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"Killer Flu" Emerging On Both Sides of the Pacific
mallorean writes "The spread of SARS ( Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome ) worldwide is just about making the headlines. The WHO has issued an advisory. American Scientist had two very timely articles relevant to SARS in the current issue. The first is about the rapidly growing antibiotic resistance in bacterial diseases and the origin and possible sources of this resistance. The second article talks about Type A Influenza and the possibility of a world pandemic similar to the 1918 Global Flu Pandemic. The transmittable nature of SARS, the lack of epidemological information and its severe resistance to antibiotics seems tailor made to fit the scenario outlined in the second article ( it even originated in the far east and is a strain of avian flu )." Read below for a related link.
jake-in-a-box points to a New York Times article which says that the illness "has affected hundreds in China and Southeast Asia, and now spread to Vancouver, BC. It does not respond to antibiotics or antivirals and apparently nobody has fully recovered yet. Transmission appears to be via aerosol droplets - coughs, sneezes etc."
Instead, we feed antibiotics to livestock and hand them out to anybody who asks for them. It's not surprising that that leads to resistance. The consequence is already a lot of disease that would have been treatable otherwise, and it will likely be lots of deaths in the future. And simply researching new antibiotics won't be a solution: they'll become ineffective as quickly as the current crop; this is a race that we are losing.
If you prescribe or take antibiotics unnecessarily, or if you buy meat from animals that have been fed antibiotics, you are responsible for the deaths of others pretty much as if you put a gun to their head; it's just that you are never going to meet the people you killed.
We need more Distributed Computing disease curing programs aka http://folding.stanford.edu/
:)
tecks and scientists unite!
(stop looking abroad while there's problems at home (SETI))
nature is not "fighting back" any more that is was when mammals took over for reptiles after thee climate changed. Nature does not fight back, it evolves :)
Darn it! I wanted to moderate, but I'm going to have to post because everyone seems to have missed something important here. (donates his moderator points to the ether)
The really really scary thing about this is that no one who has been infected is getting better.
That by itself might not be enough to have everyone in an uproar, but throw in moderate mortality and extremely infectious and completely unknown infectious agent and it is definitely time to be concerned.
Just in case you still don't see the implications, imagine a disease that spreads with the same ease as the flu or the common cold, but from which you never recover. OK, that's scary right? I have a cold (or flu) at the moment, so I know that I find this scary.
Now imagine that EVERYONE who has caught it is a carrier of it forever, but they don't tend to die, so there are LOTS of carriers. OMG, very scary.
OK, now imagine that the symptoms can be relatively mild for long periods, meaning people will travel and go to work and to school for quite some time before they seek professional help (and thus be quarantined). Jeez. Too scary for words, really.
How long before a significant fraction of the population of the earth could be infected by such a disease?
Let's just hope the actual disease turns out not to be as bad as my hypothetical one.
-dhk-