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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."
Unfortunately, finding a target binding site for a potential drug is years away from actually having a useful cure...
Except that seti@home does not analyse signals in real time, they've got a huge evergrowing database of signals recieved and we're analyzing that... we aren't going to miss a signal, we're just going to find it few hours later.
AFAIK.
Actually, the way SETI works allows for any workload over an extended period of time. The samples that your computer is analysing have been around for quite some time; they are transmitted from regions that are light years away! In addition, it is only once every year or so that they have a real chance to look for anything interesting that they find. As far as a cure for SARS goes, I have an elderly grandmother who was rushed to the hospital for unrelated reasons shortly after the start of the SARS scare in Ontario. She was taken into an ambulance by men and women wearing full environmental suits. She has since been released, quite possibly too early (they still don't know what was wrong with her), so I'm anxious for the world to just deal with SARS. This is a prime example of the Fear Consumption Model brought to us by Marilyn Manson and Michael Moore. The more we fear, the more we consume. As a whole our society has seen millions of dollars spent on research on a disease that has only killed 295 people out of over six billion. When diseases were feared in the past it was worth fearing them: Justinian's Plague (541-544AD) killed 40% of the population of Constantinople; In the 14th Century we saw as many as 800 people a day dying of the Bubonic Plague -- 30% of Normandy's population was decimated. By comparison, SARS has managed to destroy less than 0.0000005% of the world's population, infecting a mere 0.000077% of the population.
In order to be immortal you must be organize
Download the SARS genetic sequence here.
I saw a report yesterday, either BBC or CNN, that WHO now believes the fatality rate of SARS will be about 10-15%. Much higher than previously believed (this was after China went public with their info)
Je ne parle pas francais.
Make up your mind. Never mind, I'll do it. The SARS virus is a coronavirus, a family that includes infectious bronchitis. Colds are typically caused by paramyxoviridae, which includes things like mumps, measles and pneumoviruses.
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.
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%
The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 had a mortality rate of about 4% which is similar to what we're seeing with SARS. It infected a fifth of the world's population. The U.S. was one of the countries least devastated by the pandemic. But even here 20,000,000 Americans came down with the flu, with 850,000 deaths resulting. Which means that flu killed more Americans than died in all the wars of the twentieth century.
Like SARS, this one originated in China as well. It started as a virus passed from birds to pigs. (They know because in 1997 someone exhumed the body of a soldier who died of it in 1918 and sequenced some of the virus from his lungs.)