Monday, August 29, 2005

We're not worthy

The Times reports that senior Labour politicians and BBC employees have been chosen as priority cases for receiving scarce anti-viral drugs if Britain is hit by an Avian Flu pandemic. Will close family relatives also be priority cases?

Unfortunately for Liberal Democrat and Conservative politicians, the Department of Health is yet to decide whether opposition politicians should also receive protection.

5 comments:

Aiden Truss said...

It's nice to know that they've already chosen who'll live and die isn't it?

The amount of wasted money and resources we have in this country is staggering. If ever there was something worth actually spending money on i.e. protecting the population from a nasty pandemic, then this is it!

Snafu said...

Astolath, could it become similar to the Gulf War Syndrome!?! Service personnel who did not take the jabs seem to be the lucky ones as the medications were rushed through testing.

There is nothing to say that the anti-viral drug will be able to protect against a mutant strain of Avian flu anyway.

Aiden Truss said...

You could be right - I hadn't considered the Gulf War angle...

Still, the first pidgeon I see sneezing, I'm going to leg it!
:b

Mike D said...

Snafu- I think you're right about the risks of undertested vaccines. One of the weekend papers said that the US government ia still paying compensation for some over hasty vaccination programme in Texas 30 years ago when they tried to tackle some similar killer panic.

Anonymous said...

Living at this side of the World we have our fair share of health scares, SARS and bird flu etc, for the most part the bird flu's victims have all been the poor peasant farmers who have little choice in what they eat, I remember one case in which the father and two kids from the same family died after eating a dish containing raw duck blood, trouble is for these folks it's a case of eating this kind of thing or not eating at all, also the government falls down in not educating people that it's a good idea to cook stuff first.
In the West we do have several alternatives to eating fowl, and unless mad cow, swine fever and avian flu all strike at once we should be okay.
Anyway there is always Tofu, although we may die of boredom in that case.