Slashdot Mirror
Distributed Computing Attacking SARS
fwc writes "D2OL has added a SARS Target to it's distributed computing project which locates potential drug candidates for several viruses. At this point, I've replaced SETI@Home at least temporarily on all of my Boxen. There are clients available for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and of course Windows."
Looks more usefull then finding the odd alien out there :P
-- signed for your pleasure --
If everyone stops doing SETI@home and moves to battling the SARS problem then we may miss a vital signal from outer space from an alien race that has a cure to SARS and all the other nasties roaming this planet!
... I guess
I wonder when my United Devices client (ud.com) is gonna add that project... It's currently working on smallpox and cancer...
;)
Should I change projects? Switch UD in favor of D2OL or what? And why?
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Who owns the results once they've been calculated? Who gets paid royalties when a drug is developed from this data? I'm not going to donate my CPU time if SARS sufferers have to pay royalties (either directly or indirectly) to GlaxoSmithcline or the US Government (which IMHO isn't any better than a multinational corporation) for their medication.
Unless the results are released into the public domain or at least licensed under a BSD- or GPL-style license, I'm not touching it.
OLPC Australia
Unfortunately, finding a target binding site for a potential drug is years away from actually having a useful cure...
I know how to cure SARS.
You give 8 of the most powerful businessmen in America SARS.
In two months, there will be 3 or 4 different cures.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
How do all of you out there feel about contributing your computing cycles to the private sector? Previous iterations of this idea have been through nonprofit/university research institutions, but this new post seems to be private enterprise driven. As noble the goal D2OL is working towards is, i still feel odd about the whole idea. I pose the following question to the general Slashdot community: How do you feel about your computing cycles being used for the research and development of pharmaceuticals (or any other imaginable private sector application) and said company reaping tremendous profits from this show of goodwill?
Let's all DDOS SARS.
/Lame joke.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If they find the correct drug against SARS, will it be free? or will it be patented and only the rich countries will use it??
by the time their server receives the first round of results from all the clients, SARS has been naturally erradicated.
I'd say: keep up on the lookout for greys
Moderators: Don't agree? pray tell why.
Here's a question.. Suppose i download this thingummy and run it and jackpot, a miracle cure for SARS unrolls in front of my eyes. Do I have any sort of intellectual property rights over my discovery? And do I have the right to prevent the distributed software Im running from connecting back to the server and giving them the good news?
Does this mean I might win the Nobel Prize???
Not that I'm going to do anything like that. Just wondering if the guys behind the thing have thought through the legal issues.
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
I'm not sure that this project (as it is now) will be all that useful. Alot of it appears to be hinging on generous speculation.
I'm not a virologist, but as far as I remember, drug-directed approaches haven't been notably successful with attacking coronaviruses (ever hear that "medicine can't cure the common cold", anyone?) -- and to confuse things more, this one seems to be very atypical.
Also, from what I know about the anti-virals that have shown some efficacy against these type of SS-RNA viruses, they've been directed at nucleic acids, not at product-proteins. Ribavirin, which was initially hoped to be the "magic bullet" to stop SARS is a nucleoside analogue (purine? I don't remember). I haven't heard of an effective intervention that disrupts the protein envelope or synthesis.
Additionally, this group is assuming that the causitive agent of SARS has correctly been isolated and identified in the first place, which isn't certain by any means.
Aiming computing power towards a worthy goal like this can't hurt, but I question how effective it really will be. I guess the computer-types can just tweak the parameters as the biomed-folks find out more on their end.
Let's all try to be funny and make some comment about how the slashdot effect DDoS has melted the distributed computing project's servers.
It is offencive to 'slag off' anybody my cowardly friend, no matter their race or religion.
As for the rest of your gab, thats just to far from reality to even bother commenting on.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
...it coughs 'the operation timed-out' when i click on it !
*** unix _is_ user-friendly.
*** it just decides who his friends are.
Download the SARS genetic sequence here.
Sars is attacking distributed computing. Let the computing infidels bask in their illusion. Their infidel processors are committing suicide by the hundreds. I can assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place. Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Updated April 25 2003
. ht ml
SARS outbreak;
The fruit of the plant Morinda Citrifolia contains substances which are highly effective for treating this outbreak. Powder, juice and fresh fruit are all effective at any dosage level. It is not appropriate to take this substance as a preventative measure. All active cold viruses are treated effectively using this fruit which has been used for over 4 thousand years.(95%+). There is a wealth of information on the World Wide Web referring to this plant, with many suppliers.
http://www.geocities.com/channelledhealing/Home
...but i didn't see the usual prominently-advertised guarantees of non-meddling on their site. where are the ol' reassurances about "we won't sell information about your mp3 collection to record labels" or whatever?
I've heard you can run it under wine but can't be bothered messing with it.
Anyone got a mirror of the client?
This done with something that actually is more deadly on a world-wide scale. AIDS, Cancer, Heart Disease, etc. SARS is just a pitiful cough compared to them. I like the concept of using computing time for medical advancement, but I think our energy would be better spent on other, better research. Damn the media for their knack of blowing things out of fucking porportion.
And no, I know of no other distributed computing programs for other, more deadly diseases. But then, that's my point.
This slashdotting of such a site shows the need of a new distributed computing project. I wish to propose that we all sit down and share our cpu cycles to prevent slashdotting. How about we call the project "SARS: Some people Are likely to Risk Slashdotting this project" (Ok, I know that was a lame attempt at a name, but try coming up with a better one instead of complaining :P )
It would in essence work the way that we'd all put aside ~200k disk space and ~5k bandwidth for storing the most recently posted websites and files on our computers, then people could put together impromptu mirrors from this distributed project and behold! No more slashdottings of sites, articles and programs that one actually wants to read or download!
So, who's with me on this trek into the land where no slashdotter has ever ventured before?
Anyone?
If you're already searcing for E.T. and not a cure for cancer, why would you search for a cure for SARS? SARS is scary because it's new not because it's a currently uncontrollable viral disease, we've got loads of them. HIV/AIDS, TB, the common cold. Somwhere between 80% and 95% recover quite nicely from SARS, IIRC 500,000 die each year of the flue, you don't see us jumping around over that.
Disclaimier: I'm not saying SARS shouldn't be fought, all disease should, but let's all get some perspective.
(To back some of this up with a _little_ more reliable resource found through Google, look here)
Look a monkey!
media hype?
Now everybody fears me!!!
:)
Sa"e"rs
Looks more usefull then finding the odd alien out there :P
/.ers called CIC.
Now if they could come up with a Distributed Computing Project to help with a socially dibilitating disease affecting millions of geeks and
Chronic Invoulntary Celebacy.
There are much more dangerous illnesses than SARS which affect much more people. There are 2000 people sick with SARS but 40 million with AIDS. And the death rates for AIDS is 100 % percent. The numbers for cancer are even higher (not the death rates).
This seems to be rather a angst-hyped PR champain instead of real science. The problems we have now are elsewhere.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Oooo... 300 people dead! That is SO SCARY.
For you risk-adverse people that are concerned about it, here are some magic tidbits that will GREATLY REDUCE your risk of dying. Unlike worrying about getting SARS or then dying from it...
1) Wear your seat belt.
2) Don't drink and drive or ride with someone who does.
3) Watch where you step when traversing stairs.
4) Never clean a loaded firearm.
I bet you can come up with others.
The point being, SARS has some unusual tendancies that make it worth watching; however it still much less important than daily-risk management done sensibly.
My CPUs will continue searching for E.T.I. thank you. Call me when 100,000 have died.
I'd be inclined to think about this one. Just a related matter. If you look at the spread of HIV around the world, the rate is slower and the powers that be may be less inclined to 1) fund research for cures or vaccines, and 2) probably more importantly less inclined to distribute treatment around the world because it has less chance of affecting them. In short, it may be something like: lets cure the world before this highly infectious disease becomes a problem for us. HIV is much more manageable, we'll let those countries take care of it themselves. If a cure for SARS is found, needless to say several things will happen: -the drugs will be made cheaply available -they will be distributed more quickly than ever before -ALL countries and all classes/races/religions will get them -the drug companies may not be able to swing a patent and expensive license manufacturig rights. How about doing this for AIDS in Africa and other areas where HIV is rife. There is no doubt it will affect everybody. It is just a little further down the road. As tragic as it is, SARS is something that will I hope break the barriers between nations (just like a funeral is the best way to get a family together). There is nothing for individual nations to play for with a visibly threatening global problem like SARS. It is just a damn shame that HIV and the environment get a back seat because those in authority refuse to see further than the tips of their noses (or election campaigns.)
It's hard to say for sure, but SARS simply doesn't seem that deadly. With worse hygiene and containment certainly far more people would be infected, but it's unlikely such a huge percentage of them would die. Currently fatality rates are in the 2-4% range. Even if that'd double to 4-8% without modern medical care, that's still not near 40% (and that's not even necessarily the case; a lot of people that have recovered just recovered on their own, similarly to how you recover from a cold, not due to wonders of medical care).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
..another project that lets our CPUs work for simulating atomic explosions ...
Oh wait..you mean you didn't know that and thought you were searching for aliens/cure/dna samples/... ?
You know how easy it is to catch a cold right? Well, SARS is like that, a cold. It's easy to catch. There's a damn good reason for all this hype. No one talked about SARS in china for months until it went totally out of control and people didn't realize that they should be taking basic precautions.
SARS would have absolutely no problem killing the same numbers of people if it managed to get 'free' of the quarantines and stuff
Also, Michael Mooor is a dumbass, and he has his math backwards. The more scared we are, the less we consume. SARS is death to tourism and the like in Asia, and it makes people stay home to avoid it.
9/11 certanly didn't boost the economy.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
[N-to-tha-T thing]
When it comes to diseases, early overreaction is good. At an early stage there is little information about exactly how dangerous this particular disease might turn out to be. At the same time, containing the disease at this stage is easy. All you might need to do is quarantine half a dozen people.
Of course, as the disease progresses and the actual severity of the epidemic is assessed, we can update our procedures to make it less or more stringent as the need might be.
This is the same reason why firemen overreact to fire alarms by the way. It is so much easier to contain a fire in the first three-five minutes that is worth driving recklessly to the scene of the fire, even though 95% of the time they turn out to be false alarms.
There are much more dangerous illnesses than SARS which affect much more people.
The issue with SARS isn't how many people are currently sick - it's how many *could* be sick. In the 20s a flu epidemic swept through Europe, killing 2MM people. Sounds like a lot... but it only had a 2.5% fatality rate. The problem was that everyone caught it.
Same deal with SARS. Relatively low fatality rate (4-6%, maybe as high as 10%), so it doesn't kill people before they spread it (which is easy to do, it seems), but high enough that it can do some damage if a lot of people catch it.
Hopefully the world community has reacted fast enough with quarantines, etc, to stamp it out... but if it starts spreading freely in the wild, a lot of people's lives are in danger.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
I take it you don't live in Hong Kong or China then? I'll go tell my family in Hong Kong that you think they have more chance of getting into a car crash than getting SARS. I'm sure that'll make them feel MUCH better.
the people who die from influenza are old and weak. SARS kills healthy young people, like you and me.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
"Slashdot has added a D2OL Target to it's distributed DOS project"
Hah, that was easy! Next, please
that all these distributed projects are actually doing what they're supposed to?
Would you notice it if my long-lasting-no-results-yet-but-soon-for-sure distributed project for an AIDS vaccine were actually a rendering farm for animated kiddie porn movies?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
The way the world is reacting to SARS is much like the way it would have reacted to the 1918-1919 flu, if we'd had the public health infrastructure then that we do now. And that reaction would have saved millions of lives
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
SARS attacks YOU!
TrollKore
irc.freedomirc.net
#trollkore
Ever did the math ?
In an average year, 10 to 20 percent of the people get infected with some form of influenza. There are different strains, so for arguments sake lets say 0.5% of the people gets infected with the SARS virus (very conservative estimate).
Based on the current deaths, approximately 3-4% of the people who get infected, actually dies. (experts are actually arguing that this number may be higher).
On a population of 6 billion, that is approximately 900,000 people.(or to put it in a US perspective 75,000 people)
Normal influenza kills mostly the weak and old. SARS does not. So far it has killed a lot of nurses and doctors.
Something to think about before making a decision on whether or not to participate.
What benighted fool came up with "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome"? Severe and acute mean the same thing.
OK, I might be being pedantic, but I expect better of people we're supposed to be able to trust with our health.
You can argue patents all you want but in order for the pharmaceutical industry to function the intellectual property right of drug research companies most be sacrosanct. Billions of dollars are spent every year on pharmaceutical research and if the is no return on investment then there won't be billions of dollars to spend next year. I realize that there are government grants but that is not were most of the money to fund research comes from most if it comes from the money made from the previous successful drug. I know it sounds cruel to say you can't make this drug because you can't afford the patent rights but its better then having there be no drug research at all.
You don't need a drug that matches this virus to treat it, you need a vaccine to prevent it in the first place. The Influenza drugs like Tamiflu and Relenza only came out 3-4 years ago and the vaccine is still the best weapon we have against it.
Just so you all know, this is about as fruitful as SETI, so don't go giving up on that just because this "sounds" like it'll be more important or yield a more relevant result. It won't. I work on this type of protein modelling and drug-protein interaction research. The state of the art is that anything produced by your client is going to be at best a wild guess at what the protein looks like or what interactions the drug will make with the protein.
The "scoring" that your results are based on is just how nice the energy is of the final folded protein. This is flawed in a couple of ways, first it means that we need to know nearly everything about protein folding energetics and calculate it with a tidy formula (not yet...but we're getting there) and it means that the folds chosen by the algorithm to test for these energies are all the possible folds (last best guess is that we only know about 80% of all folds)...and then if you're going to try to use this for docking a drug molecule...you open a whole new can of drug-protein interaction knowledge necessary.
SETI actually has a better scoring method for finding a "hit" and while the result (hey, look radio from space) isn't as tangible as killing a virus...I'd say stick with the SETI or try and break the XBox number....or find some more prime numbers. At this point, distributed protein folding/docking isn't just fishing in the dark, it's fishing in the dark in Death Valley.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
...last I heard, the development of a new drug costs billions of dollars. Now, it's all fine and dandy to get on your moral high horse and say that "no cure is better than an expensive cure", but at the end of the day, the money to create the drugs has to come from somewhere. So if you really believe what you're saying, I see one option - see if a VC or banker will float you a loan based on the premise that "I won't be paying you back the $1,378,422,596.83 it took to research and design the drug because it just isn't important, don't you see that poor people need these drugs more than you need your money back?" If you do find somebody who'll do that, let me know, I could use some free money too..
Not that pharmcos won't do some pretty low things, but really, with the expenses we're talking about, basic economics can explain a whole lot of it.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
UNAIDS sez if we (the world) spend $10 billion a year for 20 years, it will steadily decrease the number of infections. Right now, we're spending more like $1.2 billion a year, and AIDS is going crazy all over the world. Are we not spending that money because of a focus on SARS? No. We're not spending it because the countries who would be paying $5-6 billion of that are not the ones with 40% infection rates, so they simply don't care. SARS doesn't really affect that.
On the other hand, if you read a history of the AIDS outbreak in the US, you'll find that people wish there had been a much stronger response right from the start. If we had reacted to AIDS the way we reacted to SARS, that $10 billion/year wouldn't be necessary right now -- and most of those 40 million people wouldn't have the disease.
Test everyone for AIDS, and throw them into a biohazard incinerator if they test positive.
You don't have to cure the disease, you just have to sterilize anyone that has it.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
There is a difference though. AIDS is largely spread by infected individuals performing unsafe practices that lead to infecting others.
In a number of cases, people with AIDS are known to have been consciously trying their best to infect as many others as possible, in some sort of misguided retaliation for getting the disease.
You're not going to be innocently standing by someone infected with the AIDS virus and catch it from them.
While I do believe it's important to continue with AIDS research, I also can see how there would be a more pressing desire to find a quick cure for a disease that people are catching simply by breathing it in.
World Health Organization issued a travel advisory
(another article
on Yahoo.)
To be honest with you, I have not taken the TTC (subways or buses) for a long time now so I do not know if there are many people wearing masks there, but on the streets I have only seen two people in the last month actually wearing surgical masks. On the radio (CFRB 1010) there was a discussion of a baseball game from where shots were broadcasted widely displaying a person wearing a mask, with headlines like "In Toronto, Fear Strikes Out ". The host from the radio was on that game and he only saw one (1) person wearing a mask out of thousands of people there. The camera-man concentrated his attention on that person.
Have you seen the shots from Baghdad, where supposedly thousands of Iraqi people were cheering while the US Marines took down Saddams statue? Later in the news they actually showed wide shots of that scene, and it became clear there were only a handfull of people in the area.
This is the same tactics used by the news crews for the single purpose of maintaining attention of millions of people on something that is not that newsworthy but something that can be blown out of the proportions and something that will boost news channels' ratings.
I live in Toronto and I swear to you there is no uncontrolably spread disease here, the offices are not closing, the restaurants and hotels are not closing business is as usual, people are not staying home out of fear but there are a few thousand people on quarantine, most of which will never show any symptoms.
Since last week there was no new cases of SARS in Toronto and the only deaths that occured (19 I think) can be attributed to SARS striking on the older people with some other health problems.
The only thing that WHO achieved was creating massive desinformation and boosting cnn and bbc audiences for the past month and costing Toronto travel industry hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Really, last year, about 2000 people died in Toronto from flue, but we did not hear about this on cnn.
There are over 5000000 people in Toronto area and there are about 200 people that have SARS, that is 1/50000 of 1 percent. 19 of the sick people died. So far this means about 10% mortality rate for a disease that is statistically so rare, that anyone will have better chances of been killed by a lightning bolt than getting it. Hell, there are more chances of been violently murdered somewhere in Texas than getting SARS in Toronto. Maybe WHO should post a travel advisory about that.
You can't handle the truth.
SARS is getting to be a big deal. CNN Beijing SARS link
The US secretary of health at the time, if memory serves, commented that the 1918-1919 had the potential to end civilization. Further, it ended up killing more people than the Great War. If it could have been contained with drastic measures, no one would have complained.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Ebola usually requires some kind of bodily fluid/tissues swap with an infected person.
There's also a reason why "hemorrhagic fever" bugs like Ebola tend to burn themselves out... they are extraordinarily lethal, and quickly kill their host; Ebola has a 90% mortality (compared to 6-12% for SARS). When a virus is too hard on its host, it lessens the opportunity to spread itself.
AIDS is a good example of a successful high-mortality bug... but you can stay alive and asymptomatic for so very long, that spread is virtually assured if you are uncautious.
SARS looks so much like the common cold, that even experienced clinicians have difficulty differentiating it from other bugs. That is, of course, until it's too late. SARS could be a real problem... significant mortality rate, easy to spread, poorly understood, and, like West Nile, NO treatment (well, some advocate treating West Nile with interferons... but the side effects of those drugs are terribly unpleasant; the treatment is almost worse than the disease).
It's nice that they're taking this thing seriously; any money spent on containment is probably well-spent indeed. If they can determine that this bug has no animal reservoir, it could even be eradicated. Till then, public panic serves no one, but public caution is NOT a bad thing.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Possibly. Maybe this is a trial to see how the world would cope, and the real virus is coming in a few months? Kind of scary if you think about the fact we can't cure this crap, think about the % of us curing a super virus. Kills instantly. Or how about a modified aids virus that spreads through the air.. weeeeeee~
/.ers should be at the forefront in the fight againts SARS for their best interest. It's a known fact that a lot of /.ers are afflicted with SARS (Severe Absence of Romance and Sex).
:)
Oh, you're talking of another kind of SARS.OK, nothing anymore important here. Move on.
"I'll have a witty
SARS has a mortality rate of more than 10% so far in Singapore.
In the past century, there has not been any other infectious disease that has spread so fast and consumed medical and political resources of affected countries so fast.
Just because your country has not been significantly affected (so far) does not mean that this is a minor problem.
It's still early in the progression of SARS. If there are no good public health measures to limit the spread of SARS, it's entirely conceivable that the entire world would be infected by 2005. Even assuming that the mortality sticks at 10% or so, that's a heck of a lot of dead people.
Or, how about "Making A Deal!" ?
;)
You "donate" your computing power and, if and when you need the medication, you get it at a price you can actually pay for.
Sure.
It would work.
Just like health insurance does.
And, if that worked, a *trend* could be started.
Eventually, you would start living partly off "credits", obtained from cedeing your mips to diverse service and product providers.
And *then* government would surely butt in, and start comandeering your mips for "relevant public objectives" (or other similar blather). And politicians could start making campaign promises to reduce "mips-tax" (they wouldn't call it a tax, of course), or propose flat-rate "mips-participation", or "progressive-scale", or...
Well, so.
Just relax and enjoy, folks !
This probably won't go away. It's a new very virulent species of cold that probably will mutate every which way. The most successful strains would reinfect humanity year after year after...
You are counselling people to abstain from contributing to the fight against this possible extended "plague" cycle.
Possibilities are that
A) You have been abducted and brainwashed into collaborating and conspiring with humanity's demise. (horror!)
B) You voted for the "arsenic-based ecological support", in one of the last polls. (Thats ok, I guess.)
If SARS gets a foot hold in India and China it could be just the thing that stops offshore outsourcing.
The virus may mutate and become more fatal, dont be surprised to see it go up to 20 percent, or even 30 percent.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Why do you care about the poor people? Care about yourself first.
I'd rather see the third world die than die myself. Consider the fact that its run this software or risk having no cure at all, you need to shut up.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I think the thing most people are missing is the source of this virus.
It began in China months ago, and the only reason China admitted knowledge of the disease and reported it to WHO is that it got out of China and into the news. With a 20% mortality rate in an overpopulated country trying to deal with moving 200 million people for a power plant project, its possible that SARS was developed and launched as a biological attack on China's own people to reduce population without mass graves and slaughter (ala Eastern Europe). This way China looks like an unfortunate victim of a disease instead of a genocidal communist.
Watch. This will be the source of China's own bioresearch program. Japan had its bio-labs in China during WW2 and used bio-warfare on the Chinese, and China took back posession of those labs and noone outside China made sure that the information and diseases were destroyed.
China is not just a terrorist nation and a rogue superpower, it is also harboring WMDs.
And not just nuclear.
Although it wouldnt be legal, Im sure governments like China are running tests on prisoners right now.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Why doesnt Bill Gates cure Sars? What the hell is he doing right now? Oh wait hes busy spreading Windows.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
(This is from http://www.reenhead.com/comments.php?93238396 )
"It is not clear yet whether the SARS virus will be similar to corona virus in these respects, but it is highly likely.
So, the top 5 reasons SARS is here with us forever.
1. The corona virus envelope lacks immunogenicity. On average you get sick with corona virus every 2-4 years, but there are only two types of virus, hence 80% of infections represent re-infections with a type you have already fought off. So, the immune response to corona virus is not permanent like those for chicken-pox or measles (which are only near permanent, you can get reactivations and the vaccines wear off over a decade or so).
2. It is a cold, colds spread via small particles of aerosolized spit or mucus from sneezing, coughing, breathing etc. The spread is unlikely to be contained considering this.
3. It also represents a fusion with some kind of animal virus, making an animal reservoir highly likely, although so far it only appears to infect humans.
4. A vaccine could conceivably be developed, but because the coronavirus is typically resistant to normal immune responses illicited by the viral envelope or whatever your body targets, it is likely we will have to use a much more experimental type of vaccine. Such as plasmid vaccines which express a chosen protein from the virus, or a vaccine that infuses a particularly wierd epitope of the virus that is not mutable, and your body doesn't ordinarily recognize.
5. Finally, it is unlikely we will resolve this anytime soon because our government, and the government of China have not taken this seriously. The CDC took it seriously, and I'm sure in a decade we'll here about how they fought the administration for more attention, money, manpower etc., but it was denied just like with HIV. The second this was detected we should have taken far more drastic measures. Now the fatality rate approaches 10%, and the virus even kills young healthy people.
So, we're screwed. Just sit back and wait for the people to start dropping like flies.
Dr. Strangelove 04/25/03 05:56pm"
Is it a geek thing?
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Sometimes this goes as high as 20% in places like Hong Kong, in Canada its around 15%, the 5% are fake government figures.
SARS mortality rate/Death Rate
why dont you read what some actual doctors are saying. Also take into account that SARS is mutating constantly, which means its becoming more deadly everyday, the death rate is rising due to this mutation, as the virus gets smarter it learns how to more efficiently destroy our immune system.
Do your research begore you come up with some numbers.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The flu is always going to be the flu, its not getting stronger.
SARS as it spreads becomes STRONGER. Meaning the more immune systems it kills, the better it becomes at killing.
This is what scares me, the rate jumped up from around 5 percent to 15 percent in a matter of weeks, 15 percent in CANADA of all places, where they have some of the best hospitals in the world.
15 percent of 1 million is 150,000 people, but according to estimates, a billion people can be infected by the end of the year.
1 Billion in 12 monthS
Theres only 6 billion people on this earth. If 1 billion people are infected with a 15 percent chance of dying (this is assuming SARS doesnt mutate and become more deadly), 15 percent of 1 billion?! What is that? 150 million? Thats as bad as the plague.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
From my research doctors say SARS kills 15 percent of everyone of all AGES.
SARS is not the common cold, it destroys your lungs, people with asthma, people who have weak lungs, people who smoke, people who live in smog filled cities, these people have weaker lungs and can die from SARS no matter the age.
So unless you are a marathon runner with great lungs you will most likely be one of those 15 percent. Also the virus mutates, the more it learns about how our immune systems work, the more vulnerable we become, so even you can survive it while its killing at a rate of 15%, when it mutates again it might kill at 25%, and then when it mutates again it might go up to 40%, so eventually over a period of years it could reach a 90% death rate or higher, so this disease is no joke, the Flu does not mutate like this.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Look if I could cough on you and you get AIDs, yes I'd agree we need to focus on AIDs, but AIDs isnt spreading through the air.
SARS is like AIRBORN AIDS, you get it and you have a 15 percent chance of dying. Theres no cure, the virus is becoming better at kicking our asses as it mutates, and you want us to sit here and let it go from a 15 percent success rate in killing us to around 50%? Then fight it?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This program churns up cpu cycles like it is a distributed p2p encryption cracking program, ie.. doesn't it make sense for the government to export it's resources to a huge network of computers and convince the ppl that they are helping to solve some medical need? I'm skeptical of this program, ecspecially if it's closed source
You people keep forgetting this virus mutates, the death rate started low, but now its at 15 percent in Canada, and almost 20 percent in Hong Kong.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Well, this seems kinda stupid, but if we can do it for sars, why not aids!? I mean come on, its more widespread than any of us wants to know, and if we can stop sars in its tracks, why not?
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I've stayed out of this thread because I believe people are doing a good job of identifying the ways that SARS is a bigger threat than some would like to think, but this post is stupid.
"The flu is always going to be the flu, its not getting stronger."
The flu changes every year. Some years it's mild, and other years it's particularly deadly, killing literally millions of people. In any given year there are 2-3 different strains of flu and virologists use contagion models to distribute the vaccine for the most likely 'dominant strain'.
"SARS as it spreads becomes STRONGER. Meaning the more immune systems it kills, the better it becomes at killing"
This is sensationalistic rubbish. What kind of evidence do you have for this? SARS isn't a DnD character. It's a virus.
As for the spread factor, there's one crucial number that nobody knows, and that's what percent of the population has a natural immunity to the disease. Nobody has a guess as to that number until there are many more documented infections, and that number is vital to understanding how the virus will spread.
Also pivotal to any model is an understanding of SARS's 'superspreader' model, where some patients manage to infect dozens of people in a very short time, while others won't infect anyone. 'superspreaders' have been seen from the beginnings of this virus, and aren't more prevalent now than they were then, so this doesn't indicate any sort of 'mutation' or strengthening.
We have a strong sense of security because we haven't had a 'middle-ground' virus since smallpox. AIDS spreads too slowly to be perceived as a single-year pandemic, and Hanta and Ebola kill so fast that they burn themselves out before thy spread too far.
basically, we're going to have to learn fear the hard way.
Kevin Fox
I'd like to point out that Canada's SARS is pretty much confined to hospitals. No new case outside of a hospital for 2-3 weeks now. There has only been 1 person who was classified as healthy die. The death rate is high in Canada because it is primarily hitting sick people and the elderly who where already in the hospitals.
Man made drugs will never be able to keep up with viruses like that until we get back to using nature aginst nature.
Problem is a project like this does help but it olny helps the drug companies in the end.
And if that site can not handel a slashdot post, what are the servers gonna do when a million people a min want to send or get a new packet.
SETI blows cause of this and only works so well cause so many have dropped out of the program since it got big.
5) Don't try to pick up chinese girls you meet at the airport.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
I work in Emergency Services, and have already had to deal with TWO suspected cases of SARS. Speaking as a physician, I'll donate my computing cycles, absolutely. The sooner a treatment is brought out, the better.
Here's how I feel about it: I hate having someone come into my ER when I have nothing to offer them. I feel a powerful ethical and professional obligation to take care of people, and do whatever I can for them. I do my best for each and every single patient I see, even if it's somebody who has been through maximal surgery/chemo for their cancer, and has literally reached the end of what medical science can do for them. For such folks, sometimes all I can do is hold their hand and offer a little reassurance, but at least it's SOMETHING. I hate having someone die right in front of me, and being powerless to prevent it. Call it a God complex if you want... I call it wanting to be able to help people. Having people die, and having nothing to say and no way to say it... well, that bothers me, call me crazy.
I don't particularly mind not having a cure for the common cold... a cold is an annoyance, nothing more. I very much DISLIKE not having a treatment for a lethal condition.
I personally don't care who develops the cure... Pharmcos are often painted as evil opportunists that prey on the illnesses of others... I disagree. I like Pharmcos, because they keep my arsenal full, which makes me MUCH more effective at my job. I don't accept Hawaii trips from them, but I'll accept lunch and a couple of pens if they're going to give me some clinically useful information (and hell, I have to write with something). I resent the AMA (I am NOT a member, BTW, for this reason and others) preaching to me about the "unethical behavior" of having dealings with drug reps. Do they really think I'm going to sell out my ethics, my oaths, and my patients because somebody took me to dinner?? I'm sorry, but that's a fucking insult.
I prescribe what I want, within the standard of care, regardless of what drug reps say. I always use cheap if I can, expensive if cheap won't work... but I like the fact that Pharmcos give me tools to take better care of patients.
The sooner a cure for SARS shows up, the happier I'll be.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
The point about SARS is not how many people it has killed relative to something like your example of murders in Texas. Murders in Texas are not particularly contagious.
The purpose of WHO's advisories is to limit the spread of a contagious disease. It's not really targeted at individuals to tell them that they may be in danger if they go to Toronto - the point is to stop the spread of the disease. However, the disease is ultimately spread by individuals, and to stop it spreading, you ultimately need to prevent individuals from acting as vectors for the disease. That means issuing advisories telling them not to travel to certain regions, and it means quarantining people who may be infected, even though you know that most of them are not.
Unfortunately, individuals aren't very good at recognizing and respecting risks to a global population, and they tend to want to personalize it - which leads to the faulty logic that since the SARS risk to an individual travelling to Toronto is low, it is therefore OK to travel to Toronto.
This is a little like saying that since my personal taxes are small relative to my country's total tax revenues, that I don't need to pay them. The point is that disease containment, like taxes, only works if everyone complies.
BTW, the truth about Toronto specifically, as I understand it, is that its quarantine practices originally weren't up to scratch, and it allowed e.g. exposed health care workers to wander freely amongst the population - attending church, for example. It's at least partially these lapses in containment procedure that have led Toronto to have one of the largest SARS-infected populations on the planet, which is why it was slapped with a WHO warning. The warning is the result of Toronto's health care system and government not originally taking the problem seriously enough.
I think me meant the glue
Bullshit. We'd have billions of otherwise healthy people who'd be susceptible of dying to a flu-like disease, because their parents were never screened for immunity.
Death is a part of life. Death is a part of evolution and natural selection, and viral disease is a part of this process. It preys on those who are vulnerable, leaving (mostly) the strong.
I wonder, if we can so casually and objectively observe the role disease plays in maintaining plant and animal populations, why the hell are we so blind to the role it plays in human ones?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
I would like to help but I can't download the client. Is there a mirror somewhere of clients?
You keep posting that this virus mutates, grows stronger, more evil, more intelligent etc. (Okay, not those words exactly, but that is what I've gotten from your posts) I think you've watched a little to much Star Trek and are believing the psuedo-biological science that is in the show.
Viruses mutate, yes. But they do not activally mutate to a stronger version (it is just as likely that any mutation will do no harm to the virus, kill the virus (Yea, I know viruses aren't alive, how about make the virus inert), or make the virus weaker, as it is to make it stronger), nor do they learn. If they did, the world would have been dead a long time ago.
The death rates are higher then first reported simply because there is now more data to work with. The first data sets were incomplete and the conclusions were wrong, or it was deliberatly understated so as to not cause a panic. It could be that the 20% figure is now over inflated, to stress concerns. It could be that the true fatality rate is going to be the same as it was for Europe during the plague (66% or thereabouts, if I remember my history correctly).
The point is, whatever the final number turns out to be, that is probably what it was like all along, we just didn't have enough information in the begining to make an accurate estimate, and not because we have been infected with an virus with an intelligence.
Checkout
http://folding.stanford.edu/
This is a distributed computing project to study protein folds for things like Alzheimer's, BSE, and parkinsons, which are caused by misfolded proteins.
They have clients for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. It can run as a console only, or as a screensaver. (Both at lowest priority)
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
Parainfluenza is a paramyxoviridae, but not the main cold virus.
I live in Toronto, and know first hand what sorts of SARS precautions the city and the province is taking. Take for example, the University of Toronto. They have put in place a number of SARS precautions, including not letting 3rd and 4th year medical students attend clinical rotations. In fact, I know a handful of people, both directly and indirecty who are in quarantine.
Now even if we quarantine the entire population, my suspicions and academic knowhow seem to suggest that SARS is here to stay. In fact, a number of my professors have mentioned that fact. The virus does not seem to be as virulent as the media is making it out to be, which therefore means that it has a good chance ot sticking around, aka: trade-off hypothesis.
Remember, evolution is constantly occuring, and SARS is a perfect example of evolution taking place. It may not be be a perfect fit of the 'species' definition, but it sure seems close!
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
What about a repressive protein, which blocks the operating cells?
Baby Jesus was a Jew, and you just made him cry.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This sounds a little too like a troll to promote PlayStation alternatives like the X-box. Sony would be monumentally stupid to try this one. The main point is that a distributed client must go online from time to time. For a lot of reasons, people don't like it when their boxes starting connecting all by themselves.
See my journal, I write things there
MacOSX Solaris Linux Windows
There's nothing to worry about. All us slashdot types are confined to sitting in front of a computer all day with no social interaction or going out.
.... that guy, the frenchman, Louis Pasteur, surely needed billions.
What was the name of his multinational corporation? Memory fails me.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... when you have the prospects to afford the drugs.
If people in rich countries are happy with a mechanism to make science to benefit only the wealthiest of the wealthiest I seriously question the values that move people in those countries.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If they use a common. shared resource (people's CPU cycles) why should they be entitled to an exclusive patent?
If they want exclusive rights to something then they better buy their own computers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Think about this: 1 is 50% of 2.
I hope that is enough for you tyo understand that before any menaingful statistical analysis you need numbers big enough that stablish trends.
The most accurate trend would be to add all cases and all deaths and calculate percentages.
I did this last Saturday and the mortality rate was 6%.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
http://www.powerweb.net/sars/
/.ed, but never do anything cool enough to get it, so this should be a good minor /.ing that will help them see they are not ready.
some of the staff at powerweb wanted to be
it currently has only the windows installer, i'm currently working on getting the mac installer, and then i'll grab the linux and sol.
http://sealsystem.sourceforge.net/bgp/installDDOL. exe
(linux version didn't work for me, debian and java DONT mix)
if you get linux filename, run it through http://www.filemirrors.com to find its mirror
- Sexual activity is reserved for marriage.
- Marriage is one man and one woman bound in a divine covenant.
- Marriage is for life.
100% FREE, 100% effective.Adherence to regimen required for success. No computer necessary.
From the forum of d2OL,
I have been doing my best to find out some information about this for you all and here is what I have found out. First off is some information about what differentiates our project from others out there and secondly there is information about specifically what we are doing with our SARS results.
Our program is different from all others in that we use real candidate molecules that anyone can either get for free from the NCI or order from chemical suppliers. We also are unique in that we "Publish" in real time on the web site the best hits, so anyone can use the results. They have the results at the same time we do. This is in the spirit of the "Bermuda" convention that was adopted by those working on the human genome to share results as soon as you have them so anyone any where in the world could build on them and use them to help people. We operate in that spirit, recognizing that we all have to work together, like open source software, to make the biggest difference, and that there are over 10,000 labs that have the skills necessary to take our results and test them. This sure beats just us doing it.
In addition we are working with select groups to test the best candidates. Specifically in the case of SARS we are working with Professor Tian Xu of Yale University and researches in china's leading university, Fudan University, who have agreed to test our most promising results DIRECTLY on SARS virus that have been taken from REAL patients with the disease. The beginning stages of these tests are will be done in dishes of human cells with the SARS virus to see if our best candidates kill the virus.
Ken
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The only thing I hope is that Sony actually has an option to turn off processor sharing, just in case us hapless users don't want to support whatever cause it is that they are studying at the moment
Of course 'hapless consumers' actually buying the hardware from Sony, and buying software licensed by Sony isn't going to help fund Sony's R&D at all - I mean who would run a buisness like that? I'd expect that hardware to just sit on the shelf there being boycotted by all those consumers.
But if Sony provided the net connection for free - would that be a good buisness model?
The main objection I see to distributed computing is people not being compensated in some way for providing thier resources.
If company X provides me with a net connection for nothing to use for what I want, in return for using my hardware for something useful while I'm asleep - then I don't see anything inherently wrong with that principle, I think in fact its great.
Sure if it happens I'd like to know what I'm helping out with, but that doesn't invalidate the idea.
It might even be a great idea for ISPs - have the option of reducing your bandwidth bills by allwoing the ISP to pool your spare clock cycles for commercial work.
Few days ago I was thinking if it would be possible to have a service (UDP?) that one could use for distribited processing. The idea is that of a protocol that permits one to upload chunks of data and the operations you want done on the data..... and after processing the service returns the result. Part of the protocol would be advertising the service to those who need it (after setting appropriate premissions/rules) One could also allocate different precentages(during different times of the day etc.) of idle processing power to different distributed computing tasks. I have seen at least three DIFFERENT x@home programs..... if we're going to do some serious distributed computing it's about time there is a standard. I am not tech enough to propose such a thing myself to the world(e.g. RFC) so I'm just dropping off the idea.
- "They misunderestimated me."
You can vaccinate against Smallpox, but the existing vaccination is somewhat more risky than some would like. They may be looking for a less risky vaccination. Also, it would be worthwhile having a TREATMENT in case someone who wasn't vaccinated caught it.
Find-a-Drug is pleased to announce the start of its Respiratory Disease project which focuses on diseases that affect the lungs. The first target is Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and subsequent ones may include Tuberculosis (TB) and Chronic Bronchitis. more Is this different? Better?