited in ProMEDmail
The Promedmail's moderator notes :
"[A preliminary account of this case was included in ProMED-mail post "Avian
influenza – Eastern Asia (120): Thailand 20041003.2731. If confirmed by the
World Health Organization, this case will raise the total number of cases
recorded in Thailand to 16 (with 10 deaths). Taken together with the 27
cases in Viet Nam, the total number of avian influenza A (H5N1) virus cases
in East Asia becomes 43 (with 30 deaths). – Mod.CP]"
So there may be one case…
As there's already clear evidence that the virus can cross species to cats,
dogs and humans, its not really that shocking that it there will be the
occasional likely instance of human to human infection occurring. I
calculate the raw probability of infection at approximately 1 in 4 million
on the current reported infection rates reported in Thailand. Pretty remote
chances indeed.
http://www.promedmail.org – best place I know of to keep track of this
stuff. If you need to follow it up just put bird flu and Thailand in their
search engine and you'll get more info on the Thai cases than you probably
ever wanted.
UPDATE: Quinn sez: "i've put up a long post about what makes the bird flu more dangerous than
it seems at ambiguous, inspired by your post. fundamentally, i agree with
the point that there's no reason to *not* take business trips to asia, but
i wanted to highlight why the bird flu matters, despite how little direct
danger it presents at the moment, especially in light of the recent flu
vaccine news."
