Does all strains of flu start in one valley in china

[madokie]

in swine then transfered to ducks then to other fowl then on to man. Seems like I read this somewhere years ago. Just wondering. Not asking to be flamed ok.

[applegrove]

1. I think it starts in that region because it is so populus and the number

of people & chickens living side by side is huge. If they have 2 billion people - or 1.5, what half of them a living near livestock? So the incidence of human livestock contact is greater. In india - where the cow is sacred - people says that comes from the lack of land and that eating cow was a very cost ineffective way to eat as a cow takes up much more arable land to grow into a cow - than humans can eat by devoting that land to rice or whatever. So perhaps livestock is not so big in India - not to mention the class system which keeps many off the farms and in their assigned roles in society - never to mix.

I think the pox diseases of the Elizabethian and Victorian times were because of the numbers of Europeans living near animals. Of course, when Europeans chased people off north america and into the hills, they then had lots of room for their livestock & their farms. So was not given to disease transfer between animal-human, then human-human. Spaced out more.

I think it is the concentration of people & animals together.

And remember it was milkmaids who were resistant to some pox or polio that got the idea of vaccination going. It think that was in france!

[Bridget Burke]

4. Proximity to animals can lead to disease....

The viruses mix.

Saw a part of "Guns, Germs & Steel" on TV. It said that people in the New World had few domestic animals before the Conquest; therefore, they hadn't been exposed to that sort of disease. Not that disease hadn't killed off many a European--but a whole family of diseases appearing in the wake of conquest was especially rough on New World natives. (I've got the book--need to finish it.)

[porphyrian]

5. You're right about the pox and Europeans.

They had many rats and dogs. Blood vector diseases like the bubonic plague were then transferred by the fleas that proliferated in that environment.

[Bridget Burke]

2. The "Spanish Flu" probably began in a Kansas army post.

It went overseas with the troops & returned even stronger. And spread throughout the world. Here's the Wikipedia article on "Spanish Flu." (Wikipedia is not infallible, but this article is referenced.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Flu

Apparently "avian flu" does usually start in Asia. But there are other types.

If the questions about all sorts of influenza could be answered--welcome to your Nobel Prize! But it's an interesting field of study for the intelligent layperson. After a few hours of reading, you could be miles ahead of our "President."

[applegrove]

3. Delete - Double Post

[leftofthedial]

6. some of it starts in labs in Maryland and Virginia

and is released into "the wild" in a valley in China.

[meow2u3]

7. Another reason Americans ought to quit outsourcing jobs to China

US multinational craporations are not only exporting jobs to China, they're also importing pandemic diseases from China.