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Originally Posted by Not Afraid
Am I personally worried? No. I'm young(ish) and (reasonably) healthy. I may get sick and suffer but I don't think I will be damaged beyond belief if I DO catch this thing.
There are those who will not be as lucky. They are frail, old, terribly young or generally unhealthy. These are the same people who could be killed by a bad case of "regular" flu.
As usual, the hardest hit demographics will be those with fewer priviledges and that will be terrible. There aren't many equal opportunity diseases around these days.
I tend to look at the fear the media is currently inciting with a chunk (better than a grain) of salt. I rarely watch TV and, when I do turn it on, there's always something ridiculous like "Storm Watch 2005" (reporting on California). I just can't take it seriouslt any longer and I'm not willing to go into any sort of panic mode just yet (if ever).
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So once again you live up to your name.
I found this tidbit on Webmd.com:
The H5N1 bird flu bug has been particularly deadly for people unlucky enough to catch it from poultry. But if the bug learns to spread among humans, it almost certainly won't be as deadly as it is now, says Ira Longini, PhD, professor of biostatistics at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health.
"Avian H5N1 looks like a 70% case fatality in humans. But this has never been true of any human strain," Longini told WebMD last December. "There has never been any human influenza virus that has behaved that way in recorded or even unrecorded history. The case fatality of even highly virulent flu strains are a couple of deaths per 10,000 people."
So it looks like it's not quite as bad once it makes the human-to-human jump.