Here comes the Bird F Word.....

More terror on the way?

The UKHSA says it's turning to “bird flu” models given the recent outbreaks, and as we said, we’d review what the models from 2005 reported. 

The two prominent models from this era are authored by Neil Ferguson et al. and Ira Longini et al.. 

Ferguson's 2005 paper estimates the effect of antivirals on containing an emerging influenza pandemic in Southeast Asia. To do this, the model used ‘recent statistically rigorous estimates of antiviral efficacy.’ 

We had to follow the trail of evidence in a conference abstract that cites the Longini et al. modelling paper on Containing Pandemic Influenza with Antiviral Agents. 

The Longini et al modelling paper predicted an influenza illness attack rate of 33 per cent of the population and an influenza death rate of 0.58 deaths/1,000 persons (We’ll leave out the confidence intervals for now, but needless to say, they are fairly tight). 

Longini reports that with targeted antiviral prophylaxis, if 80% of the exposed persons maintained prophylaxis for u…