Man Made Sun?

[K9]

So all the howling about bird flu marching across Europe and all the turkey producers that went out of buisness due to the hysteria that was generated by the Press about an imminent epidemic (and would not if you didn't eat raw turkey and didn't go around sniffing bird shit) was totally justified. Especially with not a single case in europe, and since sick birds generally dont tend to fly very far so all the talk about migration patterns was again really justified.

I shoulpd mention that I'm a biit sore here becasue a few weeks ago in Ireland we had 100% of pork products pulled from the shelves becasue a small amount of them were found with unacceptable levels of Dioxin. Of course doing that in the busiest time of the year unnesseserilly cost 2000 jobs, but at least the polititians ass was covered.

Well generally the people who make decisions about this sort of thing aren't guided by the press. I haven't really looked at the 2003 culls, but the general threat of avian influenza is credible. This is a situation where playing it safe (the culling) is the best strategy when taken in the balance. You want to contain the virus before it has more opportunities to co-infect people who are carrying human influenza.

[Morat20]

Well generally the people who make decisions about this sort of thing aren't guided by the press. I haven't really looked at the 2003 culls, but the general threat of avian influenza is credible. This is a situation where playing it safe (the culling) is the best strategy when taken in the balance. You want to contain the virus before it has more opportunities to co-infect people who are carrying human influenza.

Apparently Sir T feels it is overreaction to worry about a 63% fatal form of flu that has the capacity to go fully airborne among humans.

Flu. One of the most infectious, nasty, easily spread fucking diseases on the planet. Where immunization is basically "guesswork", and the mortality rate is 6/10 dead.

And worrying about that is an overreaction? THAT should freak you the fuck out. Not goddamn colliders or fusion plants. A fucking strain of flu like that could wipe out billions if it went airborne. Countries -- first world countries -- would fucking collapse.

[MahrinSkel]

Sir T, look up the Spanish Flu sometime.  It occurred shortly after WW1, killed far more people than that war, and was comparatively non-fatal to the "Bird Flu".  I'll make it easy for you, here's the Wikipedia page.  If it makes the jump to human-to-human transmission, we're going to have a big problem.  That's not doomcrying, if it was *no worse* than the Spanish Flu, but with today's air transportation network and higher population, we're talking about 300-600M dead.

--Dave

[Daeven]

Shhh. shhh. Now don't get all alarmist Dave. We live in a time when people don't get sick any more of pesky things like polio and TB. Well, unless you live in Africa or some far of remote place that doesn't matter. After all, there are entire communities that ignore vaccinations because of wacky autism rumors associated with preservatives which are no longer used.

And you want people to worry about 'bird flu'? Mutating viruses?

We're talking about MAGICAL THINKING here people! Stop foiling all of the fun of a blind leap of faith with pesky empirical data and rationality!

[Samwise]

[Khaldun]

This is nothing new or even notable. It's just intensely shitty reporting of an inertial confinement fusion experiment.

We've been doing these since the 1970s.

Exactly.  This is an especially bad case of bad science reporting. My colleague does research somewhat like this, and has for 15 years. It's utterly safe.

[Jeff Kelly]

The bad thing with most flu types is that they preferably kill young people. Most people that were killed by the spanish flu were under 30. With young people the immune system overreacts and goes totally berzerk.

Today the real flu is still one of the leading causes of death even in industrialized countries. The wife of my boss nearly died of the flu when she was in her twenties and studying to become a doctor and it took her only 72 hours from infection to being comatose and on the brink of death in a hospital ICU.

[DraconianOne]

Apparently Sir T feels it is overreaction to worry about a 63% fatal form of flu that has the capacity to go fully airborne among humans.

Flu. One of the most infectious, nasty, easily spread fucking diseases on the planet. Where immunization is basically "guesswork", and the mortality rate is 6/10 dead.

And worrying about that is an overreaction? THAT should freak you the fuck out. Not goddamn colliders or fusion plants. A fucking strain of flu like that could wipe out billions if it went airborne. Countries -- first world countries -- would fucking collapse.

Now that's an overreaction.

Have a proper look at the stats: Turkey has a 30% fatality rate on contracted cases. Thailand, Vietnam and Egypt have a <50% fatality rate. The stats are skewed by places like Indonesia and Cambodia (having a sum total of 7 out of 8 fatalities) having a high proportion of cases to fatality (~90% or so).  Also, that figure of 247 deaths is over 5 years.  That's ~50 deaths a year.  None in first world countries (and before anyone says "China and Hong Kong" - they're third world countries masquerading as first world.  Don't believe me?  Go to Kowloon and see a Hong Kong food market for yourself because, quite frankly, if that sort of food preparation and trading took place in the UK or US, people would be locked up.)

Also, there are no figures for how many people were actually exposed to bird 'flu and how many subsequently contracted it. The strain in question, HN51, currently is not easily communicable between humans.  If it mutates and reassorts itself then yeah, we could be in real trouble but at the moment it's contained.  You should be much more concerned about human influenza.  In 2006, over 56,000 people died from influenza/pneumonia in the US alone.  That's 150 people a day.

Also, avian flu is already kinda airborne.  On account of, you know, being carried by birds.

[K9]

The point is that the the N1 antigen hasn't been seen in human influenza since the 1918-1919 flu pandemic (H1N1), and the H5 antigen is entirely novel. This means that effectively the entire human population carries no innate resistance to this virus. Now while this is not a cause for immediate panic, the low genetic barrier to this becoming a human-to-human infection is a definate cause for concern. Given the already-high death rates (Influenza accounts for ~1% of all deaths in the US annually) for influenza which is systematically vaccinated against, and against which many individuals may have partial resistance, the thought of a more virulent strain against which we have no defense is scary indeed.

[DraconianOne]

(Influenza accounts for ~1% of all deaths in the US annually)

You're missing some numbers.  Population of US (2006): 300 million* Deaths from Influenza/Pneumonia (2006): 56000**.  Percentage of deaths from  = 0.018 or 18.8 deaths per 100,000 heads.

I absolutely agree that if the current H5N1 strain adapts and becomes easily transferrable between humans then it would be a serious issue.  However, I highly doubt there will be a pandemic in the same way that the Spanish flu hit in 1918 because we're having this conversation about it - we're well aware of the existence of H5N1 and are aware of the implications and possibilities - very much unlike 1918 when it hit and no-one was prepared. Prior to 1918, no-one had been diagnosed with Spanish Flu.  We've already had 5 years of warning about H5N1 and there have been only 247 recorded deaths.  Add to that the circumstances that existed in a post-WWI world where trench and chemical warfare had been prevalent, heavy newspaper and communication censorship existed and every major country was in a post-war recession.

I'd be more worried about a genetic mutation in existing human transferrable flu strains making them more resistant to current immunisation and more hostile in their pathogenic behaviour.

Hell, I'm more worried about crossing the road every day.

Sources:
*big landmark event that made all the news.  Estimated to have taken place mid October
** CDC NVSR report on Deaths in 2006.

[K9]

(Influenza accounts for ~1% of all deaths in the US annually)

You're missing some numbers.  Population of US (2006): 300 million* Deaths from Influenza/Pneumonia (2006): 56000**.  Percentage of deaths from  = 0.018 or 18.8 deaths per 100,000 heads.

You're missing out some maths:
Total number of reported deaths in the US in 2005: 2,448,017.
Reported deaths due to Influenza in 2005: 63,001
Influenza deaths as a percentage of all mortality = 2.6%

As far as the scale of the pandemic being less than Spanish flu, then we're entering into the realm of conjecture. Despite the world being warned about the prospect of avian influenza the risk of a global pandemic is probably higher than in 1918, due to drasticly increased international travel. The recorded deaths have admittedly been in groups of people who have exceptionally high contact rates with infected fowl, however to trivialise the risk by saying that there have only been 247 deaths is facile. The 63% mortality rate of those individuals is fighteningly high, comparable to diseases such as Ebola (50-90% mortality) and Marburg (25-80% mortality), and this is in a zoonotic disease, rather than one adapted for human-human transmission. Other diseases classed as epidemic/pandemic risks by the WHO have much lower mortality rates (Lassa Fever and Dengue have mortality rates around 20%). While I hope fervently that you are right, the ease with which existing human flu strains are transmitted, combined with the degree of global movement of people, and the virulence of the particular virus makes for some scary scenarios.

www.who.int
www.cdc.gov

[Morat20]

Also, avian flu is already kinda airborne.  On account of, you know, being carried by birds.

Airborne -- as in "transmitted by coughs and sneezes", as opposed to blood borne vectors, like HIV.

As K9 noted, the fatality rates are comparable to the worst of the non-weaponized "oh shit" things floating around out there, and the decently lengthy infectious period plus the known ease of transmission of flu viruses really do pop this one into "Oh fuck" territory.

I think I read about some interesting new vaccination work focusing on sites in the flu virus that are very difficult to mutate, similiar to some work being done on AIDS. Anything that mutable is a bitch to immunize against, whether you're talking "natural" immune reactions or the sort your doctor triggers with that little injection.

[DraconianOne]

Airborne -- as in "transmitted by coughs and sneezes", as opposed to blood borne vectors, like HIV.

Yeah, I get that. Maybe I should have put it in green.

As K9 noted, the fatality rates are comparable to the worst of the non-weaponized "oh shit" things floating around out there, and the decently lengthy infectious period plus the known ease of transmission of flu viruses really do pop this one into "Oh fuck" territory.

Fun with numbers.  If you took just the cases in Indonesia, you could say that it has an 80% mortality rate. Conversely, if you took the cases in Turkey or Pakistan, you could say that the mortality rate was 30%.  Also, while it's easy to point and say "look! 63%" that also ignores the WHO's own statistics that show that infectious diseases cause 45% of deaths in lower income countries (of which pretty much all the countries on the avian flu death chart are) and of 85% of those infectious diseases are largely down to five major diseases: HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, diahorreal diseases and, most relevant to this off-topic discussion, acute respiratory infections.  If you look at some other charts on the UNICEF site, you can see that childhood pneumonia mortality rates are 5/6% higher in South East Asia than other developing countries.  Point being that it's not a totally representative sample.  Other thing those figures don't give is data about the people who died - the age ranges and so on.  Perhaps the information is there and I admit that I can't be arsed to find it.  The reason I mention it is because if you look at SARS (another respiratory disease that, funnily enough kicked off in SE Asia and is on the WHO pandemic watchlist) then that has a 50+% mortality rate - but only in people 60-65 years and over.

K9 also said "we're entering the realm of conjecture" which is pretty much what we're doing when we're talking about the avian flu mutating and becoming human transmissible. Or airborne. Or sentient or whatever. Basically, you're saying we should be worried about something that "might" happen but isn't guaranteed to happen.  Fuck that for a game of soldiers.  If you're going to worry about death from infectious disease, worry about SARS which is already out there. Or hell, worry about MRSA which, according to a Cardiff University report in 2005, kills over 1000 people a year in the UK and has a mortality rate of 64.6%.  Or viral pneumonia which kills 3-5 million people a year globally.

This is a very cheery topic.  Personally I'd like to get back to the scientists creating a small sun.  That was more interesting, less depressing and less verging on being shifted to the Politics forum.

[Fordel]

Airborne -- as in "transmitted by coughs and sneezes", as opposed to blood borne vectors, like HIV.

Yeah, I get that. Maybe I should have put it in green.

Or at least added a 


I also need to stop reading these fucking disease threads. They make me want to live in a bubble.

[Teleku]

Scarier than the large hadron collider? Check.

Thankfully, they're in England. Anyone up for a game of scorched earth?

Actually, its something we built, and it's located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, about 25 miles from where I currently live  .

This is pretty damn cool though, I've been waiting for them to get this thing completed for awhile.  When I was in AFROTC, I got to go on a tour of the facility as they were building it because I was in a tech major.  Got to walk right up into the huge sphere thing they are going to stream all the lasers through.  It was insane to see how huge the laser they built for this thing is (they say its the most powerful ever built).  Don't think we've really had any huge science projects get built in a long time (a lot started, but always end up getting defunded), so it's pretty cool to see this almost completed.

[Yegolev]

It was insane to see how huge the laser they built for this thing is (they say its the most powerful ever built).

Bah, everyone thinks their laser is the most powerful.

[Teleku]

It was insane to see how huge the laser they built for this thing is (they say its the most powerful ever built).

Bah, everyone thinks their laser is the most powerful.

Sorry, that was actually a mistype on my part.  I actually meant to write:
"It was insane to see how huge the laser they built for this thing is (they say its the largest ever built)."

I actually have no idea if it is the most powerful or not, but I'm going to be a little surprised if it's not.

[Yegolev]

Now you're just turning this into a country music ballad.