I have lost all hope When H5N1 goes Pandemic and if the death rate does not come down life as we know it will change. There will be mass death from illness, starvation and violence on a sclae never before seen in modern times. Read on, I will pull no punches. About me, I am 52 yr old man. I am married and have 3 kids ages 12, 14 and 19. I have owned my own business in Manhattan for 23 years. I lived in Manhattan for 25 years moving out to the exurbia of NYC 2 years ago. My world changed in May 2005 when I read a small Excite news story about 6,000 birds dying in China. I have sporadically followed disease outbreaks on the WHO website… checking every 6 months or so. I began to look for more info on these birds. This led me to Dr. Niman’s Recombinomics website. After reading his “What’s New” commentaries going back several months, I began poking around his other links. A month later I weeded out the sites and became hooked on Recombinomics.com and Curevents.com. By August 2005 I had become VERY concerned about H5N1 and it’s pandemic potential. In September 2005 Jakarta closed the zoo and I experienced my first panic. I began to prep. In Nov-Dec 2005 the Turkey incident caused me to ratchet up my efforts and I began to feel very nervous. Over the next 2 months, I prepared my home, family and business to withstand a 3 month quarantine and service interruption situation. I was feeling ok about my level of preparedness. Thinking through all the “what if’s” and felt relatively ok with it all. I even began to finally feel calm inside. Now… we’ve all heard the death predictions – from mild like the 1968 pandemic, all the way to severe – like 1918 with 100,000,000 deaths. I knew based on my own research that if we had a 1918 style pandemic with a virus that had a 50% death rate (the current H5N1 average) we’d be seeing more in the neighborhood of 1.6 billion deaths plus many deaths from
collateral damage (food, water and meds shortages). Then in Feb 2006, an imminent Russian virologist stated that he felt the death rate would be closer to 2.5 billion. Then Dr. Robert Webster, the world’s most prominent flu researcher and expert in H5N1 and a seemingly conservative voice made a bold and scary statement on ABC TV’s World News Tonight. He said right now there is a 50-50 chance of Bird Flu turning into a human Pandemic, and if it did, 50% of the world’s population could die. This, besides freaking me out, got me thinking hard about the effects of a very severe pandemic and the links in the global supply chain. Today, when any one link in the chain breaks, it takes time to fix or replace it. I see it everyday in my business. Things take time under the best of circumstances. In a severe pandemic, we will be seeing worker absences ranging from 2060% or more due to sickness, caring for the sick, parents staying home to watch school aged children (schools will close of course) and sheltering at home out of fear of contracting the illness. And we are talking globally and simultaneously due to the new ingredient of air travel. The virus will circle the globe in weeks. The result of this massive absenteeism will be broken links in the Global manufacturing and delivery system of everything. First will be the oil drilling and the refineries. We saw the effect of Katrina on the oil refineries in New Orleans and how long it took to get them back and running… and that was a local event with no worker absenteeism. With no oil for weeks or months. This will have a trickle down effect on every area of life. Our planet holds over 6.5 billion people now. That is made possible by modern farming including diesel run farm equipment, computer based processing plants, oil based pesticides and oil based distribution by land, sea and air. The leading producers of food supply the third and developing world as do donations of cash for many food and medically based aid programs. This supply chain will stop dead in its tracks as the oil stops flowing. There will be no food harvested, processed nor shipped. No drugs manufactured. The stores will run out of supplies as will
the Hospitals. The power plants will run out of fuel. The water treatment plants will stop. Take for example the small office with a boss and a secretary. The secretary orders all the supplies for the boss to use… paper, pencils… if the secretary is out for weeks, who orders the supplies? Chances are the boss isn’t even aware that supplies get ordered. No more business at the small office. Now magnify that with thousands of links in thousands of interacting chains of supply and you have the makings of total system failure. 6.5 billion people sick, starving, freezing. The resulting civil violence will bring down local governments on a worldwide scale. He who has the biggest arms will seize all local supplies by force – return of strongman rule. Total chaos and breakdown of society. In other words – a total nightmare for the entire human race. So… here I sit losing all hope. I do not see any way out. Many have tried to sooth my fears, patronize my anxiety, explaining how it won’t be that bad, how TPTB will somehow keep the power on and food flowing. I don’t buy it anymore. There are dark days ahead my friends. Our preps may just be in vain.