Six die in south Malaysia floods, 75,000 homeless

MUAR, Malaysia, Dec 22 (Reuters) - Relentless floods in southern Malaysia have now killed six people and forced around 75,000 from their homes, national media said on Friday.

The southern state of Johor bordering Singapore was the worst affected, with some 65,000 victims taking shelter in schools and community halls, Bernama news agency said.

The floods, which followed this week's heaviest rainfall in a century, submerged buildings and washed out roads in Muar and several other big towns in Johor.

"The floods in Johor and other states in the Malaysian peninsula have shown no signs of subsiding soon," Bernama said.

It said police had recovered the body of an elderly woman in Johor on Friday, bringing the death toll so far to six.

Military and police deployed helicopters to airlift emergency food supplies and take patients to hospital.

One flood victim in Muar said he had lost everything.

"The flood water rose so fast at about 2 a.m. when my family and I were asleep," Shahril Yusof told Reuters. "I could not salvage any of my belongings."

Rains flood New Orleans streets

NEW ORLEANS - Heavy rain swamped New Orleans' streets Thursday, forcing some schools to close early and backing up traffic as pumping stations struggled to keep up.

"Unbelievable," said Pamela Borne, who waded in knee-high water with her daughter on her back to get to her house. "It's very disappointing, that just with an overnight rain of this magnitude, that the city is so ill-prepared."

Most of her home was above the water level, but the ground-level floor, where she had stashed Christmas presents, had 4 inches of water in it before noon, Borne said.

Pumping stations, closely watched since the catastrophic flooding after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, were working, officials said. But the rain lasted so long, they couldn't keep up, said public works director Jose Gonzalez of Jefferson Parish.

"The rest of the day, we will continue to pump," Gonzalez said. "Hopefully, it's not going to rain as much as it did this morning. ... The amount of rain, that's what hurt us."

Some schools in New Orleans closed early because of street flooding and traffic problems, officials said.

The same storm that dumped snow across the West brought more than 6 inches of rain to the New Orleans area through midday Thursday. The

National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch until noon Friday for parts of east-central and southeastern Louisiana.

The community of Larose, about 60 miles south of New Orleans, got an estimated 10 to 12 inches of rain, meteorologist Fred Zeigler said. Parts of southeastern Louisiana, leading up to New Orleans, had 6 to 8 inches, he said.

Bad weather grounds flights, strands thousands

Bad weather in Denver, London and other busy hubs created pre-Christmas headaches for tens of thousands of customers, some who may very well end up spending the holiday not with loved ones, but in an airport.

Even before dawn, hundreds of people in Denver were in line at the ticket counters, hoping to rebook a flight out by Christmas.

Outside, an army of snow plows worked to clear the runways so the airport could resume at least limited operations around noon.

“I just want to get home to see my family,” said Atlanta businessman Scott Carr, standing in the Frontier Airlines line that wrapped around to the opposite side of the terminal.

He booked four flights on three different airlines to increase his chances of making it home for Christmas and was considering driving to Kansas City to catch a flight.

“If I have to drive, at least I’ll be getting closer,” he said.

As flight after flight was canceled, the situation grew into a logistical horror for fliers, whose vacations were disrupted if not spoiled, and for airlines, who may lose much-needed revenue.

Frontier spokesman Joe Hodas said the airline has 65,000 bumped passengers to move system-wide and the airline is already 90 percent booked for the holidays.

“Do the math,” he said.

Industry officials said it could take two days to untangle the knot, which is tightest in Denver, where more than two feet of snow kept the airport closed for a third day. Home to one of United Airlines biggest hub operations, it’s not expected to reopen until midday. In London, the weekend forecast is for more fog — and more travel delays.

“The weather across much of the U.K. is regrettably showing little sign of improvement,” said Geoff Want, director of ground operations for British Airways which has canceled all domestic flights.

Cardboard shelter
A makeshift shelter of cardboard boxes sprang up near a United Airlines ticket counter in Denver as hundreds of stranded travelers found ways to cope.

More than 2,000 flights have been canceled at the nation’s fifth busiest airport, according to airline officials.

Two of the airport’s six runways were set to open first, followed by a third runway Friday night.

Flu virus 'could kill 81 million'

LONDON, England (AP) -- If a flu virus as deadly as the one that caused 1918 Spanish flu struck today, it could kill as many as 81 million worldwide, a new study estimates.

By applying historical death rates to modern population data, the researchers calculated a death toll of 51 million to 81 million, with a median estimate of 62 million.

That's surprisingly high, said lead researcher Chris Murray of Harvard University. He'd done the analysis in part because he thought prior claims of 50 million deaths were wildly inflated.

"We expected to end up with a number between 15 and 20 million," said Murray. "It turns out we were wrong."

The new work is published in Saturday's issue of the journal The Lancet.

The 1918 outbreak killed at least 40 million people worldwide. But flu pandemics have varied widely in their severity. The last two, in 1957 and 1968, were relatively mild, killing two million and one million people worldwide respectively.

Many numbers have been tossed out in speculating how many people might die in the next flu pandemic, ranging from several million to several hundreds of millions, but the guessing game will continue until the actual pandemic strain emerges.

To get their estimates, Murray and colleagues examined all available death registration data from 1914 to 1923. There was sufficient information from 27 countries, including numbers from 24 U.S. states and nine provinces in India.

The researchers then compared death rates during the pandemic to average death rates beforehand and afterward. That revealed how much the pandemic flu contributed to death rates, a figure called excess mortality. They then applied the excess mortality data to worldwide population data from 2004.

If their median estimate of 62 million flu deaths occurred in a single year, the total number of deaths from all causes around the world would more than double, jumping by 114 percent.

One surprise in the new study was the huge variation in how different countries would be affected by a pandemic. The study estimates that 96 percent of the deaths would occur in the developing world. Murray and colleagues noted there was a 30-fold or more variation in mortality.

"That tells us it's not just the genetic make-up of the virus that will cause deaths, but that there are a lot of other things that intervene," he said.

Determining what some of these mitigating factors are might help to avert a similar catastrophe in the future. "If we can answer that question, we may unlock the mysteries behind which non-pharmaceutical strategies could significantly decrease mortality," said Murray. Issues such as population density, nutritional or immune status could all play a role, he suggests.

Some experts warn that planning based on the Spanish flu -- the deadliest infectious disease event ever recorded -- is skewed. The World Health Organization estimates that in a moderate pandemic, based on the 1957 and 1968 pandemics, up to 7.4 million people might die.

"We know that even if we have much lower numbers of deaths worldwide than in 1918, the world will be severely stressed," said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, coordinator of WHO's Global Influenza Programme. "Speculating about the possible numbers is an interesting exercise, but the really important thing is, what do we do about it?"

Since the pandemic threat first arose, with the circulation of the H5N1 bird flu virus on a large scale in late 2003, the global community has greatly bolstered its pandemic preparedness plans.

Medical systems today are far stronger than they were last century, and the availability of antivirals and antibiotics -- which did not exist in 1918 -- should help greatly.

Still, many of these advantages remain out of reach for poor countries. A big question mark also looms over the impact a flu pandemic would have on the approximately 35 million people infected with HIV. Seasonal influenza exacts a heavy toll on people with weak immune systems, thus, in the case of a new pandemic flu, Murray's estimate might even be optimistic.

And while the Spanish flu has often been regarded as a worst-case scenario, there is no guarantee that the next pandemic will not be even more deadly. Despite the tens of millions of deaths the 1918 flu caused, the death rate among those infected was approximately two percent.

In comparison, the fatality rate for the H5N1 virus, currently thought to be the most likely candidate to spark a flu pandemic hovers around 60 percent.

But experts think that if H5N1 were to evolve into a strain easily transmissible between people, it would have to trade some of its lethality for transmissibility.

"It's not in a virus' interest to kill its hosts so readily, otherwise it can't reproduce itself," said Dr. Ian Gust, a flu expert at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

There is no guarantee, however, that H5N1 will make such a concession if it does ultimately ignite the next pandemic.

"If that happens, we would be in for a devastating impact," said Gust. "All bets would be off."