Ukraine, battling an outbreak of respiratory disease that’s sickened 478,400 people and killed 81, is struggling with a lack of protective equipment, antiviral drugs and laboratory facilities to confirm whether the H1N1 pandemic virus is causing the disease. Many residents are staying at home and turning to natural remedies such as garlic to ward off the virus.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said in an urgent address to the nation today that the country’s flu outbreak is “unique” because three flu strains are spreading at the same time. That increases the risk of mutations of the viruses into a new strain, he said, citing unnamed domestic and foreign experts. The World Health Organization sent a team of scientists and advisers to Ukraine this week to investigate the outbreak.

The country’s Council for National Security and Defense is taking over management of the epidemic now, Yushchenko said, adding that the government has failed to control the spread of illness from the western Ternopil region.

Ukraine’s 2009 state budget devoted 10 times less money to combating epidemic outbreaks than in the previous year. The money allocated to epidemics was 500,000 hryvnia ($60,423), down from 5 million hryvnia a year ago, according to the Web site of the Ukrainian parliament.

CheesecakeLarry wrote:thanks all, I'm just trying to put this in context. I know wheat futures are poor, we have no surplus, any great crisis would create hundreds and thousands of starving, angry people. The easiest way to control that is to kill them. Cull them. Such draconian measures, though, just boggle the mind.

We revile the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Mao for doing it on scales that are staggering today. To have it happen again would be beyond horror.

Just my opinion, I ask 'cause I don't know.

Concerns over swine flu are sweeping countries from Ukraine to Afghanistan as governments scramble to deal with reported outbreaks of the disease.

But it remains unclear how many of the reported flu cases are swine flu rather than ordinary flu. The symptoms of both diseases are easy to confuse and in many countries doctors still have only limited experience diagnosing the new H1N1 strain......
.......Fatami says Afghanistan has a laboratory in Kabul equipped to diagnose H1N1 infections and counts on this to help check the spread of the disease.

"We have all the advanced technology and lab equipment to diagnose and isolate and identify the H1N1 influenza virus," he said. "And we are grateful to the U.S. government for providing us this support.”

Kiev - Ukraine's deadly flu outbreak widened on Wednesday, as government officials announced new emergency measures in an attempt to control the spread of the illness. More than 478,000 people were registered with national health authorities as suffering from the flu, of whom 17 had confirmed cases of swine flu, Health Ministry spokeswoman Lyudmila Luharska said.

The nationwide death count from flu-related illnesses since late October stood at 86, Luharska said at a Kiev press conference, according to the Ukrainska Pravda website.

In addition to the known types of flue, there is a new one which may be different from the swine flue. It kills and there are no tested pharmaceuticals against it, says Ukraine Minister of Health Vasyl Knyazevych.

In response to the call for help from Ukraine, doctors from neighboring European countries have come to examine a reportedly new variety of the flue. It will take several days for them to give their verdict.

“Chief medical officer Bohdan Onyskiv states.

We have sent the analyses to Kyiv. We don’t believe it’s the swine flue. Neither do we know what kind of pneumonia it is,
Borysevych stressed. Viral tests can last from one to two weeks. They are complicated and not done in Lviv. The course of the disease was very quick. The symptoms included very high temperature and short-wind cough.

The disease started as an ordinary chill with headache and temperature. The symptoms lasted for a week before patient condition began to aggravate.