The WHO and Avian Flu

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Well the WHO certainly isn’t thinking of taking half measures. The debate is now surely divided between those who say ‘don’t panic’, and those who want to be able to argue ‘don’t say you weren’t warned’.

The World Health Organisation on Thursday predicted governments would need to quarantine about 120,000 people to contain an initial pandemic flu outbreak of just 19 cases……Not only would such aggressive quarantining raise legal and human rights concerns, he said, but knowledge about how to use antiviral drugs as a preventative measure was limited.

Meantime the virus seems to have undergone a small mutation, while the firus itself seems in danger of becoming endemic in Turkey and spreading.

Benjamin Harvey seems to be blogging the situation from inside Turkey, but I can’t find his blog. Anyone got the link?

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".