Monday, January 23, 2006
Bird Flu
Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly window where web matters. I am your Cyberhost, a very frustrated Steven Lang having spent a good chunk of my weekend fighting a virus – or more specifically a Trojan.
A Trojan is a type of virus – or as the experts call it – malware. It is generally a form of software that was put on your computer against your wishes, or as happens most of the time – without you even knowing it.
Now I take internet security very seriously – I have a firewall, virus protection and anti-spam software – yet I still got this Trojan that is very difficult to get rid of. You can understand if I feel somewhat aggrieved.
(T) H5N1 is a far more dangerous virus that could do much worse than simply bogging down the internet with ridiculous spam. This strain of the Avian influenza virus – H5N1 has been the cause of grave concern for about eight years.
At the moment, it appears that humans have only caught avian flu, or bird flu directly from birds – mainly poultry. Health officials are however, very worried about a mutation of this virus that would allow it to become contagious between humans. Since this flu has a very high mortality rate, scientists say that if the H5N1 mutates – it could cause millions of deaths all over the world.
The World Health Organisation has taken the lead in monitoring and advising on methods of containing the virus. The WHO has an extensive sub-site directly linked to its main site at www.who.int/en . The sub site has a section on “Avian Influenza: am I a risk?” – It has a page on frequently asked questions, a page on “Ten Things you need to know about pandemic influenza and an extensive fact sheet. Incidentally, the WHO has fact sheets on most major diseases.
If you go through the WHO sub-site on Avian influenza – you will be a very worried person – but at least you will have a thorough understanding of the virus.
However, if that is not enough for you then I suggest you try the SciDev.net site. It is also very authoritative and carries more information about bird flu than you would ever want.
To find out about our state of preparedness in South Africa, I went to the Department of health site and found very little useful information – a press release put out last October saying that the department was working with the WHO. Even the Department of Foreign Affairs had more information on avian flu than the department of health. I really hope that the lack of information on the Health web site – www.doh.gov.za – means that they are so busy preparing for the pandemic that there has been no time to update the web site.
I searched through a number of South African web sites looking for information on Avian flu and found that the best resource is the Avian Demography Unit at the University of Cape Town. You need to navigate your way there from the UCT home page at www.uct.ac.za.
And if you still don’t find it – click along to the Cybersurf blog which you will find at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com – I will put the entire script on the blog together with a number of useful links for you to do more research on avian flu.
That address one more time – www.cybersurf.blogspot.com
That’s it for today; please join me again next Monday for more on the best of the web.
