Weird worries of the week

This story was so bizarre I had to add it here. Has nothing to do with bird flu, though. Are you shocked? Well, to ensure things still have structure in the world, I've included two bird flu articles as well!

Garage doors work after mysterious radio signal disappears
Last Updated Mon, 07 Nov 2005 13:01:24 EST
CBC News
A widespread problem with a mysterious radio signal that caused some garage doors in the Ottawa region to stop working has vanished.

The powerful radio signal causing the problem stopped transmitting on Thursday afternoon, around the time CBC News contacted the U.S. Embassy to ask if it knew anything about it.

The embassy denies that it had anything to do with it.

The signal was being transmitted at 390 megahertz, a frequency used by the Pentagon's new Land Mobile Radio System.

The same frequency is used by garage doors openers, which started to malfunction around the city about two weeks ago. A similar problem has popped up around military bases in the States.

The world's biggest garage door manufacturer, the Chamberlain group, took the problem seriously enough to fly design engineer Rob Keller to Ottawa from its Chicago headquarters, with machinery to try to track the signal.

But by the time he got there, the signal was gone.

Whether this is caused by a military frequency or not, some project manager somewhere really screwed up. Wouldn't you think that working at a conflicting frequency would be common knowledge to someone in the industry? Bizarre.

And now onto....bird flu!

Economies could be hit hard if bird flu causes panic

Imagine a collapse in the housing market, erasing billions of dollars in household wealth; production lines shut down as terrified workers hole up at home; slumping consumer and business confidence; plunging financial markets. Those are a few such doomsday scenarios being sketched around a possible avian flu pandemic, as the issue grabs more headlines with public health officials issuing warnings and politicians promising greater spending for treatments and vaccines. Yet many analysts say it's too early to make hard-and-fast predictions of what the actual economic toll might be, should the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu begin to spread from person to person. “Who knows? There's no model to follow,” says David Wolf, head of Canadian economics and strategy at Merrill Lynch Canada. “Exactly how damaging and for how long (a pandemic might be felt) is anybody's guess.” But it is possible to forecast what sectors of the economy would likely feel the first hits and where the aftershocks would reverberate. Some say the SARS outbreak of 2003, which walloped parts of the economy and killed 44 Canadians, provides a few hints of what to expect.

The first direct hits on the economy won't likely come from illness itself, but instead arise as a result of workers' efforts to avoid infection, suggests the World Bank's Milan Brahmbhatt. SARS knocked about 2% off East Asian regional GDP in the second quarter of 2003, he calculated, taking about 800 lives. Extrapolating to global GDP, a 2% hit would cost the world's economy about $200 billion in just one quarter, he said. Besides tourism and travel, agriculture would also be hurt, trade curtailed if border controls tightened and tangled traffic, while business supply chains could be clogged, said Adrienne Warren, senior economist with Scotiabank. Given that ordinary flu costs the US economy roughly US$10B to $12B each year in direct medical costs plus lost productivity, an avian flu pandemic could boost those costs to a staggering $70B to $167B, says BMO Nesbitt Burns economist Sherry Cooper, citing studies from the Centres for Disease Control. For Canada, the costs of an avian flu pandemic could reach as high as $8B to $18B, Cooper added in a fall report on a bird flu outbreak. “With the US - the engine of global growth - slowing trade and US activity would slow economic activity worldwide,” said Cooper. It's impossible to predict the toll, but a severe pandemic could infect up to a third of the US population and kill anywhere from 209,000 to 1.9 million Americans, says the Bush administration's new Pandemic Influenza Plan. It puts the health costs alone, not counting disruption to the economy, at $181B for even a moderate pandemic.

Markets can at least feel confident that the Canadian government's books are in healthy shape and that could help the economy weather almost any storm, says Finance Minister Ralph Goodale. “We should never falter in our confidence. Canada is operating from a position of strength, we have had more than a decade of consistent economic strength,” he said in an interview. He, too, pointed to the limited economic impacts of the SARS outbreak - which was only one of a steady series of shocks to the economy in 2003. Ottawa's healthy budget balance could help calm fears that the country can cope with so-called second-round effects after illness hits - the eventual impact on investor and consumer confidence, said Wolf. “The fiscal position in Canada is very strong, relative to other countries, in terms of fiscal balance and in terms of the flexibility that that offers the government to respond to adverse events,” he adds. Yet many Canadian business are hanging on by a thread - threatened by soaring energy costs and a strong dollar - so a hit from an avian flu pandemic could push many over the edge, warns Garth Whyte, vp with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. “There's already a build-up of uncertainty and this could really be the last straw. Certain sectors could really be hurt.”
(Canadian Press 051106)

Pandemic could carry $950B cost: World Bank
Last Updated Mon, 07 Nov 2005 07:12:11 EST
CBC News
An avian flu pandemic could cost the world economy as much as $950 billion Cdn in lost growth, the World Bank told health and government officials gathered in Geneva on Monday for the world's largest-ever conference on the disease.

That's the estimated price tag for one year if the disease caused the same kind of disruption as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, said World Bank economist Milan Brahmbhatt.

A more severe pandemic would end up costing even more as manufacturing ground to a halt and service industries closed shop, he added.

The three-day international "war council," as it's being called, is aimed at designing a global strategy for preventing a widespread outbreak of influenza caused by the H5N1 virus.

"If the pandemic started tomorrow, and we started to get prepared after tomorrow, it would be far too late," said United Nations flu co-ordinator David Nabarro.

"You can't prepare when you have a pandemic underway. It's like trying to get firemen ready to fight a fire when the fire's already burning."

The conference comes as many Asian countries battle new outbreaks of the disease in birds, as well as cope with new human fatalities:

China is dealing with its fourth outbreak in the past three weeks, and thinks it may have found the first Chinese case of human infection.

In Vietnam, which has recorded the most human deaths from bird flu, chickens carrying H5N1 have been discovered in three different villages over the past week.

Indonesia has just recorded its sixth human death from the disease ... while a handful of other infected people remain in hospital fighting for their lives.

So far, a total of 63 people have died from the disease. Most of them have caught it directly from farm birds, though some are suspected to have contracted bird flu while nursing close relatives.

The 400 delegates at the Geneva conference will be grappling with the fact that there are huge disparities in the abilities of different countries to mount prevention plans.

Some richer nations, like the United States, have expressed a willingness to spend more than $7 billion US on anti-flu measures.

Poorer countries like Cambodia say they have enough of the antiviral drug Tamiflu on hand to treat only about 100 people.

"If we are unprepared, the next pandemic will cause incalculable human misery, both directly from the loss of human life, and indirectly through its widespread impact on security," said Dr. Lee Jong-wook, the director-general of the World Health Organization.

"No society would be exempt. No economy would be left unscathed."

A trillion dollars, eh? Hard to tell whether this is a valid concern or not since we can't read the minds of viruses, however, at least our leaders, scientists and doctors are concerned enough about the potential threat to have a conference on it. Better than nothing, I guess. I really can't see how you can be proactive about an unknown potential viral genetic mutation until it happens. I guess the safety measures put in place would be more along the lines of emergency response.